In your example I will assume that both spouses worked and earned the same amount of income. I will also assume individually they have an equal amount of retirement savings and social security benefit.
Therefore, NO, the wife is not "entitled" to some form of spousal support for any amount of time just because the husband walked out on her.
It's about time people stop thinking that spousal support is a weapon used by women to get revenge on men in a divorce just because it was a marriage of long duration!!
Bali...grow up
In this scenario the very youngest these people could be is 66, and that is if they married at 16. Its more likely that they are 70+
Don't be a AZZ. Hell, if I wrote the laws nobody would be able to get divorced if they had been married for 50 years. They would be stuck with each other for life.
My dad, that same generation, only ALLOWED my mother to go to work when I was a teenager, and ONLY so that her salary could help pay for college for the 4 of us. If he could have afforded college for us without help she wouldn't have worked. She CHOSE to keep working afterwards because she liked having her own money, but if dad had had his druther's she wouldn't have kept on working. He was consistantly annoyed (not mad) that she couldn't get off work to do whatever he wanted.
Heck...IRA's didn't even become available under law until I was in my early 20's.
So stop employing YOUR standards to a generation that is already in retirement, who came from a totally different place than YOUR generation.
And...when it gets right down to it...you could have divorced your wife many years earlier than you did, and therefore could have had a very different result than you did. (not that you have ever explained your situation here, other than the fact that you are seriously ticked off because you had to divide the marital assets and pay alimony)