My mother has a sly way of backing into major announcements. “I’m renovating my kitchen” was her way of introducing the fact that she and her beau were moving in together several years after my father died. A year or so later she said, “I’m spending the morning finishing paperwork, so this afternoon we can go ring shopping,” which was her way of warning that a sapphire solitaire would soon grace her ring finger.

But about one thing she is most direct. “We are not getting married,” declares the woman who chose a teaching career over law school back in the 1950s because her mother warned that a new bride would be too busy to become a lawyer — and who was none too pleased when I briefly lived with a boyfriend when I was in college.

Her decision not to remarry makes her part of the fastest-growing subset of cohabiting couples in the U.S. nowadays — those over the age of 50. The generation that most wanted marriage has become the generation that scoffs. Most of their reasons are practical — remarriage can mean, for example, adjusting or possibly losing some Social Security benefits and risking a life’s savings to pay a new spouse’s medical bills. It means entangling finances that adult children will, sooner or later, have to untangle. Some of their reasons are more personal — memories of a bad first marriage, perhaps, loyalty to a good one or a reluctance to give up newfound independence.

Image Credit... Human Empire

But at its core, this trend is the latest twist in the redefinition of marriage — and what it means to be a wife. It used to be that a woman went to college for her Mrs. degree, then donned a starched apron and baked apple pies, all while delighting in her sparkling floors. Now a grocery chain in Britain surveyed its customers and found that only 16 percent of married women can make the dough from scratch, while more than half of their mothers could. (Only 25 percent can poach an egg without relying on a gadget, compared with 75 percent of their mothers; two-thirds of us can’t make gravy from scratch — two-thirds of our mothers could.) Today working wives in the U.S. bring in 45 percent of total family earnings, and 22 percent ages 30 to 44 earn more than their husbands.