These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement.
For many relationships, life after work brings an unexpected set of challenges.
Richard and Yvonne McCracken, who have had to figure out how to share their space since retiring.Credit...David Hilliard for The New York Times
This spring, Barbara and Joe, a retired couple in their 60s, sat down with me at a bistro in suburban Connecticut to talk about their relationship. That they were sitting there together at all was something of a triumph. In the past few days, they had hurled at each other the kinds of accusations that couples make when they are on the brink of mutual destruction. They were bruised from the words that had been exchanged, and although they sat close to each other, their energy was quiet and heavy.
Barbara and Joe met 13 years ago, two divorced people who had relentlessly climbed their way up from working-class backgrounds. Barbara rose to be the vice president of a wholesale apparel business before moving into retail, then winding down her career; to keep herself busy, she sells clothing online a few hours a day. Joe co-founded a delivery business that he sold in 2021 for an amount that meant he would never have to work again; he retired in January last year. He and Barbara had time; they had money; they had leisure. They also had a problem: They were driving each other mad.
Barbara briefed me on her experience before we met in person. Since retirement, she reported, Joe had found himself untethered. He was underfoot, always around and not exactly occupied. It was bad enough that he was spending hours on his phone scrolling through Instagram, bad enough that he was doing so on a couch in the living room, a space that had always been hers and hers alone throughout the day. Now he also wanted her to look at the funny dog videos that made him laugh, and yes, funny pig videos too. She did not find this particularly sexy, but he also wanted more sex than when he was working, one of many ways she felt the burden of keeping him entertained. “Love him very much,” she texted. “But I’m going crazy or going back to work, whichever comes first.”
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.
After some 50 years of marriage, decades during which she often wished her husband worked fewer hours, Yvonne McCracken, at age 73, found herself hoping that the office might reclaim him. When her husband, Richard McCracken, retired from the business he built, Yvonne was still working from their home in Charlotte, N.C., as a quality-assurance specialist for a network of research sites, and she could feel him hovering near her desk off the kitchen as he did busy work on his laptop.
Having left her largely in charge, for most of their marriage, of raising two daughters, dealing with the home and managing her own career, Richard now seemed to have had some late-in-life revelation that his wife could clearly benefit from his input. He had ideas about how she should manage her team, which he sometimes shared after she completed Zoom calls: She should have told them to solve a problem a certain way, or given them more direction. The advice irritated Yvonne, who is not a fan of micromanagement (of herself or others). “I’m a very private person,” Yvonne said, “and the fact that he was even listening to my phone calls was, my God, it was like: I can’t believe you’re doing this. What? Why are you here?” Sometimes he walked past her computer and waved and smiled and mugged for her co-workers, which annoyed her just as much as his unsolicited counsel.
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Yvonne reaches up to a tree.
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Richard next to a tree with a leaf blower.
Yvonne and Richard McCracken.Credit...David Hilliard for The New York Times
She wondered: Was this what he was like as a boss at the business he ran? She supposed so. She had never given her husband’s work persona much thought. That part of his life was separate from her own, but instead of receding now that he was retired, it seemed to be taking up even more space. When Richard started picking up consulting work to stave off his own restlessness, he took over their kitchen, spreading papers and folders on various surfaces and leaving half-filled coffee cups and laptop chargers lying around. “It destroys the energy in the house,” Yvonne said. She told me they had agreed that he could no longer work in the kitchen; Richard seemed to have the impression that he had simply promised to clean up at the end of each day. He told me that his wife was becoming a minimalist. “I’m kind of the opposite,” he said. “I always tend to spread out — like mold.”
The couple had coexisted on separate tracks for many years, so much so that even the sweet moments of retirement, like weekends with their grandchildren, to whom Richard was devoted, kicked up feelings of regret and loss for Yvonne. As a working mother, she had done the large part of the child rearing on her own, without a fully invested partner. “He’ll say to me about the grandchildren, Wow, they’re so bright and interesting,” she said. “And I’ll say, You know, your own children were very bright and interesting, too.” Regrets about the past were colliding with the minutiae of how they would coexist as they faced aging together.
