Welcome to Rollin' with the Dolans. We're Patrick and Tamekia, and most weeks we're talking about blended families, our interracial marriage, raising kids of wildly different ages under one roof, and the entrepreneurship chaos on the side. This week's topic hit closer to home than usual: what happens to a marriage once the kids are gone.
Here's how it started. Patrick asked Tamekia straight up, on camera, how she thinks she'll feel when the last kid is finally out of the house. Her answer: relief, mostly. "I'll be sad probably the first couple weeks. I'll miss them, I'll check on them. But once I realize I have so much freedom, I think I'll be just fine." Patrick's take was a little different, and honestly, that gap between the two of us is kind of the whole episode.
We did some digging before we hit record, and the numbers stopped us. Somewhere between 36 and 40 percent of divorces now happen to couples over 50. There's actually a name for part of what drives it: the empty shell factor, where couples stay together for decades purely for the kids, running on fumes the whole time and nobody says anything out loud.
To be clear, we are not out here telling people to bail the second parenting gets easier. We think the opposite, honestly. Build the marriage on a real foundation and it can go the distance. We tell our own kids constantly: don't be like us, get married once and mean it. But if the relationship already quietly hollowed out somewhere around soccer practice and homework help, waiting for the kids to leave doesn't fix that. It just delays the conversation.
We got into what we're calling the loss of primary focus, the built-in dinner companion problem (Tamekia has strong feelings about always having someone to drag to a restaurant), and what our own "roadmap, or vision board, depending on the day" actually looks like heading into this stage ourselves.
Full conversation is up now wherever you listen. If this one hits close to home and you want to actually build a plan instead of just talking about it, that's the exact work we do one-on-one through our coaching practice, Get Your Life Rollin'.