Retirement didn’t catch Don and Judy Ayers by surprise — not exactly.
It’s just that she’d like to spend their golden years in the Mt. Prospect house they’ve called home since 1974, within easy walking distance of her neighbors and easy driving distance of the Ayers’ grandchildren.
Newly retired Don Ayers, on the other hand, would like to truck on back to Streator, Ill., where he was born 66 years ago. Less traffic, more fishing, is the attraction there.
The Ayerses agree on numerous functional goals for their ideal retirement house — a one-story dwelling, to ease daily chores; space for visiting grandchildren to play; and a good nook for reading, which both of them have been pursuing as never before with their newfound, retirement free time. Yet the sticking point — exactly where that retirement house will be located — hangs over their heads, unresolved.
“I wish I could tell you what we’re going to do,” says Judy Ayers. “So far, we’ve just been procrastinating.”
Like the Ayerses, many couples find themselves surprised by significant differences of opinion when it comes to spending their golden years. He’s thinking hammock; she’s thinking hammering with Habitat for Humanity. She unveils her long-held, never-spoken dream of cruising around the world; he counters with his own hope to own a rustic fishing cabin on the shores of Lake Superior. She expects that they’ll finally have time to join that ballroom dancing club; he has been looking forward to quiet evenings at home with a stack of best-sellers.
Although there aren’t any statistics documenting the number of couples with mismatched retirement expectations, and no way of measuring how much anxiety these scenarios evoke, family therapists say that such tensions often crop up when couples come in for help with their relationships.
“It’s not the reason people come in for counseling, but it’s something we wind up dealing with a lot,” says Kenneth Potts, a family therapist and director of Midwest Resources, an Oak Lawn-based counseling center affiliated with Central Baptist Children’s Home. Several times in just the past couple of years, Potts says, he has encountered couples shaken by the revelation that they seem to be moving in dramatically different directions for the last 20 years of their lives.
In fact, one couple is teetering on the brink of divorce because the husband is determined to move to Phoenix while the wife clings to Chicago, where the couple’s children live. Their crisis was precipitated by their empty nest, Potts explains. The two-career couple rarely spend leisure time together and have no professional interests in common.
“The geographic thing was the catalyst,” Potts says. “When they got to talking about their dreams for the next 15 years, they realized that they hadn’t taken time to develop mutual goals and interests, and all of a sudden they’ve been blindsided.”
Counselors agree that the most common points of tension are where to settle for retirement; how to spend leisure time; and frustrations with the deteriorating health, or sex drive, of one spouse. That’s particularly exacerbated when the healthier spouse believes that the partner has been careless or even negligent with his or her health decisions, resulting in limited choices for both partners.
“One wife was angry that her husband had let his health fall apart because of work. She’d wanted to hike the Alps, and he couldn’t go up the stairs,” Potts says.
Couples who have let everyday busyness shield them for years, even decades, from talking about their emotional needs, hopes, dreams and fears find the prospect of discussing retirement options quite intimidating, according to Edith Harshbarger, family therapist with Kenneth Young Centers in Elk Grove Village.
“We don’t talk about, `What does it mean to lose my occupation? My identity? What are my fears about retirement, and dying, and loss of everything familiar to me?’ ” she asks. “Mismatched expectations stem from not communicating because we don’t know what our own needs are, and what the other person’s are. We need to understand (those) and what kind of solutions can meet both of them.”
Adds Barry Miller, a career and life planning counselor at Pace University in New York City, “Even with an empty nest, you’re still paying bills and dealing with college educations, and there’s an attitude of, `I’m not going to worry about that; I’m just going to make it through today.’ There’s not a sense of the future.”
There’s actually a fair amount of truth in the stereotype of the newly retired man driving his homemaker wife nuts by re-engineering her chores and alphabetizing the spices, adds Alan Roadburg, president of the Toronto-based Second Career Program, a traveling workshop that deals with retirement issues (www.secondcareer.com).
“If there is a problem, it comes down to the man, usually, not having other replacements for the satisfactions lost from work — friendships, problem solving, power, routine,” he says. “The husband seeks to satisfy those needs through the home and his wife, and in many cases that can’t be done.”
One couple Roadburg met through the Second Career program had never exchanged a word about how their post-retirement years would be spent, yet the wife took early retirement to be with her husband, assuming that they’d quickly find mutually satisfying activities.
Instead, on his first day of retirement, the husband started painting the house at the time when he used to leave for his morning commute. He had a morning coffee break, then lunch with his wife, then an afternoon coffee break. He stopped painting at 4 p.m. Each day from there on followed the same pattern. He painted the whole house, then the garage, then started renovating the garden.
“Eventually, he ran out of things to do and started watching TV all day. It drove her nuts and she went back to work,” Roadburg says.
Couples who have successfully worked out their differing expectations say they started doing so years before they actually retired.
Dick and Peggy Canning of North San Diego, Calif., sold their small publishing company in 1986 and retired the next year. They had started talking about their retirement plans in 1983, when Dick was recovering from a bout of kidney cancer.
“I realized that I had plans for the business, but no positive plans for myself,” he says. “Right then, I decided that retirement was off until I could think of something positive.”
The Cannings reviewed their mutual interests and realized that both had been saving ideas for novels and self-improvement books for years. They decided to structure their retirement time around occasional travel, twice-weekly golf, participating in an investment club they’d just joined and setting aside daily time to write, edit and market their work. Now Peggy Canning is winding up work on a major project, a book on nutrition, which she says she would never have completed if it hadn’t been for their plan.
As the Cannings found, establishing common ground may not be as hard as it seems, Miller says. “Your expectations may look very different, but there may be underlying common ground. After all, you’ve been living together for decades,” he says.
The key, say Miller and other family counselors, is to open up the topic well before retirement is imminent. If a couple’s life revolves around their children, and then their grandchildren, they may want to find a joint interest that’s just theirs. The empty-nest years are ideal for volunteering on an experimental basis with various charities to find one that can serve as an avocation in retirement. And taking up sports or getting in shape for walking vacations can provide some valuable interim fitness goals that will pay off in an active retirement. Throughout it all, talk about expectations, fears and hopes, urge counselors — and see how differences of opinion are resolved as you get to know each other better.
Jim and Arlene Robertson of Skokie are taking exactly that approach.
Arlene, 62, and Jim, 59, hadn’t talked much about retirement until they visited their eldest daughter in South Carolina several years ago.
“I liked it, and that kind of surprised Jim,” Arlene says. “I’d never thought about moving, and surely not in thayt direction. If we ever did move, it would have been north.”
That conversation opened both their eyes, and soon Arlene, a homemaker, realized that Jim, a food service manager, likely will want to continue with busy days, most likely with executive level volunteer responsibilities, while she wants to volunteer two days a week in a hospital, and then “just do what I want to do with the rest of my time.” Wherever they end up, Arlene says, they’ll be sure to accommodate both of their preferences.
