During her sophomore year in high school, her father retired and the family settled in Fort Collins, a midsize town in Colorado, where her father had secured a teaching position.
The years of rootlessness taught Carolyn how to make friends quickly and find her place in a variety of social situations. Those skills proved valuable in college and beyond. Thinking she might teach, Carolyn majored in English Literature, but teaching didn’t suit her. She preferred writing, and from her first job as a newsroom runner, she knew journalism was the right path for her.
Glenn, a year younger, took over his father’s insurance business the year he graduated from Colorado State University and discovered that with hard work he could grow it well beyond what his father had achieved. Having been a child of working parents, he had a feel for the stress that accompanied raising children and tending a career at the same time. Glenn had no strong desire to be a father, and when he met Carolyn, he quickly came to understand that her primary interest in life was her journalism career, not motherhood. Glenn and Carolyn both saw their relationship as a good fit. When they got around to talking about marriage and the future, they decided together that they would not raise a family.
After they wed, Glenn told Carolyn that if she had a change of heart about having children, he was open to reconsidering the matter. Carolyn deeply appreciated his willingness to be flexible. From time to time she asked herself whether she was still content not to have children, and the answer kept coming up “yes.” In her mid-thirties, she listened to many of her old high school and college friends talking about the ticking of their biological clocks. Carolyn could not discern any such clock inside of her and felt quite satisfied with the work that continued to interest her and the promotions that were rolling her way.
During her thirties and forties, Carolyn worked for a series of daily newspapers, each one larger than the last, and, at age forty-three, became a key editor for one of Colorado’s largest dailies. During that same time period, Glenn quadrupled his father’s insurance business. He opened three more offices around the state, and when his father retired Glenn assumed the reins of the entire enterprise. When they weren’t working, Glenn and Carolyn spent time with extended family, an eclectic assortment of friends from their neighborhood, their respective work circles, and old college chums who were still in the area.
Marion, now sixty-two and a successful marketing executive for a large public relations firm, always loved children and assumed she would marry and start a family sometime after college. However, life didn’t go quite as she had planned. Although she grew up in a vibrant, midsize city in Massachusetts, Marion always wanted to see the Northwest, and college gave her that opportunity. Accepted to the University of Washington in Spokane in 1973, she made her way across the country. During Marion’s sophomore year, her mother developed metastatic breast cancer. Marion rushed back to Massachusetts to be at her mother’s side for the surgery and the chemotherapy that followed.
For the first three years after surgery, her mother responded to treatment, and after six months in Massachusetts, Marion returned to college to finish her degree. Upon graduation, she accepted a marketing job in Tacoma, Washington, and signed a lease on a condominium a few miles from her workplace. Within a year of moving to Tacoma, Marion also fell in love with a man she met through a friend and became engaged to marry. Life appeared to be working out much as she had hoped.
However, in 1980, Marion’s mother had a setback and needed more extensive chemotherapy. This time, Marion and her mother decided to pursue further treatment in Washington State so Marion could be with her fiancé and continue working at the job she loved. He helped her sell the Massachusetts home and move her mother into an apartment in Tacoma, about a mile from Marion.
As her mother’s treatment became more and more debilitating, Marion found herself going daily, after work, to her mother’s apartment to visit and care for her. She did all the shopping and meal preparation as well as helping her mother bathe and dress. On weekends she did her mother’s wash as well as her own household chores. The all-consuming job of being her mother’s caregiver lasted three full years. During that time, Marion’s fiancé felt neglected, and was emotionally disturbed by the cancer. He finally broke off the engagement and walked out of Marion’s life.
After three years, Marion’s mother fell and broke her hip. Because she needed strength to heal the broken bone, the chemotherapy treatments had to be stopped. However, those treatments were all that had kept the cancer at bay and once they were discontinued the cancer raged anew.
When her mother died, Marion, at thirty, was emotionally and physically exhausted. But as the weeks went by, her body and spirit healed and she rededicated herself to her work. The job began to require quite a bit of travel, limiting Marion’s ability to meet another potential marriage partner. However, the fulfillment she found at work more than compensated for the loss of that prospect. She considered having children out of wedlock and raising them herself, but with her demanding job, raising children didn’t seem to be a realistic plan and she abandoned the idea. Instead, Marion continued to travel and enjoy the benefits her high-profile job afforded. As she thinks about winding down her career now at sixty-two, she has no regrets about how she pursued her life and how things turned out for her.
The life path for most child-free baby boomers has depended on several factors. Among more educated women with higher-paying jobs, being without children at midlife has meant more freedom to come and go at will, living alone or with a companion of their choice. Single or married, they have established social networks that include a personalized mixture of friends and blood relatives. Men have followed similar paths, but theirs have typically relied more on work-related networks and connections and less on contact with family members.
A growing number of men and women today, regardless of age, are choosing to remain single for life. The age at first marriage is now in the upper twenties for both men and women, and appears to rise every year. In the United States today, as in much of Western Europe, one hundred million people—almost 50 percent of the population over eighteen—report as “single” in the census rolls.2 Some unmarried women now raise children they have adopted or birthed, but among baby boomers the majority of single people remain child-free, especially men.
“Conservative estimates suggest that there are more than 3 million LGBT people age fifty-five and older in the US—1.5 million of whom are sixty-five and older. This over-sixty-five segment will double in the next few decades as millions of Americans enter retirement age. Unfortunately, due to a lifetime of discrimination, many LGBT people age without proper community supports, in poor health, and financially insecure.”
—Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders (sageusa.org)
A very large proportion of the LGBT community does not have children. Around twenty percent have kids, either from previous heterosexual relationships, or through adoption or artificial insemination, but the majority of LGBT boomers do not have children.3 Today, same-sex couples are legally allowed to marry, and those unions are becoming increasingly accepted in society. This acceptance has opened the doors for more parenting among gay couples, either through adoption or surrogacy. However, most gay men and women in prior generations are child-free, like Ken:
Ken, born in Cleveland in 1938, went to private schools and an eastern college, then to the University of Michigan Law School, as a good background for politics.
After graduation, he joined a small firm in a midsize Northern Michigan city, and was soon elected to the state legislature. After three terms, he decided he would be happier in the executive branch of state government. He then worked in the governor’s office for five more years before burning out on politics altogether. He felt adrift, not only with regard to his career, but also his sexual orientation. He knew his life had to change in some fundamental ways.
Ken took a year off, and then went into teaching at a Michigan law school. He dated women off and on, but never
