At age 69, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has an impressive, if mixed, résumé. But when you ask him what his biggest regret is, it’s not buddying up with Jeffrey Epstein or microchipping the populace with the COVID-19 vaccine (kidding!). His biggest failure, he told the Times last week, is his divorce.
“That was the mistake I most regret,” he said of his split from Melinda Gates in 2021. “You would have to put that at the top of the list [of failures]. There are others but none that matter. The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years.”
Referring to the tumultuous time shortly after the divorce, the Times’sAlice Thomson paints a portrait of a life stripped of daily meaning: “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would soon just become Bill’s. They no longer had their joint book club, meditated together or went on walks where he would brush away the cobwebs in her path.”
Bill Gates, who has admitted to at least one extramarital affair during his 27 years with Melinda Gates, nevertheless credits her with contributing to his success.
“My marriage to Melinda,” he said, “kept me grounded.”
While he says he is doing better now than shortly after the divorce, and he is dating Silicon Valley philanthropist Paula Hurd, he recalls the comfort and familiarity of a decades long marriage.
“There is a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person because of the memories and depth of things you have done and having kids together,” he said. “When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful — that came during the time that we were together. So, she saw me through a lot.”
The couple shares three children, two grandchildren, and almost three decades of marriage. It’s no wonder Bill Gates has some regrets. And he’s not alone. Nearly one-third of both men and women regret going through with divorce, according to a 2016 study. This is not surprising considering its correlation with mental health struggles.
“Research over the past 20 years consistently shows that divorce is strongly linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes,” Charlie Health reports. “According to a 2020 study, people who go through divorce often report higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and social isolation compared to the general population.”
All this might lead onlookers to swear off marriage altogether. But the statistics on staying married are higher than they used to be. Despite the oft-cited 50% number, it is now true that 41% of first marriages end in divorce. In fact, over the past few decades, the divorce rate has been going down. “Most marriages make it now,” reports Brad Wilcox, the author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization. “Divorce is down 40% since 1980.”
The damage of divorce may be serious, but the fear of it is no reason to forswear marriage. A good marriage has innumerable benefits, boosting mental and emotional health, finances, and even life expectancy. As Maggie Gallagher reports for City Journal, “In virtually every way that social scientists can measure, married people do much better than the unmarried or divorced: they live longer, healthier, happier, sexier, and more affluent lives.”
Then there are the millions of unquantifiable moments: the coffee waiting on the kitchen counter, the thoughtful comment assuring you that you’ve been seen, and the gentle hand brushing cobwebs from your path.