Call them Diane and Walt. They drove the youngest to college on a Saturday in August, hugged him in a parking lot, and drove four hours home mostly in silence, which they attributed to being sad. That night they ate dinner at the table for the first time in years, just the two of them, and somewhere around the salad Diane realized she didn’t know what Walt thought about anything that wasn’t a child. Walt, across from her, was having the same thought about her, and neither of them said it, and they cleared the plates.
What the silence contains
Two things, usually at once. Grief, which everyone expects and which is real: the house has lost its noise and its purpose and the person you were when you were needed every hour. And a discovery, which nobody expects: that the marriage has been running on the children for a decade. Conversations were about them. Fights were about them. Weekends were built around them. Take them out and what is left is two people who have been colleagues on a long project and haven’t been a couple, in the old sense, since the project began.
That isn’t a failure. It’s what raising children does to nearly every marriage, and the couples who say otherwise are usually the ones who haven’t had the salad yet.
Why the divorce rate ticks up here
Divorces after twenty-five years of marriage have risen for a generation, and the empty nest is one reason. Not because the kids were holding it together, exactly, but because the kids were hiding the question. With the house full, nobody had to ask whether they still chose each other. With the house empty, the question is at the table every night, and some couples find their answer is no. More couples than that find their answer is I don't know, I haven't looked in years, and that’s a very different and much better place to start.
The chance
You have time, which you haven’t had since the first pregnancy test. You have money, often, for the first time. And you’ve a partner you chose before any of this started, who is still in there. The couples who do the empty nest well treat it as a second courtship, and they mean that literally: they go find out who the other person is now, because it has been a while and people change.
What to actually do
Ask the fifteen-year-old questions. What do you want to do with the next twenty years? Where do you want to live? What did you give up that you want back? Diane wanted to paint. Walt wanted to see Portugal. Neither had ever said so, because it hadn’t been relevant to a pediatrician appointment.
Do something new together that neither of you is good at. Not the old restaurant. Something with a learning curve, so you can watch each other be beginners. It’s how you met the first time.
Name the grief out loud, and separately from the marriage. Missing the kids isn’t the same as not wanting each other, and couples who conflate them make a decision about the wrong thing.
Talk about sex, on purpose. The bedroom often went quiet somewhere in the teenage years, when there were always ears in the house. It doesn’t come back on its own. It comes back when someone says so.
When the table stays quiet
If the salad silence lasts into the spring, or the fifteen-year-old questions get answers that frighten you, or one of you has quietly decided something, a couples therapist who works with long-married couples is the right room. Many of them see this exact couple every September. Read We never fight. Should we be worried? for the version of this that started long before the last kid left.