Retirement is supposed to be one of the happiest chapters of your life.
You and your spouse have worked hard for decades, and now plan to reap the rewards.
However, many couples experience relationship issues after retirement.
Jobs allow you and your partner to have separate pursuits – as well as something to talk about at the end of the day. When you are suddenly spending large amounts of time together, you may find yourselves lacking in conversation and growing increasingly frustrated by the each other’s presence.
Here are our tips to maintaining a healthy, fulfilling relationship after retirement.
Retirement timing
There are two scenarios which can place different pressures upon your relationship and create issues after retirement.
When one of you retires before the other, the non-working partner can feel as though their space is invaded and their routine upset when the second person decides to call it quits. If both you and your partner retire at same time, you will be left with a huge time void to fill. This means forging a new structure that works for each of you – something that can be easier said than done when you are used to being in control of your own timetables.
Whatever the case, retirement ultimately means great change. When conflict arises, respect the stress that this change creates – these scenarios ultimately require open communication, perspective and compromise to truly resolve.
Clashing expectations
Relationship issues after retirement can arise when you and your partner have different ideas of what your retirement will entail. One of you may want travel the outback, while the other is content tending to the garden at home. Ideally, you will have discussed and compromised on these big plans before retiring – but even day-to-day activities can breed tension when one party feels that they always do what the other wants to do.
To get around this, plan some separate and some shared activities. Spend the morning apart, then meet up in the afternoon for a movie or dinner. Not only will this mean that you each maintain your own pursuits and sense of purpose outside of your relationship, but also that you have something to talk about when you see each other again.
Decision making
When you and your partner only saw each other outside of work hours, you were each in charge of many small decisions throughout your day – when to have lunch, what time to head home and even how to organise your tasks. As your spend more time together, these seemingly insignificant decisions need to be made as a team, and can create a lot of big issues after retirement out of little things.
To get around this, you and your partner could alternate who decides on the little things like what to have for lunch or what time to go to the shops day to day.
A simpler solution? Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Money stresses
After retirement, most couples face financial restrictions they weren’t previously accustomed to. The heightened awareness of your money that these restrictions create can leave you counting every penny, leading to conflict when one partner has a more relaxed attitude toward your financial situation than the other.
As such, it is important to plan for your financial situation before you retire, and lay out some spending rules to stick to. This may mean creating a spending threshold where any purchase greater than this amount must be agreed on by the both of you. It could also entail downsizing on a few luxury items or agreeing to eat out less often. A quick conversation today could prevent conflict in the future.
Housework arrangements
Throughout your working lives, you and your partner have adopted a housework routine where you are each in charge of different duties. This division is rarely equitable. Especially when one spouse is performing more paid work, the person at home generally completes more of the household tasks.
While this system may have worked for you when you were working, it is likely to need an overhaul now that you are each unattached to the workplace. There is no longer the variable of paid work to restrict an even amount of household labour, and one spouse may become frustrated and resentful if they feel they are completing more than their fair share.