Yvonne and Richard shared, at least, a similar vision of how to approach their finances, which can be a source of tension for many retired couples. Financial troubles can rob them of their peace of mind, and even those who are well prepared are often surprised to find that they have different instincts about how to manage their savings.
Frances and Tito Sisnett, pharmacists from California, had saved carefully for years. After they retired — Frances in 2016, Tito in 2017 — Frances was determined to hold on tight to the money they worked so hard to earn. Tito wanted to travel frequently to Panama and Barbados, where he had family. He had done the calculations and knew that with their savings and investments, they could afford it. But fear was baked into Frances’s decision-making process; at age 12, she experienced the precipitous collapse of her family’s financial security when her father died unexpectedly and her mother fell ill. No matter how many times Tito explained the math, she worried that they would run out of funds. “You’ve got to change the way you think,” Tito recalled telling her. “That was many hours of discussion.”
Eventually, they hired a financial adviser, who delivered the same assurance that Tito was already providing; Frances could accept it from a professional, and she was able to move on from what seemed like an unshakable stance.
In 2020, Frances and Tito, who felt ready to live outside the United States, moved to Panama near his family. Now they faced the question of travel in reverse: How much time were they going to spend with their grandchildren back in Maryland? Having been more reluctant to leave for Panama in the first place, Frances was now trying to build a life in their new home, which meant making a fierce commitment to spending time there. Tito, who already had strong connections in Panama, was much more eager to spend extended periods with the grandchildren.
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Tito stand with an umbrella looking up with his hand extended out.
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Frances lays in a hammock.
Tito and Frances Sisnett.Credit...David Hilliard for The New York Times
Not long after moving to Panama, Frances and Tito became friendly with Charlotte Van Horn, a fellow retiree who left a career as a legal assistant and has since built a business helping Black couples make homes there. Frances and Tito have found a way to negotiate their different preferences about travel, but sometimes, Van Horn says, the issue of how much time to spend where, and with whom, is the thing that ultimately divides previously happy couples.
“You have one person who says, I’m not leaving the grandchildren,” she told me. “And the other says: I’ve spent my whole life staying in certain places and doing certain things because I was raising my own kids. I’m not going to let someone else’s kids keep me from doing what I really want to do in life.” Van Horn has seen some couples decide that they will be apart for months of the year while visiting back and forth. “But I don’t think it’s worked,” she says. “They’re breaking up, but they’re not admitting it. It’s too painful. So they just … let it go by the wayside.”
Early in his career, John Gottman, a founder of the Gottman Institute, a center devoted to the study of successful marriages, believed that the best predictor of happiness in retirement would be a robust “second identity” for one or both members of the couple outside of work. “So if you were a mechanic but you also sang in the choir, in church on weekends, or you flew hang gliders or something like that, and it was important to you,” Gottman thought, then the pain of the loss of one identity would be dulled by the full emergence of the second.
But research over the years has found only a limited effect of a second identity on happiness in that phase of life. The much more important factor, Gottman told me, is the quality of the marriage before retirement. The Health and Retirement Study, a sweeping national research project now in its 32nd year, found that an unhappy marriage predicts unhappiness in retirement more than declines in wealth or even health, says Mo Wang, a professor at the University of Florida who studies the retirement adjustment.
Whether couples are able to help each other stretch, a concept that social scientists call “self-expansion,” also matters. Strong self-expansion skills — the ability to make new friends or pick up new interests that require dedicated learning — are correlated with everything from general well-being to even weight loss and cognitive health. Not surprising, researchers in 2020 found that couples who reported high levels of that kind of reinforcement — encouraging each other to try something new, for example — were happier and were weathering the transition much better.
