Exclusive | Grey divorce is the new retirement dream for a record number of Americansmeet the women who have moved on with zero regrets

Here come the grey divorcees! Suddenly, they’re everywhere — and don’t expect them to apologize for how much they’re loving their new, late-in-life lives.Spending your golden years on a porch swing, doting on your spouse of many years, after the kids have flown the nest? Forget that dated dream — for a growing number of women, empty nest status and retirement aren’t bringing them closer to their partners.Instead, they’re finding the clarity to walk away from their marriages — and enthusiastically start all over again.

As life expectancies tick ever upwards, record numbers of Americans are rushing to say “I don’t” to the idea of happily ever after — deciding, apparently, that the second half of their lives is too precious to accept anything less than total fulfillment, even if they have to go about it alone.Deborah Santana was 56 when she decided to walk away from her 34-year marriage to Grammy Award-winning guitarist Carlos Santana.Santana had given her all to the partnership.For decades, she stood by his side, giving her all to help him build his career, all while raising three children.It worked — until, one day, she found it no longer did.

The Los Angeles activist, author and former vice president of Santana Management realized the life she’d devoted herself to “no longer reflected” the woman she’d become — and that it was finally time to pursue her own ambitions.“I had spent so many years promoting my husband’s career and not pursuing my own creative passions,” Santana, now 75, recalled to The Post.“I wanted my children to know the real me, not just as a wife and mother, but as a writer and creator myself.”It was a difficult decision for Santana, who married at 22 and came from a generation that was told to stick it out “’til death do us part.”“I don’t feel like I was leaving something as much as I was moving towards myself,” she explained.“I knew that even if I felt lonely at the beginning, it...