January 19, 2002

While I was writing last week’s column on balancing time - making sure that your time allocation reflected your priorities, it occurred to me that couples in their retirement years had a completely different set of time issues. Before retirement, the issue was finding enough time for togetherness while balancing the demands of children/grandchildren and careers. After retirement, couples often have too much time together and not enough separate time.

My father-in-law retired at age 62 after forty-three years of working for Exxon. Much of the time, his shift was 6:00 AM to 3:00 PM. My mother-in-law was a homemaker and never worked outside the home. While Van was away, she took care of her house, ran errands, and managed to have time for friends and silence. The first day of retirement, Van said to Rotha: "Today I retired from Exxon and Rotha, you are retiring from washing dishes." True to his word, though he had never washed a dish prior to retirement, he did all of the dish washing from that day on.

Big problem — my mother-in-law did not want to be relieved of a household task from which she had derived meaning for her life for 40 + years. After enduring her husband’s "help" in managing her home more efficiently for a couple of years, she in exasperation said to me: "I wish Van had something to do beside help me. I have run our home quite well without his help for more than forty years. He is driving me crazy!"

Well, some of my female readers think it was a "short drive to crazy" for my mother-in-law because she did not negotiate that her husband do the laundry as well as the dishes. But herein is the problem — in retirement we begin to invade territory that previously belonged exclusively to the other person.

Well, I tried to learn from my in-laws. That is why I have an office at the Marshall Depot. I want Janell to be excited when my truck turns into the drive. I don’t want her saying to herself, "Oh no, he’s back already."

If you are looking at retirement, I have a couple of suggestions that might help in the problem of having too much time. First of all, sit down together and talk about what retirement means. It means different things for different people. Sometimes retirement means ceasing to work, playing, traveling, visiting grandchildren. For others, it means working at a different pace, at a job that supplies more meaning to life than income. Before you retire, make sure that you and your spouse know what your expectations are.

Secondly, keep your separate interests. One of you may play golf, the other may like hunting. Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran reminded us, "Let there be spaces in your togetherness." Life is made up of certain rhythms. You breath in and breath out. You can not just breathe in. There is a coming together for shared times and times of separating for individual interests. Your retirement is not likely to be what you have dreamed it would be if you try to only have shared times.

Thirdly, have regular check-in times. These are times where you sit down together and say something like: "Is our retirement what you hoped it would be? Are you finding personal fulfillment in our retirement?" You will be well on your way to a "golden age" in retirement when you can honestly say to each other, "This is a wonderful time of life. I am grateful that we arrived here together."