Barbara told me that she had been encouraging Joe to try new things. At the same time, she clearly didn’t see it as her job to figure out for him what those things might be. She frustrated easily. She snapped often, by her own admission. Her irritation was a function of how perilously close she was to losing touch with what she admired in this tremendously industrious and competent partner. “My friends tell me I’m going to lose him,” Barbara said. “They tell me, You have to be nicer. But … I just can’t. I am who I am. After all these years, I can’t change.”
At lunch, Joe said that there were, in fact, things he would like to be doing with his time, if he could only get motivated to focus on them. “I always wanted to play guitar,” he said. “I’m like a music banana.”
“He is,” Barbara confirmed. (She seemed to know that this meant he was a music enthusiast.)
“I’ve tried a few times,” he said, “and I never could make it stick.” He had looked at a few guitar classes online, to no avail, even though he said that once he commits to a project, he really commits. “Usually, I’m pretty good once I get going,” he said. (“He is,” Barbara confirmed.) “It’s just, now I don’t.” And that was where they had left it: Joe paralyzed. Barbara annoyed, for months now.
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Joe sits in a chair with his foot on an amp.
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Barbara sits at a table.
Joe and Barbara.Credit...David Hilliard for The New York Times
Couldn’t a guitar instructor visit the house one day a week? Provide some focus, some company, some structure?
Barbara and Joe seemed to brighten at the thought. That was something he could do. Maybe there were other things they could do too, like rethink how they used space if they were always in each other’s way. Barbara had complained that when she was online in their living room, trying to post garments on eBay, she could feel Joe’s presence in a way that was unnerving, even when he was ignoring her.
Wasn’t his office upstairs empty? What if she worked there for a few discrete hours a day, so that expectations all around were clear?
“If I go up there,” Barbara said, “it’s almost like saying, OK, you want me to be away.” She thought this over. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who needed the space. Maybe Joe wanted some, too. “I do,” he said.
“OK,” Barbara said, “well, we never really discussed this.” She suddenly saw not just her perception of Joe but his perception of her. She was overcome with remorse about how she had been talking to him. “I tell people stories about what’s going on between us, expecting sympathy, and they’re like, What’s wrong with you?” she admitted.
As they spoke, it became clear that they were each struggling with the reality that Joe was feeling something close to depression. He had taken it very hard when he had lunch with some former colleagues, people still working long hours at the business, and had the sense that once they said their farewells after the meal, they would rarely give him another thought. Seeing that vulnerability moved Barbara. For Joe, retirement meant looking back on the totality of his life and trying to weigh what all that effort had added up to. What did it mean?
In the weeks after our conversation, Joe and Barbara seemed to pull themselves back from the brink. It took him some time, but Joe had, on his own, found a guitar instructor. He spent hours on the phone with Barbara’s ex-husband, an avid musician, talking about how to tune and clamp the instrument. After the instructor came and gave Joe his first lesson, he was even more enthusiastic. Since then, he had been working for hours on the song he was learning, Pearl Jam’s cover of “Last Kiss.”
Barbara loved hearing it. She was reflecting on how she had always prided herself on being strong, on being independent, her response to a hardscrabble childhood in which she was overlooked. “You know, I just want to do what I want to do,” she said. “I’m not someone who’s going to feel tremendous guilt about not doing something I don’t want to do.” But she was moving away from her insistence that she couldn’t change, that she wouldn’t change, to a recognition that maybe she could and should, even if it took effort. “The thought of him not being around, of being with someone else, makes me think: What are these big sacrifices I’m making? The big sacrifice would be if we weren’t together.”
Read by Kirsten PotterNarration produced by Anna DiamondEngineered by Ted Blaisdell
David Hilliard is an artist and educator from Boston. He creates narrative multipaneled photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him.
Susan Dominus is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was part of a team that reported on workplace sexual harassment issues and won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. More about Susan Dominus
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/maga ... 778d3e6de3
