Retirement’s Impact on Marriage Limited

Many people may dread or delay retiring because they fear ruining their marriage, but a recent study found that the husband’s retirement does not create serious marital problems for most couples.

In the three-year study of 92 couples, a majority--60%--said the husband’s retirement within the past year had meant a “somewhat better” or “much better” better quality of life.

Only 10% of the couples reported their relationships had deteriorated since the retirement, and in most cases, that deterioration could be traced to other factors, such as an illness.

The rest of the couples said retirement had not changed their marriage, said Barbara Vinick, an assistant professor of social and behavioral medicine at Boston University School of Public Health. Vinick conducted the study with David Ekerdt of the University of Kansas Medical Center.

“I think there is a popular notion that retirement is going to have sometimes dire consequences for marriage. There’s the old stereotype of the husband’s being underfoot and the wife pulling her hair out because of the husband’s getting in the way,” said Vinick, who called the study the most comprehensive ever done on the subject.

“I think the finding that would be the most important to get out to people is that retirement is not a crisis in the lives of people. Life is pretty much a continuation after retirement, as it is before retirement,” said Vinick, also a sociologist at the Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic in Boston.

In fact, the research indicated that the best way to predict whether retirement will adversely affect a marriage is to look at the marriage before retirement. If it is good, then it should be good afterward and vice versa, she said.

“Our feeling is if a marriage is troubled before retirement it probably will be after retirement. The same issues will be there. Similarly, if a marriage has been meeting the needs of the partners, it probably will after retirement,” she said.

The average age of the men in the study was 62; the women averaged 60. The couples had been married for between 15 and 46 years.

The researchers also compared the 92 couples in the study with 125 couples of about the same age in which the husband had not retired, and found no significant difference in how the the two groups rated their marriages, she said.

Vinick noted that retirement did have some short-term negative effects on both the husband and the wife. She stressed, however, that in most cases the negative effects only lasted several weeks or months and then the couple adjusted.

Many of the women in the study reported feelings of “impingement,” that their husbands’ presence in the house infringed on their privacy and disrupted their routines.

“What had previously been a private household realm was now open to scrutiny,” the researchers wrote in a report to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Generations. “Husbands could overhear telephone conversations. They could monitor wives’ daily routines. They were just there.”

Many of the husbands in the study went through a period the researchers dubbed “the second look,” in which they often were “dismayed at their wives’ humdrum routines” and “what they considered the inordinate amount of time spent on housework.”

But both husbands and wives eventually tended to find they appreciated the extra time retirement gave them to spend together, the researchers said.

“In conclusion, none of the response patterns we have described supports the idea of retirement as a crisis in the lives of married couples.