On the evening the divorce becomes final, the spare room is still full of packed boxes, and a dating app on the phone has been downloaded but not yet opened. For many Australians the gap since their last first date is a long one. The median marriage that ended in divorce in 2024 had lasted 13.2 years.
Divorce Patterns in Australia
Australia granted 47,216 divorces in 2024, 3.0% fewer than in 2023, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That year there was 1 divorce for every 2.3 marriages registered. The median time from marriage to separation was 9.3 years, which means half of these marriages had lasted longer than that before the couple separated.
Online Dating Use by Age
The Pew Research Center surveyed 6,034 American adults in July 2022 about online dating. In total, 30% had ever used a dating site or app, and use fell with age, to 20% of those aged 50 to 64 and 13% of those 65 and over. Adults who had never married were far more likely than married adults to have used one, at 52% against 16%. For someone divorced in middle age, that means joining platforms used most heavily by younger and never-married adults.
About 10% of partnered adults had met their current partner through a dating site or app. Among users, 53% described their time on these platforms as positive and 46% as negative. Men were more positive than women, at 57% against 48%. Asked about finding a long-term partner, 42% of users said online dating had made it easier and 22% said it had made it harder.
Messages and Paid Features
Among people who had used a dating site or app in the past year, 54% of women felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received, compared with 25% of men. Men were more likely to feel insecure about receiving too few, at 64% against 40% of women.
About 35% of users had paid for a dating platform or for extra features. Users aged 30 and older were more likely to have paid than those under 30, at 41% against 22%, and paying users described their time on the platforms more positively than users who had not paid.
Partner Choice After Divorce
Pew also asked recent users what they wanted from the apps. Some 44% were looking for a long-term partner and 40% for casual dating.
A recently divorced person can set that goal before opening an app. The goal might be remarriage, sugar daddy dating, weekend company or new friendships, and the profile is the place to state it.
Rebound Relationships and Recovery
Claudia Brumbaugh and R. Chris Fraley tested rebound relationships in 2 studies published in 2015 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. They compared people who had started seeing someone new after a breakup with people who had not, measuring their well-being and their feelings about the former partner.
People in new relationships reported more confidence in their own desirability and more resolution about the former partner. Among them, starting the new relationship sooner was linked to better psychological health. The authors concluded that rebound relationships can be beneficial. The studies were correlational and relied on self-reports, so they do not show that a quick new relationship causes faster recovery.
Divorce After 50
In the United States, research by the sociologists Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin on divorce over 50 found that the divorce rate among adults aged 50 and older doubled between 1990 and 2009, while the overall rate stayed flat or fell. Of all people who divorced in 2009, 1 in 4 was 50 or older.
Brown has pointed to remarriage as part of the cause, since remarriages have a higher risk of divorce than first marriages. Slightly over half of the people over 50 who divorced in 2009 were in a remarriage, compared with about 30% of those who stayed married.
Repartnering and Mental Health
A 2024 study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health followed 228,644 people in Finland aged 50 to 70 between 1996 and 2018, using national records of antidepressant use. Use rose by about 5% in men and 7% in women in the 6 months before a divorce. It fell afterwards but stayed above its earlier level. Of the whole group, 53,460 people entered a new relationship, on average within 2 to 3 years.
A new partnership brought a small drop in antidepressant use for both sexes, and the drop was shorter-lived for women. The authors noted that women appeared to find it harder to adjust to divorce and break-ups than men did, and that the study was observational and could not establish cause. The researchers could not account for the number and length of each person’s relationships.
A 2019 American study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, using the Health and Retirement Study, found a similar pattern for depressive symptoms. Repartnering after a divorce later in life eased symptoms, but both the harm of the divorce and the benefit of the new partnership faded, and symptoms returned to their earlier levels after several years.
Safety Views Among Older Users
For older Americans, safety is still a concern, with 53% of adults aged 50 to 64 and 62% of those 65 and older telling Pew that online dating was not a safe way to meet people, compared with 42% of adults under 50. Among users, 52% believed they had come across someone trying to scam them, including 47% of men aged 50 and older and 44% of women of any age.
In the Pew survey, 38% had received sexually explicit messages or images they did not ask for, and 30% said someone kept contacting them after they had said they were not interested, and 6% had been threatened with physical harm. Pew also found that 60% of adults think dating companies should require background checks on users. Only 47% of users supported that, compared with 65% of people who had never used online dating.
The Cost of Starting Without a Goal
In a 2012 AARP survey of 1,000 single adults aged 50 and over, 48% said they wanted a serious relationship, 26% wanted friendship or companionship and 14% wanted casual dating. The most common reasons for trying it were the chance to meet a wider range of people, at 23%, and the absence of pressure to reply to anyone, at 20%. The most common reasons for never trying online dating were that it did not fit the person’s lifestyle, at 18%, and that they had heard too many negative stories, at 13%. A divorced person who opens an app without choosing among those goals risks matching with people who want something else, on platforms that 46% of users already describe in negative terms.