There is a very specific look that passes between two people who have been married for thirty-odd years when one of them announces they are retiring. A flicker of something. Not quite alarm. Not quite excitement. Something in between, that neither of them mentions, because it seems ungrateful to admit that the prospect of spending every single day together – all day, every day, with no office to retreat to, no commute to decompress on, no reason to be anywhere that isn’t here – is just a little bit terrifying.
If you have felt that flicker, please know you are in very good company.
Research consistently shows that marital satisfaction can actually dip in the early years of retirement, which surprises almost everyone who hears it. We expect retirement to be a golden era of togetherness – finally, the time to travel, to have long lunches, to rediscover each other. And it can be. But it rarely is immediately, and the gap between expectation and reality is where the trouble tends to start.
Couples therapist Thomas Westenholz puts it plainly. Many couples, he says, have spent their working lives living relatively separate lives – different workplaces, different colleagues, different rhythms. If children were involved, most of the time spent together was in what he calls “functioning mode” rather than “connection mode.” You were co-managing a household, not necessarily connecting as a couple.
Retirement removes the structure that kept those separate lives organised. Suddenly you are both home. Both underfoot. Both renegotiating who makes the coffee and whose turn it is to drive and whether the television can be on before noon.
Dr Anna Elton, a licensed marriage and family therapist, describes it as the moment when “differences in expectations, routines, and even visions for the future” that have quietly existed for years are suddenly, unavoidably, visible.
One of you has been dreaming of travelling. The other has been dreaming of a vegetable garden and not going anywhere for a while. One of you wants to be deeply involved with the grandchildren. The other loves the grandchildren enormously and also loves returning them to their parents at the end of the visit.
Neither of these positions is unreasonable. But if you have never actually said them out loud to each other, you are heading into retirement on two different maps.
Dr Elton is direct about what she sees repeatedly in her practice. “In my work with couples, I often see conflict increase during the first year of retirement because expectations have never been discussed.”
The assumption is that because you know each other so well after so many years, you know what the other person wants. That you are, as it were, operating from the same script.
You are often not.
And the longer those unspoken assumptions sit between you – the travel plans never discussed, the financial decisions never aligned, the daily routine never negotiated – the more likely they are to eventually surface as irritation, resentment or the quiet misery of two people sharing a house but not really sharing a life.
The fix, both therapists agree, is not complicated. It is simply a conversation. The kind that many couples, astonishingly, have never had.
Dr Elton recommends starting with one deceptively simple question: “What does retirement look like to you?” And then – crucially – listening to the answer rather than assuming you already know it.
From there, she suggests working through four questions that she has seen transform couples’ ability to navigate this transition:
Where do we want to travel? Not just the bucket list items you’ve each separately accumulated over the years, but an honest conversation about how often, how far, how much, and whether you actually want to do it together or whether some of it might be done with friends.
What hobbies do we want to pursue? Including, importantly, the ones that don’t involve each other. Healthy retirement relationships tend to include both shared activities and individual ones. Two people doing everything together, always, tends not to end well for either of them.
How involved do we want to be with grandchildren? This is one that catches many couples completely off guard, because they assume they want the same thing. Sometimes they do. Sometimes one of you wants to be the grandparent who is available every Tuesday and babysits every school holiday, and the other one was quietly planning to be the grandparent who sends lovely birthday presents and otherwise maintains their own schedule.
What does a fulfilling week look like for each of us? Not the same week, necessarily. Each of you, honestly. What would a genuinely good week feel like? Work backwards from there and see how much overlap you actually have.
Westenholz offers what I think is the most useful reframe of all. “Retirement isn’t just the end of a career,” he says. “It’s the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship. Couples who approach it with curiosity rather than assumptions tend to navigate the transition far more successfully.”
Curiosity. After thirty years of marriage, most of us assume we have run out of surprises. We know what our partner thinks about most things. We can finish their sentences and predict their reactions and list their irritating habits in alphabetical order.
And yet here is a whole new chapter, with new parameters and new freedoms and new challenges, and the people who do it best are the ones who treat it as a discovery rather than a confirmation of everything they already know.
Your partner may surprise you. You may surprise yourself.
At the very least, you will have had the conversation. And that, the research suggests, is a very good place to start.
Have a question for Bess? Write to us at community@startsat60.com with Dear Bess in the subject line.
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