Retirement blog about retiring together (revisited)

In May 2014, i.e. getting on for 5 years ago, I wrote an early retirement blog about what happens when couples retire together. I have recently had cause to re-read it and, though I say so myself, it’s not bad, some reasonably intelligent stuff in it. I re-read it this week because of an email I received from a person in Australia. She was engaged in researching for her PhD (although she doesn’t say what exactly the topic is). She had read the above blog and she had some questions and I said I would help if I could. Interestingly, this particular aspect of retirement hasn’t figured in this blog, in the intervening time, which must tell me something, although typically I am not sure what. On this basis alone I was not sure if I could help but if I can I will. She sent me a list of questions and that’s what I’m going to try and respond to. I will include them in this blog verbatim. You will have realised that I’m going to try and kill two birds with one stone – reply to her questions and make a blog out of it. That way the hard thinking has a pay-off for me and hopefully for my correspondent. Not too selfish I don’t think.

So here are the questions. 1. What does being adjusted to retirement mean to you? 2. In what ways do you think your partner’s retirement impacted your own adjustment to retirement? 3. In what ways did you and your partner help one another adjust to retired life? 4. If/When you or your partner experienced difficulties with adjustment, how did you help one another resolve these? 5. If/When you or your partner experienced difficulties with retirement adjustment, did this affect their or your own adjustment in anyway? If so, how?

These are my initial (and maybe final) answers. I was reluctant to go into too much depth a) because it might not be what she required and b) because it hurt my brain. I started off by saying that ‘adjusted’, in question 1, was a slightly loaded word, at least to me, in that it implied having to adjust to something difficult / challenging / unpleasant. This is not necessarily the case of course in that some people have no qualms about retiring and positively love the idea and the actuality. Those of us who enjoyed our jobs do indeed find it a challenge to ‘adjust’ to retirement. I’m going to assume we’re talking about people in the latter category.

So for me, adjustment means retaining the best bits (in no particular order) of my working life – self-esteem, identity, self-worth, interesting activities, learning new things, being useful, being well-paid, having the ‘right’ (for you) values that underpin your retirement life, but having to find different ways to achieve these life experiences. For example, to re-define yourself with a new identity that you like, is in line with your values, gives you a sense of achievement and so on. You get the idea. How to do this would have to be the subject of another blog. But that’s, broadly and briefly, what ‘being adjusted’ means to me.

The second question relates directly, as do the rest, to retiring with a partner but also connects to the last question in that it asks about how that partner’s retirement impacted on my adjustment as described, albeit briefly, above. In my case my positive relationship with my wife of 42 years added to my self-esteem and also she helped me define what self-esteem might ‘look like’. So I was starting at an advantage in that my self-esteem and feeling of self-worth were partially based on our relationship.

In addition I would have to say that my wife adapted well to retirement. She is a yoga teacher with ‘Buddhist leanings’ and has this great capacity to ‘live in the moment’. A skill I have always lacked. So retirement for her wasn’t that challenging. Given that she used very little of her emotional energy worrying about what retirement meant to her, she had energy left over to help me with my more challenging transition to retirement. But the fact that she was retiring at the same time meant we had common concerns / interests / goals for this period of our lives around which to discuss the minutiae.

I think I may have strayed into question 3 – how did you help one another adjust (that word again)? So I’d say, by having common ground, a degree of understanding of the situation of the other. Although our emotions / needs were quite different, they were similar enough to be able to provide support to one another and to make joint problem-solving a valuable and practical activity. There’s a balance (a favorite word of mine) between the experience of both partners being exactly the same and, totally different. The latter means there is likely to be little in the way of support while the former means the joint retirement enterprise lacks spark, creativity etc. Of course this may be exactly what some retiring couples want – safety, predictability and so on. You pays your money etc.

Questions 4 and 5 are similar in that they deal with difficulties experienced and how each partner helped / supported the other and what impact did giving this help have on that individuals retirement adjustment? I was always a firm believer when working as a psychologist in the power of asking the right questions rather than giving advice. So my response to these questions are biased in this direction. If difficulties arose we both got quite good at asking the other the kind of question that facilitated what might be called, the unravelling process. The process of making our retirement what we wanted it to be and deciding what we needed to actually do to make that happen.

Question 4, how did your partner help with any retirement difficulty? One potential difficulty with retirement is you have more time to be yourself, your personality traits become heightened. Good if you’re a relaxed person, you become more relaxed but, if like me, you’re something of a worrier then you have more time to worry. There’s no putting a worry on the back burner while you pop off to work and do what’s really important. When this worry is identified your partner can help by getting it out in the open, making it a legitimate topic for conversation, helping keep it in perspective, suggesting ways forward and so on. As to question 5 my partner experienced some of the same feelings so the fact is was on our agenda helped her to make any necessary adjustments. So my partner, when I asked her assured me that any difficulties I was having hadn’t negatively impacted on her own retirement and maybe helped put a name to similar difficulties she was having.

And that was what I sent to my correspondent. I haven’t heard back from her yet so I have no idea how many birds I’ve killed but it’s at least one as my response has led to the writing of this retirement blog.