The Change Mariner

He's Retired, She's Working, They're Not Happy

New York Times:

Such tensions have altered the marital dynamic of retirement, as millions of women continue working after their husbands retire. The challenges represent "a stage of the marriage relationship that's occurring for the first time in history," said Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.

And there is little in these couples' pasts, or in the retirement experiences of previous generations, to prepare them for the stresses they face.

Since 1935, when the passage of the Social Security Act created retirement as we know it, the issue of when to retire has largely been a male one. When male breadwinners reached a certain age or seniority they left work and tapped their pensions, and they and their wives began a new chapter in their lives.
But as more women have pursued rewarding careers, retirement has grown more complicated. Many working women are younger than their husbands; many deferred their careers to raise children or care for parents. When their husbands have completed their career arcs, or been pushed into early retirement, these women are often still on the way up or accruing seniority for a pension or retirement package. Some, too young for Medicare, need to work for the health insurance.

"This is the first generation that's ever had to deal with this, because in the past it was one retirement per family, and that was the husband's," said Ms. Moen, one of the few researchers to study gender and retirement. "Even if women worked, they didn't work too much."

As the 41 million women of the baby boom head toward retirement age, the new era of retirement increasingly includes two careers, diverging ambitions and very different ideas about what to do with the decades to follow.