Retirement for Two

1 The Issues My Story When I was thirty-six, I moved across the country because my husband was offered a great new job. I eventually landed on my feet, but I couldn't find any books about what was happening to me-my career, my friendships, my relationship with my child, my house, my life-while I was helping my husband up the corporate ladder. So I did a survey of the Fortune 500 CEOs and their wives, and I wrote The Changing Life of the Corporate Wife. My research showed, for example, that the quality valued most in a corporate wife was her sense of humor. Certainly, humor is a wonderful quality in any human being, but I doubt that this would be first on the list for a CEO. I found that both men and women were hungry for better ways to manage their lives-at a time when our culture was just starting to examine the rigid, traditional expectations that businesses placed on executives and their partners. The questions continue to this day for all kinds of leaders and their partners, and I believe that my book played a small part in the dialogue. That book sold well, and many couples told me how much they were helped by it. Now I'm sixty-two, and my husband has been retired for five years. We have faced some challenges that seem to be typical of people our age, and we frequently find ourselves in discussions with like-minded friends. At this point, we have sorted through most of our angst about retirement, but our forty-year marriage is still a work in progress. This Book at This Time I decided several years ago to gather information about this stage of life because the subject has interested me for a long time-in my clinical practice with couples and families as well as in my observations of friends and family members. This book is, therefore, based on: * Stories I've jotted down over many years from family and friends as well as from therapy clients * Issues that came up over the last twenty years in corporate human resources training sessions about people facing retirement * Interviews conducted, by phone or in person, over the last five years with a network of acquaintances around the world * Perusal of the professional and popular literature This is not a book about money or finances. There are hundreds of those to be found in bookstores and libraries. This aspect of retirement should never be minimized because a secure retirement clearly is built on a sufficient financial base-however that is defined by both partners. But the people I've queried say that most of their financial planning took place years back. Decisions they made a long time ago have determined their financial status now. They've come to terms with what they have and don't have in monetary resources. Money, per se, is rarely what current or about-to-be retirees want to talk about-the emotional implications of money, yes; the decisions that couples must make around money, yes; apportioning assets in a second marriage, yes; but whether one has enough money or how to get more, almost never. Rather, it's the emotional turmoil and the relationship stuff that hits them unexpectedly when they anticipate retirement or when they actually retire. What do couples in their fifties, sixties, and seventies want to talk about? Relationship issues-psychological and emotional struggles that are causing conflict. Single retirees often mention loneliness, but coupled retirees say things like "I never imagined it would be so hard to be together 24/7" or "I am with this person for better or worse, but not for lunch!" Freud said that work and love are the two major ingredients of life, and it seems logical that the loss of one will have major effects on the other. Retirees whose identity was found largely through work have a lot of soul-searching to do as they look for identity elsewhere. And people whose close relationships have been neglectVandervelde, Maryanne is the author of 'Retirement for Two', published 2004 under ISBN 9780553803822 and ISBN 0553803824.