Anne Pike’s family were shocked when she and her husband of 37 years divorced last year. The 67-year-old grandmother said that the separation was unexpected. “I had always imagined Malcolm and I growing old together,” she said.

Cracks began to appear in the marriage a year earlier when the couple had different ideas about retirement – Mr Pike, 73, wished to remain working in California but Mrs Pike wanted to return to Britain where their children live. “It’s certainly clear that neither of us were very happy for some time, but I could kid myself that it was all right,” she said. “As you get older you don’t have the sense of life going on for ever and ever.”

Mr Pike then met a younger woman. “The combination of not wanting to retire and this woman coming along and turning his head meant that it was over. I didn’t have a hope. I couldn’t hold a candle to her.”

The couple, who divorced last September, have seen one another since. “It was great because I really remember how it was, that we don’t get along very well, and that we don’t have a lot in common,” Mrs Pike said.

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They met in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968, when both were unhappily married to other people. They ran off together and brought up their children in Britain in the 1980s. “What goes around comes around. When my first husband came to visit me recently I expected him to say just that – but he was very nice,” she said. Their daughter, Susan Pike, 37, was surprised at her own reaction. “I find it very upsetting that my dad rejected someone I think so much of, but I’ve also had a childish reaction to the fact that my parents are no longer figures I can take for granted,” she said.

Mrs Pike’s granddaughter, Chloe Gee, 13, said that she had been worried that she would not see so much of her grandfather. She said she saw her grandmother crying and did not know what to do. “I didn’t feel I could do anything to comfort her, so I just left her. That did make me feel bad.”

‘A lot of us married too young’

Wendy Salisbury, 62 and twice divorced, runs a club for older divorcees in North London and said she was not surprised by the Saga generation splitting up.

She said that couples were not prepared to tolerate decades of retirement in each other’s company. “I see it time and time again. Husbands retire and after years of bringing home the bacon want to relax and play a bit of golf, while wives with newfound freedom now that children are off their hands want to speed up, often retrain and start a new job. This is invariably the cause of difficulties,” she said.

“We are all living much longer and retirement now means 20 or even 30 years together. Often it is a moment when someone asks, ‘Is this it?’ ” She married at 21, when she knew nothing. “We were just too young,” she said. “We divorced after about four years. It’s such a contrast with our children. My daughter just got married at the age of 32, and that is what all her friends are doing too. They have had time to learn about relationships and have cohabited with one or two people so they learn what works.”

Since her second divorce Ms Salisbury has had a long relationship with a man 21 years her junior, and her current partner is 32. She turned her experiences into a book entitled The Toyboy Diaries and a guide to dating for older women.

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