From Create a New System
At home together all day, Hollie and Janell Atkinson discovered something that made them mad and then made them laugh. "After we had both retired, Hollie tried to teach me to load the dishwasher -- and that did not go over well with me," Janell recalls. "He was suddenly in the kitchen wanting to help and wanting to take control."Over the next five years of their retirement, the Atkinsons worked out a new system for doing chores and preparing meals: Hollie makes breakfast. "I make lots of different kinds of eggs: scrambled, fried, omelets, breakfast tacos," he says. "And if I'm really pressed hard and the weather's cold, I'll make oatmeal. Janell enjoys that." They've split kitchen cleanup, laundry, and housecleaning too. "We had to learn what chores were ours individually and where there was room for give and take," Janell says. Adds Hollie, "I have a little bit of compulsiveness to my personality. I have certain ways to do things; sometimes they don't match with the way Janell does things. That's all part of the give and take."
Clay and Jane Turner discovered they needed to rebalance their schedules. How much time would they spend together all day? "For couples in retirement, the issues of solitude and connection are critical," Clay says. "Fortunately, Jane and I love similar things. She gets as much thrill out of seeing the first wildflower of spring as I do. We also have individual private things we enjoy apart from one another. That's part of our emotional framework: the rhythm of solitude and connection."
That adjustment wasn't easy. "At first, I felt I was giving up my time to myself," Jane says. "We had to learn how to talk about it and keep a sense of humor. Now I can simply say, 'I'd like to go do something by myself for a few hours.' We've learned not to hurt each other's feelings."
Just as newly married couples must carve out agreements about how much time they'll spend together, how they'll divide the space in their home, and how they'll split up the chores, Completion stage couples face the same questions all over again. This time, the important question is: Will we do what we've always done, or is it time for something new? Here's how long-married partners, and marriage researchers, suggest you approach the question.
Divide Time Evenly
Shuffle the housework. Redividing chores inside and outside the home can be crucial to your happiness because it maintains a sense of fairness -- and keeps you from stepping all over each other's toes, says California psychologist Betty Polston, Ph.D., author of Loving Midlife Marriage. Both are important. Studies show that unless couples make a conscious effort to reshuffle housework, they stick to the preretirement status quo. The result: In most cases, women spend significantly more time on the housework, while their spouses get more time to relax. Not a recipe for happiness. In a study of retirement-age couples, Dr. Polston found that husbands helped more after retirement in 60 percent of happily married pairs. "The importance of this can't be overstated," she says. "Splitting responsibilities more evenly contributes to well-being and fulfillment." It also prepares both spouses for a time when they may need to take on all the chores, solo. Dividing the work also lets the two of you sidestep power struggles brought on when one spouse seems to "invade" the other's traditional domain.How to get started in your marriage: Someone has to initiate the conversation about chores, says Dr. Polston, and often it's the wife. "Women often not only run the house, they also do the emotional probing in the relationship. So a wife may have to sit down with her husband and talk about dividing the work. Realize that people don't change tremendously, but just little shifts in behavior, in cooperation, can be wonderful. Partners should realize that even these little shifts set the tone for the relationship in this new stage -- how you handle yourself in renegotiating who does what and how you take on new roles." For men and women who've left the working world, having new roles at home can be welcome. You feel useful and needed."
Survey your territory. Your home or apartment is now your life's main stage. Do you have a fair share of the space? Walk through your home together, noting which rooms are truly common areas and which are used mostly by just one of you. Do you both have areas for yourselves? What about domains where you or your partner essentially rules -- such as the kitchen, garage, laundry room, office, gardens, and yard. Are you both happy with this arrangement, or would you like more access and more responsibility in areas where you're now a guest or simply a helper?
Balance solitude and connection. Some couples spend every waking minute together. Others fill their hours with personal hobbies, outside interests, and even part-time jobs just to keep their distance from each other. "There should be private time and couple time," Dr. Stephen Treat, D.Min., director and CEO of the Philadelphia-based Council for Relationships and an instructor in psychiatry and human behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia suggests. "You don't want your later years to turn into a process where two people merge. If you hold too tightly to your partner, it's going to cause resentment and anger. If you're completely separate, you'll both be lonely and disconnected. You need balance. So you have to talk about how you'll achieve that."
The right balance? It's different for every couple. "Having a conversation about time can be difficult, but it's important for both partners to process those feelings out loud," Dr. Treat says. "You should not be accusatory or judgmental -- ask the difficult questions, but do it in a loving way. You could say something like, 'How are we going to be as individuals, and how are we going to be as a couple?'"
Barbara and Chris Christensen have achieved the balance that works for them. In addition to daily rituals that keep them close -- including about 10 minutes for a daily check-in and about a half hour of relaxation time -- they each maintain separate interests and friendships.
"We have found that we need time apart," Barbara says. "I have a group of women friends that I have known for the last 30 years. We have dinner out once a month. We women also have slumber parties and weekend or weeklong vacations as a group at a beach or somewhere. Chris, a former fighter pilot, has many aviation-oriented groups and friends and also a penny-ante poker-playing group of our friends. I may be with him during the poker night, but I don't play, and the wives usually watch a 'chick flick' DVD or something while the poker group has an evening of fun. We have found it important to have separate time as well as together time."