(Photo illustration: Nathalie Cruz/Yahoo News; photo: Getty Images)
From Yahoo! Life, 12/2025
If the first season of The Golden Bachelor was meant to be a modern-day fairy tale for older adults, the divorce of Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist just three months after their televised wedding was a harsh dose of reality. In his new memoir, Golden Years, Turner shared his version of the immediate difficulties (Nist’s “tiny master bedroom,” disputes over driving and dressing) he says the couple faced trying to blend their lives as 70-somethings. Maybe, some fans have wondered, at a certain point, it’s just easier to stay single?
The statistics show that many seem to agree: A 2018 analysis showed that 76% of American women and 57% of men who had divorced after age 50 decided not to remarry. Among widowed men like Turner, 75.7% remain unpartnered, as do the overwhelming majority (94%) of widowed women. But there are those who do take the plunge — again, or in some cases, for the very first time — later in life, and say having a so-called gray marriage is much better than the Golden Bachelor breakup would have you believe.
“I don’t know that we would have worked as a younger couple,” Carol Robles, 69, says of her third husband, Ben Robles, 77, whom she married four years ago on a sunset cruise near their home in Sarasota, Fla.
Stuart Miller, 59, has known his wife, Gia Rosenblum, since they were both 17, but they only recently wed. “This is the time when we were meant to be together and where everything falls into place,” Miller tells Yahoo.
Gayle Young, a former CNN correspondent and author of the memoir Update: Reporting From an Ancient Land, married for the first time at age 62. “I had gotten to the point where I was looking forward to retiring and traveling,” Young says. “My daughter was pretty much grown, and the idea of having a partner at that point seemed so wonderful, and I just met a guy who was perfect for me.”
Why do some gray marriages succeed while others fail? We talked to three couples making it work — and a husband-and-wife team of relationship experts — about baggage, learning from past relationships and finding compromise when you’re set in your ways.
‘We both came in with a lot of baggage’
Miller and Rosenblum’s love story is the kind of friends-to-lovers second-chance romance they write books about — in fact, the New York Times Style section covered it earlier this year. But before their happily ever after, they each had long marriages that ended in divorce. So far they’ve used that experience to their advantage.
At the end of their second date, Rosenblum presented Miller with a piece of paper outlining everything she needed in a relationship: to be listened to, to be seen, to be handled with gentleness and care.
“I think she had this feeling of, ‘Oh, I’m asking you too much,’ because of the scars we each had in terms of our relationship,” says Miller, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer. “We both came in with a lot of baggage. … If you press this button, I’m going to react, not because of you, but because of what came before.”
Rosenblum, a therapist in Princeton, N.J., wanted to speak openly about the patterns from their former relationships that they didn’t want to repeat. “If you notice that I’m pushing a button, tell me,” she told Miller. “Tell me what it is. Tell me where it’s coming from. If you need me to back off, if you need me to do something differently, I am open to hearing that feedback, because I’m going to accidentally do that.”
Ben Robles thinks one of the reasons his marriage to Carol works is that he learned from his three previous marriages. “I believe in growing and learning after divorce,” he says. He asked himself, “What did you learn from this, Benny? What are you gonna do differently? Because it’s not all their fault; you also participated in the divorce.”
“The older we are, we also have more wounds, and we have more triggers,” Flores-Nisenson tells Yahoo. “So if we haven’t really looked at those before entering the marriage, I think that being in a peaceful marriage might be a little bit unrealistic.”
There are lessons to be learned from examining what went wrong in other romances. Nisenson says it’s about not just figuring out what to do differently in a new relationship but also zeroing in on your needs and expectations. “I see in our work that older individuals have a better understanding and are much clearer on what they want in their life, what it looks like and what they want in their partner,” he says.
‘You’re old enough and wise enough to know that nothing is ever perfect’
In Turner’s memoir, the reality star claims that one of the first issues he encountered in his short marriage was that Nist didn’t make any space for him in her home, forcing him to live out of a suitcase. Nist refuted this during an appearance on the Dear Shandy podcast, claiming that Turner had a short temper, called her names and told her, “I don’t want to hear your opinion.” Regardless of who’s right in this he said/she said, their friction highlights what can happen between two people who are not ready to mesh their lives together.
Whether they’re used to living independently or with a different partner, new couples are bound to face differences over their views or how they want things done.
“Politically, we are totally different, and he knew this right away,” Carol Robles says. Her husband, Ben, meanwhile, points to a more domestic dispute: what they eat. “I don’t like veggies at all,” he says, “so it’s hard to cook for me.”
In the case of Young and her husband, Tom, who live in Washington, D.C., work has been an issue. She’s retired, while he loves his work as a lawyer and never wants to stop.
But these differences aren’t deal breakers because each couple works to find a middle ground. “Compromise in a relationship actually shows flexibility. It shows strength,” says Nisenson, who warns that seeing compromise as a “threat” is a red flag. “If your heels are dug in, then you’re missing the chance to grow and learn.”
It also helps that these couples say they have more patience and tolerance for others now than when they were younger.
“I think the nice thing about getting married later in life is that you love them for all the wonderful things they bring to the table, but you also accept that there are quirks and irritations and problems that all of us have as humans,” Young says. “You’re old enough and wise enough to know that nothing is ever perfect.”
‘I wasn’t too fond of his bedroom furniture’
Young didn’t consciously choose to put off marriage, but she prioritized her career as a journalist, then eventually adopted a daughter on her own. She has no regrets about doing “everything backward” — even if it does mean missing out on the traditional “house, baby, minivan” path younger couples typically take.
“I do kind of feel wistful sometimes that we don’t have that long shared history, that we didn’t have children together and raise them together,” she says. Tom — who asked not to use his last name — is a widower with two grown kids of his own. “I also know that could never have been possible, given the trajectory of our lives.”
And while sharing a home — perhaps one that one partner once lived in with a previous spouse — can be tricky in a gray marriage, she and Tom have made it work. Young’s husband had recently purchased a new home before they moved in together. “I was really worried about it because I had never lived with a partner before,” Young says. Fortunately, they had both downsized their belongings after their respective children moved out, leaving them plenty of room to buy new things together instead of having to discuss whose dishes or sheets to keep. (“I wasn’t too fond of his bedroom furniture,” she admits. “We did give that to a young couple.”)
Miller and Rosenblum, meanwhile, are spending their honeymoon phase living in two separate homes: He’s in Brooklyn, with a son in his 20s back at home; she’s in New Jersey, living with a daughter also in her 20s. They alternate where they’re staying, but it does mean they spend a few nights a week apart. They don’t mind having that time to do their own thing and miss each other. “I think five nights a week together and two nights apart is great,” Miller says. “Four nights [together] where then there’s a three-day break — we both start to go a little crazy.”
Not having kids in the house also has an upside. “I think some of the reasons people get a divorce are kids, financial problems, in-laws — we don’t have any of those problems,” Ben Robles says.
That’s not necessarily the case for a lot of older couples. Meddling adult children can bring their own set of drama, and the Nisensons note that imminent retirement, the prospect of declining health and the complex process of merging households make financial conversations especially weighty. Flores-Nisenson quotes something her husband once said: “Don’t assume that love cancels out logistics.”
So why marry at all? “I think marriage is a commitment that you make to each other with witnesses,” Ben Robles says, “and that’s why I like it.”
Rosenblum also wanted the commitment of marriage to Miller, but she had one small reservation. At their wedding, she didn’t want to be pronounced “husband and wife,” with all the societal connotations that come with those words. Miller came up with a new phrase for their officiant that sums up everything they want out of their relationship going forward: “I now pronounce you right where you belong.”
