How To Help Your Relationship Survive Retirement

For the past several years, one of the areas in which I have focused is on helping people prepare for retirement or as I like to say: What’s next in life?

I created a list of 10 tips to prepare for retirement which were published in a previous article. I share these tips with coaching clients and in workshops. One of the tips is this: Have conversations with your significant other. Share your vision of the future and how you want to live the rest of your lives together.

It seems logical to talk with your partner about how you envision living together after you leave your career. However, many people don’t – because they assume their spouse/partner is already on the same page, because they’re afraid to, or because they genuinely haven’t thought it through.

After one of my organizational workshops for leaders, for instance, a senior leader came up to me and said this: “Probably the most important thing you shared today in this two-hour workshop was to talk with your spouse. My wife and I are both workaholics. The only thing we have talked about is visiting our one grandchild who lives out of town. We have not talked about what we want to do, where we want to go, or how we plan to live after we retire.”

My response was to start the conversation that night. When you have a spouse or significant other, what’s next in your life is going to affect them too.

As one or both spouses retire, it can be hard on the relationship. You’ve likely heard the joke: “I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.” Retirement changes how and where we spend our time. The structure that careers provided for our lives is primarily gone. Now it is up to us to decide how, where, and with whom we spent our time and energy. Many spouses are not used to spending that much time together.

Without these conversations, it is easy to grow apart. Loneliness was an epidemic before the pandemic. The social isolation and loneliness associated with COVID-19 exasperated the challenges for couples who were not used to being together 24/7. In fact, the divorce rate for baby boomers has tripled since 1990 so that it is being called the Gray Divorce Tsunami.

Friendships and Social Support Systems are Critical, But Can Be Hard to Start and Maintain

A major national study of Americans’ social networks in 2020 discovered that nearly one in five Americans reported having no close social connections, a double-digit increase from 2013. The Associated Press conducted a survey recently found that 18 percent of the public had no more than one person outside their immediate household they could turn to for help.

Joseph Coughlin, the Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, says our real social security “is not an income stream provided by the government, but by our social relationships – our friends.” We worry about the money we think we need to have in order to retire. But Coughlin says we should be considering “the social capital (friends) we will need to remain connected, engaged, to have fun, and to manage the many challenges older age will bring.”

This message is reinforced by Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study on Happiness. In fact, you can watch Waldinger’s TED talk titled: What Makes a Good Life: Life Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness. Waldinger’s book can be summarized in three lessons.

1) First, having social connections is better for our health and well-being—and loneliness kills.

2) Second, having higher-quality close connections is more important for our well-being than the number of connections.

3) Third, having good relationships is not only good for our bodies, but also for our brains.

In Waldinger’s Harvard longitudinal study, one of the questions asked about retirement. “Based on their responses, the No. 1 challenge people faced in retirement was not being able to replace the social connections that had sustained them for so long at work.” The main conclusion was that people don’t miss the work, but they miss the people.

Losing access to your work or situation friends is a kind of loss, and is something couples should be aware of when one or both retire. I explain how to navigate loss and grief as part of this life transition in a previous article.

Your Gender May Impact Your Ability to Make and Maintain Friends

Since work provides our identity for most of our life, it is hard to let go of that identity for men and women. But research indicates that most men’s circle of friends shrinks much faster than women’s and is usually smaller to begin with. Men struggle because they’re often not willing to be vulnerable. And society allows women more freedom to socially gather comfortably. Men will play sports and go to lunch. But women can call a friend and go to a movie and men seem to be less likely to do that. Some are saying that “men are stuck in a friendship recession.”

In June 2021, the Survey Center on American Life published an article by Daniel Cox titled “Men’s Social Circles are Shrinking.” During the last three decades, friendship groups of both men and women have gotten smaller and the number of Americans without any close friends has sharply increased.

“Men appear to have suffered a far steeper decline than women. Thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990.”

Women also report having fewer friends, but the decline is not as drastic as for men. “In 1990, roughly four in ten (41 percent) women said they had six or more close friends, compared to 24 percent today. Ten percent of women reporting having no close friends.”

The time to start expanding your circle of friends is now, but it is not easy making friends as an adult. It is hard for us to get out of our comfort zone. In a previous article, I described ways to make new friends. Reach out and reconnect with former friends. Cultivate new friends by joining clubs or organizations to meet like-minded people. Pursue hobbies and interests to learn new things and to meet new people.

It is important in relationships to not depend on your partner to satisfy all of your needs. Connecting with different people for different reasons can add new dimensions to your life. Since your time with work friends will be more limited after retirement, make sure you have casual friends and intergenerational friends. Both you and your partner will benefit when you have a mix of shared friends and friends of your own. Even weak ties can add to well-being. I wouldn’t discount anyone. All of this takes an investment of resources—intentional time, thought, and energy, but it will pay dividends.

Getting the Conversation Started

As readers of my work know, I am on a mission to retire the word retirement. We are not retiring from life, but moving onto something else. And it takes time and intentional thought to figure out what’s next in life.

Since this topic is a passion, my husband and I continually talk about how we want to live our lives. We like to watch, observe, and listen to how friends who have retired are spending their time, money, and energy. While we don’t judge others, we have conversations about whether what they are doing appeals to us. Ideas include:

· Do we want to escape the winter and spent time in a warmer climate? If so, where?

· Do we want to invest in real estate or rent?

· Do we want to buy a RV and travel to explore the country?

· How do we prefer to travel?

· Do we want to get more involved in our local community?

· How can we stay connected to our extended and expanding family who live on each coast?

It can be hard to talk about the life after retirement with your spouse. Dr. Ruth, the sexual health and relationship expert who strove to demystify sex, wrote her final book about loneliness called “The Joy of Connections.” In her book she says, “Nobody is excited to admit they’re having difficulty in the bedroom … Nobody is thrilled to confess they have too few reliable friends. Shame is the thread that connects them both, and shame is what I’ve always tried to help people overcome.”

The key is to remove the shame and communicate. One good place to start is to observe What are your friends doing with their retirement. What are you noticing? What things appeal to you, and what things do you want to avoid? I advise people to look for role models. Who’s living a life that looks attractive to you? What is it about their life that is appealing? Regardless of age or stage of life, now is the time to have conversations about how you want to live the rest of your lives.

Explore. Discover. Experiment. But share what you are thinking with your partner. Retirement can be a time of freedom, flexibility, and fun. Enjoy the journey together.