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It had been years since I’d seen my former co-worker Jim, so I didn’t want to start with “How’s your wife?”

Maybe she was ill. Maybe she had died. So I trotted out the old standard: “What’s new?”

“Oh, not much,” said Jim. His smile was wide. But his eyes gave him away. They flitted — was it with guilt? With discomfort?

And then he said: “What’s new is that my wife and I aren’t living together anymore.”

Jim and his Sally had been married for 44 years. They agreed to split a few months ago.

No rancor, no shouting, no lawyers scrapping over every pewter candlestick, Jim told me. “We just ran out of gas,” he said.

Late-in-life separation is becoming more common in America with each passing decade. According to the Census Bureau, divorce now occurs in more than five percent of all marriages that have hit the 40-year mark. Thirty years ago, that percentage was less than one percent.

I told Jim that this was none of my business, but I was concerned about him. What the heck happened?

He assured me that neither he nor his former spouse had acquired a new honey bun. He assured me that this wasn’t caused by sudden bad (or unexpectedly good) financial factors. He assured me that it wasn’t that old saw — “We stayed together for the sake of the kids, but now that they’ve grown up and gone…”

No, said Jim, it wasn’t any one big thing. It was a collection of small things.

For openers, they weren’t talking much anymore.

“We would sit at dinner and not say a word to one another, not even look at one another,” he said. Sure, either of them could have made it a point to speak, or to glance. “But neither of us did. And that’s just the point. Neither of us really wanted to.”

Then there was the annoying habits issue.

“It sounds crazy to say this, but for the last 30 years, she had been upset with me about how I squeezed a tube of toothpaste,” Jim said. The day they agreed to split, she said that she would look forward to squeezing from the bottom and rolling up the tube, not squeezing from the middle and never rolling.

How to spend their post-retirement years? That was a biggie, Jim said.

“I saw no reason to leave what we had always had and had always known,” he said. “She felt that the past was the past, and that we should start over somewhere else — like maybe Montana, or the wilds of Oregon. I’m not built like that.”

And then there was the silly stuff (if toothpaste wasn’t silly enough).

Jim had always wanted to hang a pair of foam rubber dice from the rear-view mirror of their car. “That was a very cool thing to do in the 1950s,” he reminded me. “Wouldn’t it have been fun in the 2000s, too?”

But Sally thought it was juvenile and perhaps dangerous. They fought about it. She won, but the damage to the relationship was done. Another little piece of fabric had frayed.

Jim has stayed in the house that he and his wife shared for more than 35 years. That decision wasn’t as difficult for either of them as you might suspect.

She always hated their washing machine and dryer, Jim told me with a chuckle. Now she has a spanking new set of them, in a spanking new apartment.

“So maybe she married down 44 years ago, but now she has traded up,” he cracked.

How about their adult kids? They have handled the split very well, Jim said.

Each of their children said that Mom would always be Mom, and Dad would always be Dad. Didn’t really matter where each was living, or whether they were together.

Yes, family occasions would now be strained. But all four would persevere.

More none-of-my-business: Couldn’t you have stayed together under one roof to be there for each other in case of illness or emergency? Not exactly as roommates, but as something like concerned friends?

Jim said each of them has agreed to be chief caregiver for the other if and when there are catastrophes or hospitalizations. “So, in that sense, we’re still a couple,” Jim said.

Then, more eye flitting — was it sadness? “But we’re not the 360-degree couple we used to be,” he said.

Jim wanted me to know that his hat is off to any pair that sails right past 44 years and aims for 50. He knows that people do it all the time, whether it’s still a joyous journey or not. But he and Sally just couldn’t find the octane any more.

I shook Jim’s hand and wished him the best. I don’t know if he noticed, but my eyes flitted as I said goodbye.

No question what was behind those flits. I was melancholy about how life can sometimes curdle, like an old quart of milk.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.