Dear LPG,

It is true that once anyone retires they have more of a choice about what they do with their time, and if the retiree has done all the initial things that they promised that they were going to do they (if they actually manage that) have a little more time to look around and observe what is going on. 

If your marriage has survived all those years of hard work, I think that retirement becomes one of the pivotal points of your relationship.  Children or not, you have both spent years living different lives until the day when you don’t have to go to work anymore.  You have had different experiences to bring to your evening conversations and lots to talk about.  Then suddenly you find yourselves under each other’s feet and that house you call a home can suddenly get very overcrowded even though not one new person has moved in. 

In my experience, most of the ladies have had a full-time job just managing to keep the house tidy and their family fed, often in addition to going to work, while their menfolk have often concentrated on nothing but bringing in the money that has kept them going, and there lies the problem. 

The ladies still have a big chunk of things to do in their lives to keep them busy while a retired husband has lost everything that has consumed his life for the past 40 or so years and needs to carve out a completely new routine for himself. 

Even though many other things can happen to relationships, this has happened to me and so many other couples that I know, and that is when there is suddenly time to argue about all sorts of things that were never an issue before.  When he retired, my other half suddenly decided that he could manage the finances better than I could and wanted to take over so many of the things that he had left me to do for years.  He always seemed to be there and I lost that all-important time I had for getting on with the things that I have always done alone. 

For some reason DIY is not as all-consuming as housework and that ‘need to feel needed’ which suddenly went missing from his life was the thing that was causing our problems.  Most of his friends were still working leaving him at home all the time, and that is when, if you are not careful you spend so much time under each other’s feet that you have nothing new to talk about at the end of each day. 

We all know that maintaining a happy marriage is hard enough when you are both busy working all the time but I think this to be a really important message;

Gentleman, when you retire you really need to find yourselves a new set of things to occupy your time, and perhaps this is a message that all retired dads need to pass on to those sons who are in their mid to late 50s and so busy at work that they have little time left over at the end of each day for getting home, something to eat and sleep.

There is so much information and advice given about how to deal with finances after retirement but time management and how it impacts on relationships is often missed and just as important…

  NA, Camberwell

LPG found some related online advice

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