Puzzling Out Retirement Together: 10 Must-Have Conversations
June 20, 2011
Conversations couples face as they transition to the second half of life — money, roles, sex, and death among them — can be knotty, complex, and fraught with unsettling conflict. Differing goals, values and dreams that daily life obscured, press for answers.
Sometimes threateningly.
As in those knee-buckling words, “Honey, we need to talk.”
Authors Dorian Mintzer (left) and Roberta Taylor
To help, psychotherapists and life coaches Dorian Mintzer and Roberta Taylor have written The Couple’s Retirement Puzzle: 10 Must-Have Conversation for Transitioning to the Second Half of Life ($17.95, Lincoln Street Press), a warm, practical, no-nonsense, and user-friendly guide to navigating and defusing potentially hazardous dialogues.
“What you are retiring to is more important than what you are retiring from,” they write. But figuring out how two people, confronted by a cascade of questions, can communicate effectively and puzzle out a map and route to a mutual destination — or shared vision — without falling prey to banked-up fears, secrets, differences and resentments is tricky stuff.
Do we want to retire? Can we afford to retire? How will we spend our time? What’s important? Do we have to spend all our time together? What if he wants to move to Key West and she wants to stay near the grandchildren in Pittsburgh? What if health concerns plague one and not the other? And what if there’s not enough money to retire? What if the long-awaited for chance for intimacy is around the corner, but the ways of it remain as elusive as ever?
The authors put to work experience and insights gathered from extensive careers treating individuals and couples struggling to talk together about difficult things. And in addressing the issue of transitioning to retirement, they frame taboo topics and coach the reader on how to have productive conversations.
Reassuringly, they share their own real-life experiences with challenging issues with their own spouses as well.
Mintzer, a Ph.D. psychologist who became a first-time mother at fifty, is still ramping up her career as her older physician-husband curtails his professional life. Taylor, a couples coach who found true love with her first sweetheart after two failed marriages, faces the difficult balancing act less than a decade after her dream marriage began. The strategy works. The reader sees that no one is exempt from struggle.
But along with the challenges of the second half of life, comes the great opportunity to reassess outdated roles, to let go of what no longer works, and to open new possibilities. “It takes courage, commitment, and compromise,” the authors write. But when couples think ahead, communicate, and plan together, good things happen.
Mintzer (also the founder of Boomers and Beyond, a national special interest group of interdisciplinary professionals) and Taylor don’t offer revolutionary advice.
Rather, they give readers a solid, accessible, positive template. They remind, too, that the nature of retirement is changing before our eyes. Instead of a future of withdrawal and decline, as dominated expectations in the past, possibilities for the second half of life are now as varied as the 78 million baby boomers entering it. That is particularly true for the many who can expect to live two to three decades beyond the “traditional” age of retirement.
As a result, couples that avoid the difficult conversations, do so at their own peril.
In the transition to retirement or new careers and undertakings in later life, partners may have to redefine roles that have become their identities. To understand how and why and to receive help and support, the conversation starters and aids this book offers may help. Mintzer and Taylor also warn couples to watch out for some myths about retirement, such as ‘everything will be fine.’ It may not be.
But the authors promise something better than myth for couples when acceptance, the willingness to “agree to disagree” and true communication occur.
The chance, that is, to see unexpected possibilities, new perspectives, individual growth, a more intimate relationship, and a mutually-created future which both partners enter with enthusiasm and shared, informed expectation.
As helpful as this companionable book will be to those facing the transition to retirement or to new, unexpected lives in the second half of life, it’s also a worthy wedding gift to newlyweds just starting out. The timetable may not be precisely the same, but most of the issues aren’t radically different and the need to communicate effectively and listen well are just as critical.