Marital or relationship conflict is more likely to develop when one partner works fulltime and the other retires [2-5]. Most specifically, there’s some evidence that both husbands and wives tend to be more dissatisfied when the husband retires while the wife continues to work [3, 6]. For men, this may or may not be due to their dissatisfaction around losing their traditional role as the household “bread-winner,” and may also be because men can tend to feel more socially isolated without the social interactions they were used to at work—especially if their female partner was the primary social organizer in the relationship [4, 5]. These findings, paired with couples’ preference for synchronized retirements [6-10] suggest that significantly synchronized retirements can reduce the risk for relationship strife.
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