Retirement For Two: Are You Ready?

 

The baby boomer generation is making a big deal out of retirement.  If you were planning on settling into your rocking chair for some well deserved R&R, you may have to rethink things a bit.  All of a sudden people are looking at you and expecting you to make some insightful and meaningful decisions.  Talk about pressure!  Even your grown kids don’t want you on their doorsteps micro-managing their lives, so don’t be surprised if they too start pressuring you to be productive and interesting.

 

It will take time to reconfigure a life plan.  One day you are working and the next day you are not.  What are you going to do and how is it going to affect your nearest and dearest?  It might be comforting if your spouse retires at the same time as you do, but this is not always the case.  If your spouse is still trudging off to work every morning you might feel lost or even a teensy bit guilty, or a lot guilty.  The guilt comes from feeling that you should be getting a lot more stuff done around home but not really feeling like doing it. 

 

On the other hand, what happens if you both retire at the same time?  You not only have to cope with your own feelings but you have to consider that your partner is going through the same thing. You may have to actually start talking to each other.  You both have had your roles so carefully delineated over the years that it wouldn’t be a leap to say that you probably don’t know each other as well as you think you do.  It is not unusual for people to find that this new post-retirement relationship is much harder than they thought it would be.

 

 Mary Anne Vandervelde, PhD. enumerates several relationship problems in her book “Retirement for Two,” that are worth thinking about.

 

·        After years of being busy (mostly doing your own thing) it is quite an adjustment to being alone together most of the time. For many years the everyday busyness associated with young family life pretty much drowned out everything else.  Can you remember, after all of these years, what it was that you had in common in the first place? 

·        The behaviors that were so successful in the workplace are very likely just the opposite of traits that you will need at home.  Now, you will need to re-examine the team work aspect instead of being the one issuing orders and reorganizing everything to suit you.

·        Your circle of friends will change. People you considered friends at work were just people you were friendly with and probably not real friends at all.  This of course creates a sense of loss and a whole new social network will have to be established.

 

Communication and friendship are the keys to a successful relationship at any level, but perhaps more so during retirement than at any other time in your life.  It is time to listen to each other. You are going to be spending more time together and if one of you is miserable it is going to affect you both.  People grow and change over time.  It is time to listen to and become reacquainted with this person who has been sharing your house for all of these years. People are very complex and they all have interesting things to say.  If you have become adept at turning each other out, there is trouble ahead.

 

Facing the future at this age can be frightening and you need to be able to talk about it.  Start dating again. Start over, but with the same person.  Remember when you would talk for hours and hours?  Revisit the excitement that you felt when first decided you were ‘soul mates all of those years ago.