Boomers: Defining Marriage All Over Again

There are many issues that face couples when men retire. By retiring without discussing the effect the retirement can have on a relationship, can put their marriage out of sync. Couples dealing with, or facing an out-of-sync retirement can take a variety of actions to strengthen their relationship instead of weakening it. Step one is understanding what retirement is not. Couples may spend a lot of time talking and planning for what retirement could be but, if they never flip things over and agree what it won’t be, trouble can brew. 

Some men, I know feel that spending 30-40 years as the main breadwinner entitles them to some time off and a little relaxation. Some of my men friends seem to have forgotten that their spouse may have also spent as many years working both at home and away from home. By forgetting this and thinking that as a man you deserve to relax without consideration of your spouse is a big mistake. 

Step two is that as your move into retirement, your role is now to figure out what new role you play in your relationship.  Before you retired you spent much of your relationship apart except for evenings, weekends and vacations. You and your partner have to get to know each other again. It is not easy, my wife and I have been together almost 51 years (married for  48 years) and when we both retired it was hard to figure out our new roles.

Marriage is a funny thing. How you view marriage as you age, is drastically different from when you were a teenager or youth with stars in your eyes. Try to look back and compare your vision of marriage you had when you were first married, or even when you married for 20 years with your views now as you are looking forward to a life in retirement as a married couple. Boomers came of age in the era of the sexual revolution, and Boomers have experienced various redefinitions of the idea of relationships and of marriage. For many of us we moved from the first early idealistic stages of relationships to where we are now we matured in our outlook, but in the process, some of our relationships and marriages did not survive and divorce became the new normal. Now we are taking our understanding of relationships and marriages into our retirement years. It may be that this next transition of relationships and marriage will bring as many changes to as any that have gone before.

Many Boomer marriages are now ending in divorce and it is the women who are the instigator of the divorce, not the man. Others may want to explore this aspect of the Boomer generation, but for me, how you view marriage as you move toward your retirement years without a doubt depends on how your relationship within your marriage has gone for you over the decades. If your marriage relationships were rocked with difficulty, separations and other woes, retirement can bring a new dimension to that tension and may lead to separation and divorce. On the other hand, one of the tasks of retirement is to begin to seek resolution of life’s struggles, so working together with each other in the context of marriage can bring tremendous healing in this phase of life.

Each era seems to bring a new opportunity to define marriage and how it will be an important part of our life. When the Boomer generation became parents, the shift was notable as retailers responded to our emphasis on being good mums and dads and away from youthful issues. Then as we moved through parenting and into the empty nest phase of life, that seemed to bring to us as many challenges as when that nest filled up with children decades before.

There is no question that in the context of life, even with the problems that arise, marriage is a huge positive resource for us throughout life’s journey. While sometimes romance can escape from the marriage relationship if life brings struggles and as our bodies go through changes. The partnership and intimacy of a marriage relationship is an incredible resource for coping with the big changes all baby boomers have had to face over the years.

One of the good things about hanging in there with your relationship or marriage until you get to the stage of life most Boomers are moving toward in this decade is the strength you have as a couple. The tensions that can rob a marriage of romance during the working part of your married years are the coming of children, the hard work of raising them, keeping a career moving forward in the tough business settings. Boomers have experienced all of these in the last three decades and we have seen our own relationships evolve under that kind of “pressure cooker” environment. The good news is that these pressures are or should be gone as you move into retirement. 

A significant amount of those pressures begins to lift when you are able to scale back the work life, enjoy the fruits of your labours and let the kids get out on their own. So your pre-retirement years can actually be a fertile setting for a new romantic life between the two spouses to spring up. Many couples, as they leave the world of parenting behind, experience such late in life romantic rebirths. This kind of late springtime in your relationship with your long time spouse can bring the birth of new creativity in many parts of your life making it one of the happiest phases of life for you and your spouse.

A marriage gets tested throughout youth and middle age, and marriages that survive do so I think in part, because of mutual support and the ability to accept the other member of the marriage and having the willingness and ability to compromise. Since these traits will be well established in your relationship as you move into your fifties and sixties together, they will be a continuous resource to you as you face retirement issues, dealing with being a grandparent, and being wise counsel for children who are facing life’s struggles for the first time.

Boomers should not be surprised if they see their marriages continue to change, grow and mature in new directions as each partner explores this phase of life for the first time as well. A marriage is a living thing so we can take joy from seeing it become something new each new decade as, as we have done often in the past, we start defining marriage all over again.