When his retirement feels like her upheaval

It sounds like a dream — after years of frenetic, overly-busy schedules, a couple finally gets to spend time together, without the pressure of work commitments. But for too many couples, those golden retirement years bring new frictions and tensions, as husbands struggle to find their place in a new and unfamiliar role, and wives struggle to respect and communicate with men they no longer recognize

“All of my friends are petrified of their husbands retiring,” Raizel, a 70-year-old teacher and mother of five, confides to me. “They’ve never made their husbands lunch in their lives, and they don’t want to start now. My husband’s seventy-three, but he’s not retiring, Baruch Hashem. I’m not letting him”

The little secret that everyone wants to talk about (but no one wants to put their name to) is that while women during the newlywed and childrearing years crave quality time with their husbands and dream of those rare date nights and vacations, decades down the line, when their husbands retire from work, the same women find themselves afraid of having their husbands home and underfoot 24-7.

“My husband has really been at a loss since retirement,” says Dina, a 67-year-old Bais Yaakov teacher. “He’s been a lawyer for over forty years, and it wasn’t his choice to retire. One day at work they came over to him and said, ‘What kind of cake do you want at your retirement party in the spring?’ and that’s how they let him know they were letting him go. His work was a huge part of his identity, and ever since his retirement he’s been floundering.”

Rivka, a frum therapist and writer, believes the problem comes down to gender differences; she says that there are innate differences between men and women that make it acceptable for a woman to be unemployed as long as she’s taking care of the home, but it’s not acceptable for a man. These ideas are so controversial in secular society that Rivka didn’t want her real name attached to them.

“I think this is about the male/female dynamic — the mashpia/mekabel model,” Rivka emailed me. “A man is in his best energy as a giver, when he is mashpia — when he overflows, which is difficult for him to do when he is not in his domain. The woman is much more the expert in her own home and will excel in the doing mode, which makes the dynamic lopsided.”

There’s also a difference in how men and women do external relationships, she points out. Women tend to create deep and meaningful relationships outside their nuclear families. The average man usually turns to his wife for emotional support, and does not cultivate many deeply emotional relationships outside his immediate family. That system can work fairly well as long as the man has a full schedule outside the home, but once he retires, he might suddenly find himself needy and lonely.

“So while the wife has created a whole other life and support system for herself,” Rivka explains, “her husband may be needing her more and more, and he feels lost and ungrounded.”

That’s certainly been the case for Dina and her husband, Menashe. “I worked as a teacher, and raised my five kids, but although I stopped teaching fifteen years ago, I never think of myself as retired,” Dina tells me. “I have a very active life. I volunteer for Bikur Cholim, I’m part of a women’s learning group, I babysit the grandkids. I wish Menashe would find something like that to keep himself busy. He should go learn more now that he has the free time. Or find some meaningful volunteer work.

“Instead, he’s like a bored kid on summer vacation. He asked me if I could wake up earlier to have breakfast with him. He’s disappointed when I tell him I’m going out. He wants to go grocery shopping with me. I say, ‘Menashe, I’ve been going grocery shopping myself for sixty years. I don’t need you to come with me.’”

Penina had a similar experience. When her husband, Yanky, retired from his CPA job at a big Manhattan firm, he had a tentative plan for how to fill his day. But it didn’t work out exactly as promised. “He has a morning seder with his chavrusa, and he’s serious about it. But it doesn’t start until nine thirty, and it’s in a shul three blocks away,” Chaya says. “No commute, no rush to get out, none of the sense of purpose and urgency that marked our mornings for decades.

“As for the afternoons... Yanky tried the gym for a few weeks, but it wasn’t the ‘right fit,’ he said. A nap seemed like a better fit. A nap? My husband? When did he turn into an old man? He had always been so busy, trying to fit so many obligations into his limited hours. If he napped every afternoon, how would he even fall asleep at night? I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”