Driving each other nuts in retirement

Shortly after I retired last October, my husband and I began to drive each other nuts. Readers enjoyed my funny posts about fighting over fish sauce and oatmeal and trying to kill him with bacon. Oh, and Fitbit couples therapy, when I earned the Zip It badge for keeping my mouth shut. The stories were fun to write and made Dale laugh as well.

I haven’t written about our relationship lately – mostly because it has been great! For sure, we are soul mates, but we have our differences, and it seems we found our retirement balance. We relish the warm and wonderful moments just hanging out enjoying each other and this chilled life we both love. It’s like we’ve rediscovered our younger, sillier selves. The people we were before life knocked us around.

I’m sure I will be writing about more marital mayhem, but while the going is good, I thought I’d share some perspectives that might help you avoid the same mistakes.

Moving

In retrospect, I think moving right after I retired compounded the issues. The closest we ever came to breaking up during our 40-year marriage was during one of our 20-something moves. Moving is stressful all by itself, and when you add that to the unknowns and fears of being newly retired, crankiness kicks in.

We would still move, as we were able to reduce our living expenses considerably, but I’d recommend either waiting a few months until retirement feels more comfortable or talking through these unique challenges in advance.

Habits & Behaviors

When you’re both working, you miss a lot of the little things people do when they are by themselves. Or you ignore them because you have more important things to worry about. Without the distraction of a job, you can put all your focus into identifying and correcting your partner’s flaws! Don’t. Just don’t.

You are with this person for a reason, so either accept them as they are or have a serious discussion on what needs to change. Dale is the silent type, while I like to talk things through until I am speechless and comatose on the couch. But we both agreed these picky fights had to end. To get there, he started to talk more, and I started to listen better, and now if we start to go down that path, one of us will say, no, we don’t do that anymore. It’s not worth arguing about. And we let it go!

We were driving to the Smart & Final the other day, a store that is in an area of town we don’t go to much. He was about to make a left turn into the parking lot, and I said, oh, isn’t this where we had the big fight about how to make left turns?

Dale said, yes, it is. And we both laughed.

Togetherness

We love to be with each other, but we also like our alone time. And suddenly, neither one of us had it. I started playing more golf. He doesn’t play, so that’s my thing. People always ask me what he does with his time, and usually I say, oh, I don’t know.

Dale has the gift of being pretty happy with not much going on. He reads, plays computer games and works around the house or yard, but his big hobby is dinner! Shopping for it, preparing for it, cooking it. I like to cook as well, and I thought, oh, great, we’ll be doing this together! But it took me awhile to realize the joy of cooking is mostly a solitary experience for him. Now I let him run the kitchen, and if I have the urge, I let him know I want to do dinner on a certain day.

I attribute our success to deep and open communications, but I asked Dale what he thought the biggest difference was and he said you stopped criticizing my driving. I probably could have skipped the soul-searching all together.

So, there you have it. To keep your retirement relationship strong, sometimes you have to talk, and sometimes you have to Zip It!