The relationship that retirement redraws — an extract from The Retiree’s Path

The following is an extract from The Retiree’s Path, published by Greenfields Press.

The marriage that worked perfectly well for thirty-five years of working life began to show different textures in the first year of retirement.

Not problems, exactly — the word implies something sharper than what was actually happening. More a process of adjustment: the discovery that the relationship, which had been organised around the rhythms of two busy working lives running largely in parallel, required a different kind of attention when both people were home, most of the day, with no external demand to provide the structure that had previously organised the shared domestic life.

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Retirement redraws every significant relationship. The partnership or marriage most profoundly, because it is the relationship most continuously affected by the change in daily structure, but also the friendships that were built around shared professional context, the relationships with adult children that are reconfigured when the parent is no longer a busy working person, and the professional relationships that were sustained by institutional proximity and that, in its absence, often reveal themselves to have been more conditional than they appeared.

The structure of the working years provided a kind of natural regulation of the shared life: the time together was constrained by the demands of the working day, and the constraints produced a particular rhythm of connection and independence that many couples had found sustainable for decades without having to design it explicitly. In retirement, the constraints dissolve, and the rhythm requires replacement by something more deliberately chosen.

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The sorting of friendships that retirement performs is one of the less expected dimensions of the transition. Many relationships that felt substantial during the working years — the lunch companions, the professional peers, the colleagues whose company was genuinely valued — reveal themselves, in the absence of the shared professional context, to have been more dependent on that context than on any deeper personal connection.

The friendships that survive the transition are usually the ones that always were friendships in the fuller sense: relationships that were sustaining beyond their professional context, that involved genuine mutual interest and genuine honesty, that would have been chosen freely rather than simply maintained by convenience. Retirement performs the sorting, and the result — whatever its initial discomfort — is often a clearer and more genuinely chosen set of relationships than the one that the working life had accumulated.

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