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He's Retired, She's Working, They're Not Happy
By John Leland, the New York Times
March 23, 2004
When Robert Waskover sold his direct-mail business in 1990, he looked forward to a Florida retirement of golf and tennis.
His wife, Barbara, had other plans. She wanted to work. He was 62; she was 57. Mrs. Waskover had postponed her career while her children were young. Now she was finding work as a public speaker and interviewing Holocaust survivors for a research project. While her husband played golf, she was busier than ever.
"He felt threatened because my life was so exciting and his wasn't anymore," said Mrs. Waskover, who is now 70 and still working. "It was constant bickering. When we did go out, he wouldn't dance with me. I guess he was trying to assert himself."
Such tensions have altered the marital dynamic of retirement, as millions of women continue working after their husbands retire. The challenges represent "a stage of the marriage relationship that's occurring for the first time in history," said Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.
And there is little in these couples' pasts, or in the retirement experiences of previous generations, to prepare them for the stresses they face.
Since 1935, when the passage of the Social Security Act created retirement as we know it, the issue of when to retire has largely been a male one. When male breadwinners reached a certain age or seniority they left work and tapped their pensions, and they and their wives began a new chapter in their lives.
But as more women have pursued rewarding careers, retirement has grown more complicated. Many working women are younger than their husbands; many deferred their careers to raise children or care for parents. When their husbands have completed their career arcs, or been pushed into early retirement, these women are often still on the way up or accruing seniority for a pension or retirement package. Some, too young for Medicare, need to work for the health insurance.
"This is the first generation that's ever had to deal with this, because in the past it was one retirement per family, and that was the husband's," said Ms. Moen, one of the few researchers to study gender and retirement. "Even if women worked, they didn't work too much."
As the 41 million women of the baby boom head toward retirement age, the new era of retirement increasingly includes two careers, diverging ambitions and very different ideas about what to do with the decades to follow.
Some men are threatened by the role reversal; others are impatient to travel or to move someplace warm. Some women resent having their husbands lie about all day, rarely taking on additional housework. A Cornell University study of 534 retirement-aged men and women found that working women whose husbands were retired or disabled were the least happy with their marriages. Working men whose wives stayed home were the most.
The census does not track couples by their retirement status, but it provides a broad estimate of the dimensions of this phenomenon. While most couples say they would like to retire at the same time, in 2000 there were more than two million couples in which a man 55 or over had not worked in the previous year but his wife had. These accounted for 10.9 percent of couples involving a man 55 or over, up from 1.6 million such couples, or 9.6 percent of the total, in 1990.
"This mismatch doesn't work very well," Ms. Moen said. "Husbands are not satisfied when their wives are working."
She added that when wives retired first, they tended to be "very unhappy in that circumstance because they feel they're being pushed back into all the domestic work."
The Waskovers, who live in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., came to their own solution. "It got to the point where I said, `If you don't go out and get a job, I'm getting a lawyer,' " Mrs. Waskover said.
Mr. Waskover got a part-time job as a telemarketer, then one selling insurance. Now the couple exercise together, and Mr. Waskover supports his wife's work.
Of the early frictions, he said: "When you work your whole life, and all of a sudden you stop, it's like you lose something. She's doing all these things. I became insecure. I did nothing but criticize, which I never did before. All of a sudden, I didn't like the way she was rolling my socks. Luckily I had enough street smarts to get over it."
Barbara Vinick, a research sociologist with the Normative Aging Study at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, said most men she had studied were initially thrilled with retirement, even if their wives continued to work.
"There's a kind of euphoria at first," Ms. Vinick said. "And they were pretty sure their wives would retire quickly. If that didn't happen, they were disappointed."
Few couples adequately discussed how they would live during the next stage of their lives, she said. "Some of the wives felt pressure to retire and didn't know how to counter that pressure." If the women did retire, she added, "Some decided that too much togetherness wasn't so great."
In Montclair, N.J., Laura Radin looked forward to following her husband, Rodney Leinberger, into retirement. Mr. Leinberger, now 64, retired from his job as a computer systems manager in 1995. Ms. Radin, now 59, retired from a job in customer service in 1999.
"I had my own ideas of what would happen," she said. "I'd spend time with my husband, take care of things around the house, travel. I found out I was invading his space. He had already carved out his life during the daytime."
Ms. Radin also said she felt insecure without her income. Unlike her husband, she had not been eligible for a sizable retirement package. She returned to work in 2000, in part because she found her presence unwanted at home.
"She doesn't have the interests I do," Mr. Leinberger said. "She was at loose ends. She envisioned that we'd be going here and there together, but I'm sort of a loner."
Though his job had paid better than hers, he said he did not feel threatened now that she was earning more money. "That was never an ego thing for me," Mr. Leinberger said. "The more money she makes, the better it is for me. It's like if she beats me at tennis. I don't like it, but it just means a better game for me."
Women often work because their husbands have been pressed into early retirement. Martie Williams, 60, had not planned to retire in 1999, when the gas company in western New Jersey where he worked offered him a buyout package. Since then he has briefly tried selling cars, but has not worked regularly. His wife, Pat, 55, who makes $10,000 a year as a librarian's aide, has come to resent his not working.
"Even if he worked 20 hours a week, it wouldn't be enough money, but we'd have some normalcy," she said. "That's what I'm looking for. Life needs that, but we don't have it. We need some sort of routine. I'm angry. I don't make dinner anymore. I say, `You're home all day, I'll be damned if I'll do it.' "
Mr. Williams said he did not miss his old job, and felt his retirement package provided enough money for now. But, he said, "Our home life has gone to hell in a handbasket. I don't know if it's my fault, her fault or nobody's fault. She resents my being home so much. I just close up and say, `When I get a job, it will resolve itself.'
"The only thing I have a problem with is talking about it," Mr. Williams said. "She's always saying, `What are you going to do?' I don't know what I'm going to do. All I can do is keep going out and trying."
Even when money is not the major concern, many women who came of age with the feminist movement have invested their identities in their careers, said Laurie Young, executive director of the Older Women's League, a research and advocacy organization.
When Lois Ambash met Lawrence Schneider in 1984 through a personal advertisement in a Long Island circular, they had very different plans. "He said he wanted to retire at 55," said Ms. Ambash, 57. "I said I was going to work till I was 90."
In their small Greenwich Village apartment, Ms. Ambash runs a consulting business out of the living room. Mr. Schneider, 65, who retired from his job as a teacher in 1995, does the shopping and cooking and attends concerts in the afternoons. They make appointments to go to the movies together.
Most of their income still comes from his pension and Social Security.
Ms. Ambash, who works long hours, said she would not feel complete without her career. "When I was growing up, my family's expectations for me as a woman were about marriage and family, not work," she said. "All my life, the choices I made involved having an identity in addition to being a spouse and a parent."
She occasionally thinks about retiring, she said. "I wonder, `Why does what I do have to be such a big deal?' "
Mr. Schneider said that he was happy to see his wife work, but that he himself did not miss working. "I never tied my identity to business or teaching," he said. "There's so many other things to do. And when I go to Lincoln Center in the afternoon, in that crowd I feel young."
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