New Portrait of Retiring Is Emerging

By: Susan Gilbert
The New York Times, May 29, 2001

The emotional aspects of retirement are proving to be vastly more complex than previously thought, according to recent social science research. With changes in the work force, researchers are now focusing more on women and are examining how retirement affects couples' relationships.

"Retirement has long been seen as an individual — mainly a male — passage, but increasingly couples must deal with two retirements," said Dr. Phyllis Moen, a professor of sociology and human development at Cornell University and the lead author of a study on couples' retirement transitions, published in the spring issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Adding to the complexity are changes in the nature of retirement itself, Dr. Moen said. For example, retirement used to mean an end to paid work, but increasingly people are working part time or as consultants after retiring from their primary career jobs.

Dr. Moen's new study is among the first to track people through the process of retirement. It focused on 534 married couples who were either retired or about to retire from six large employers in upstate New York.

The researchers asked the men and women separately about their marital satisfaction before and after retirement. Dr. Moen specifically wanted to know if there were any differences between the groups and about effects of retirement timing on marital satisfaction.

The main finding was that retirement itself was a happy time for couples, but that the transition to retirement — defined as the first two years after leaving a job — was a period of marital strife for men and women.

"I was surprised that it was the transition that was stressful on the relationship," Dr. Moen said in an interview from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where she is working on a fellowship.

"Earlier studies had talked about the possibility of a honeymoon period for men shortly after retirement, when they'd travel and their morale would go up, but that this honeymoon period leveled off after a year or two."

Though the transition was equally stressful for men and women, some important differences were found. Women who took new jobs after retiring from their primary careers reported high marital satisfaction, more so than those who retired completely. But men who worked after retirement reported much more marital conflict than those who completely retired. Dr. Moen suggests the difference lies in the adjustment to the typical post-retirement job, which is usually part time. "It's easier for women to work part time because they are more likely to have done it before," she said.

In general, she found, husbands and wives were happier when they retired at the same time. Marital conflict was highest when the husbands retired first. Dr. Moen attributes this to a relative uneasiness with nontraditional roles, in this case, the wife's working while her husband is at home.

Dr. Maximiliane Szinovacz, a research professor of internal medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, has also found this arrangement stressful, especially to husbands. "That's because husbands aren't used to being alone at home," she said. "It may create issues of status and power in the marriage."

But the source of stress may be different for wives. Sometimes, husbands retire just as their wives are resuming their careers, said Dr. Joel S. Savishinsky, author of "Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America," a book published last year that followed 26 people in retirement. "It isn't uncommon for a woman to be in an important point in her career just when her husband retires," Dr. Savishinsky said. "In that case, the couple needs to negotiate."

Still, retirement problems rarely ruin marriages. "Divorce rates don't go up," said Dr. David J. Ekerdt, a sociologist at the Center on Aging at the University of Kansas. He found that 60 percent of couples said their marriages improved after retirement.

Dr. Savishinsky, a professor of social sciences at Ithaca College in upstate New York, added: "Like the first two years of marriage, retirement challenges people at the start. But most work through their differences pretty well."

He and the other researchers agreed that getting through the rough transition would be much easier if people planned for more than financial survival in retirement. Couples, they say, should envision what they want to do once they retire and share their ideas.

"We plan our careers, but we don't plan our retirement," Dr. Moen said. "And yet retirement may last 20 or 30 years, longer for some people than their work years. We need to see retirement as a passage to new opportunity."