At lunch that day, Joe wore a pink flannel shirt that suited him and had clearly been picked out by someone with a tasteful eye. He seemed nervous about discussing his relationship, which reflected just one of the many differences the couple had to negotiate: Barbara was frank and open by nature; Joe was more private (which is why they’ve requested that only their first names be used).
For years, Joe said, he had been monomaniacally focused on his exit — on selling the business. He had given almost no thought to what his life would look like once he finally did. “I had visions of going to the gym,” he said. That turned out to take up no more than an hour of his day. Then what? He was at something of a loss. “It’s been a kind of transition trying to move away from people that were like my second family,” he said. “It’s been a little enlightening that once you’re gone, you’re gone.”
A life transition as significant as marrying or having children, retirement is a stage that many couples anticipate with little of the trepidation those earlier choices inspired. They look forward to it as a reward for years of hard work — a long vacation, full of agency and freedom, to enjoy as long as their bodies hold up. Yet retirement, like any major transition, often entails destabilizing shifts that take many people by surprise. Although it’s still rare for married couples over 60 to break up, the divorce rate is rising faster in that age group than in any other, as baby boomers accustomed to self-actualization reach retirement age and evaluate their lives anew.
“The relationship can have an identity crisis,” says Allison Howe, a therapist who works primarily with couples in New York. Howe says retirement is a time when the issues that couples have been avoiding — aided by the distractions of work or child rearing or both — come roaring to the forefront. “There are disagreements now about how to envision this new stage of life,” she says. “The retirement phase amplifies everything, actually — the absence of true collaboration, whether they were really friends, whether they had a shared narrative. All of these things get heightened now because we have less time.”
Couples have less time on a grand scale while contending, suddenly, with more free time in their waking hours. Many disagree on how to spend it. “I can do anything I want, but lack an activity partner,” reported Danny Steiner, a recently retired 70-year-old high school teacher whose wife does not share his passion for travel — a difference that really manifested only once it was an option. More time can lay bare the reality that some couples did better with less of it. “Being together just does not feel as special as it once did,” said Martha Battie, a retired college administrator in Hanover, N.H. “Whatever conversations or sharing we have seems to be forgotten, or not really heard from the start.” And more time means more exposure to whatever irritating habits were easily endured in smaller doses. Among the things that grated on her, Barbara had texted, was that Joe “mansplains everything.” He had always been that way, she knew, but now she had to deal with so much more of it.