Most Couples Soon Adjust to Retirement, Study Says

Retirement won’t destroy a good marriage nor will it salvage a bad one, say two researchers who interviewed more than 200 couples to determine the effect of retirement on marriage.

As time goes by, Mature Outlook magazine reports, more couples will be leaving their jobs.

“Retirement neither ruins nor resurrects marriage,” said Barbara Vinick. An assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health and a research sociologist at the Veterans Administration in Boston, Vinick conducted the three-year study with David Ekerdt, associate director of the University of Kansas Center on Aging.

The researchers interviewed two groups of married couples. In one group, the men were in their first year of retirement. In the other, the men were still working and were on the average two years younger.

“We found that a lot of people approaching retirement wonder how they’ll get along after retirement and whether they’ll get in each other’s hair,” Vinick said. “There’s some natural apprehension.”

But most couples make the adjustment fairly easily, the study suggests. While many of the retired husbands acknowledged that they initially missed the camaraderie of their workplaces, most said they adjusted within a couple of months and were enjoying the opportunity to do projects they had been saving for years.

Although many of the wives had worried about having their husbands underfoot, they said they enjoyed spending more time with the men in a relaxed atmosphere.

Everyone doesn’t react the same way to retirement, Vinick and Ekerdt said. But they found several common reactions to life style changes that retirement can bring. For example, many women in the study felt a loss of privacy in the first months after the husband retired. And husbands gained a new understanding of their wive’s daily routine.

Overall, the positive aspects of retirement outweighed the negative ones, the study found. About 60% of the retired couples said their quality of life improved upon retirement.

“Before retirement, one spouse or the other was often worried about some aspect of the change,” Vinick said. “After retirement, most couples said they got along better than they expected.”