Living in harmony in the retirement years: Dimensions of change in the marital relationship and implications for preretirement education.

Abstract

This research project investigated the effects of retirement upon the marital relationship and the experience of life at home for retired couples. Participants included 112 men and women, consisting of 56 couples in which the husb and had retired from a full-time occupation within the previous six to twenty months. The sample was drawn from male retirees of five large organizations in Michigan and California. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires and in-depth personal interviews. Results of this study suggest that husb and s did not substantially increase their participation in domestic tasks following their retirement. Contrary to expectations, household socio-economic status did not make a difference in patterns of task-sharing in the post-retirement home. A majority of both husb and s and wives reported participating in more activities as a couple in retirement, with women expressing negative reactions to shared activities at rates consistently higher than men. Distinct gender differences were also discovered in relation to changes in personal freedom, the quality of personal time, requirements for personal space and privacy, and level of activity, with women overwhelmingly describing decreased freedom, disruption of personal routines, a shrinking of both physical and social space, and activity constriction relative to men. Men were more likely than women to report that retirement had posed no real problems for them, but when problems were identified, husb and s and wives tended to see their problems as rooted in different sources. Indeed, the post-retirement experiences of men and women were often very different, with wives tending to emphasize negative changes in their lives and men tending to offer more positive or neutral appraisals of change, suggesting that men and women may inhabit different spatial and psychological cultures within the retirement household. Possible explanations for these divergent patterns include differences in the territorial domains occupied by many men and women of this cohort prior to retirement (e.g., the work-place vs. the household/family sphere), socialization practices encouraging traditional sex-role divisions with respect to household labor which were prevalent at the time of this cohort's education, and cultural norms dictating that men fulfill a primary role as "provider," in contrast to norms encouraging women's greater attentiveness to family life and interpersonal dynamics within the home.