Dating Over 40 and Finding Love Without Changing Your Lifestyle

Between 1997 and 2017, the number of people aged 45 to 64 living alone in the UK rose by 53%, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics figures. Many of them have a household built around one person, with their own front door, their own hours and a weekly pattern of work and friends that nobody else has to approve. A new relationship at that age can look like a negotiation over all of it, from whose house to keep to whose friends get Saturday night. About 1 in 10 heterosexual couples in the UK keep separate homes.

Living Apart Together in Britain

Living apart together is the term researchers use for a couple in a steady relationship who maintain two households. A national survey of Britain carried out in 2011, by a team that included the sociologist Simon Duncan, found that about 9% of adults were in this position. More than a fifth of the people counted as single in official figures were in fact in a relationship of this kind.

Most of these couples lived near each other and saw each other often, and many expected to move in together eventually. A minority preferred to stay apart permanently. Participants named autonomy and flexibility as the main advantages. Most described their relationships as monogamous and committed, with marriage still a reference point, and saw living apart as little different from living together in terms of risk, emotional security or closeness. The authors described the approach as flexible pragmatism. The same survey found the pattern most common among people under 25, many of them students, so the national figure says little on its own about people in middle age.

Friendships and a New Partner

A new relationship also takes time from friendships. In 2010, a team led by the Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar surveyed 540 people, 428 women and 112 men, about their social lives and presented the results at the British Science Festival. People who had started a romantic relationship had, on average, about two fewer people in an inner circle of close friends that normally numbers about five. Dunbar attributed this to time and attention. A new partner takes up hours that used to go to other people, and friendships that are not kept up weaken. Men and women lost close friends at similar rates.

Later-Life Partners and Age Gaps

Researchers at Lancaster University and University College London analysed the UK Household Longitudinal Study from 2011 to 2023 and found that about 4% of people over 60 were in a relationship with a partner who lived elsewhere, a rate similar to those recorded in the United States and Canada. It was by far the most common form a new relationship took at that age. For single women over 60, it was about 10 times more likely than cohabitation or marriage. For single men, it was about 10 times more likely than marriage and nearly 20 times more likely than cohabitation.

Dating someone older has been the more common pattern for women in England and Wales, and the Office for National Statistics has noted that men tend to marry younger women. In 2014, 56% of men aged 65 and over who married chose a wife under 65, compared with 22% of women of the same age who married a man under 65. The pattern has loosened. An earlier ONS study, published in 2003, found that the share of women marrying a younger man rose from 15% in 1963 to 26% in 1998.

Divorce, Property and a Second Household

In 2022, the median age at a first opposite-sex marriage in England and Wales was 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women, the highest on record. In 2014, 92% of brides and grooms aged 65 and over in England and Wales had been divorced or widowed, and 8% were marrying for the first time. There has also been an increase in divorces at older ages, against the overall trend. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of men aged 65 and over who divorced went up by 23% and the number of women by 38%, while divorces overall fell by 28%.

Across all ages, there were 80,057 divorces in England and Wales in 2022, the lowest level in decades and the fewest since 1971. The median length of an opposite-sex marriage that ended in divorce that year was 12.9 years. A person who has been through one of those has already seen what moving out and dividing property involve. The Lancaster and UCL researchers suggested that avoiding a second round of this kind of decoupling may be a major reason older people choose to keep their own homes. They also pointed to the complicated family relationships and responsibilities that many people manage in later life.

Separate Money Within a Couple

Finances can stay partly separate as well. In a survey of 1,023 married or long-term partners carried out by Censuswide for TSB in early 2024, 61% shared household finances through a joint account, and 4 in 5 of those joint-account holders also kept a personal account. A YouGov survey from May 2019 found that 51% of people aged 55 and over in a serious relationship had a bank account of their own, and that one in eight people in a serious relationship kept secret savings from their partner. A joint account for shared bills alongside a personal account for everything else is the common pattern in both surveys.

Well-Being Outside a Shared Home

The Lancaster and UCL study also found mental health benefits for over-60s whose partner lived elsewhere. They reported less mental distress and better well-being than single people of the same age, and the size of that benefit was comparable to the benefit of marriage or cohabitation. Moving into this kind of relationship brought a slightly smaller improvement than moving in with a partner. Its end, though, caused a much smaller decline in well-being than the end of a marriage or a cohabiting relationship, and women and men benefited to a similar degree.

The ONS reported that a 65-year-old man could expect 17 more years of life in 2004 and 19 in 2017, and that the figure for women rose from 20 years to almost 22. Brides and grooms aged 65 and over rose by 46% between 2004 and 2014, from 7,468 to 10,937, while the population of that age grew by 20%. The ONS linked the rise partly to longer lives and to more people over 65 staying in work, and it noted a 2007 change that allowed spouses and civil partners to transfer tax-free inheritance allowances to each other. The ONS could not rule that change out as a factor. On those figures, a relationship begun at 45 or 50 has decades in which to settle the question of a shared address.

The Cost of Merging Households Too Soon

A shared address is easy to agree to and hard to reverse. The partner who moves gives up a home and a routine, and a later separation leaves two people untangling one property. Someone over 40 who has already divided a household once risks going through it a second time, for a gain in well-being that couples in separate homes reported without moving at all.