How Retirements Have Changed My Friendships

Retirement can change friendships. Friends who retire enter a chapter of their lives that diverges from mine. They travel, they grandparent much more than was common in my parents’ generation, they throw themselves into fitness programs and develop hip problems and have hip surgery, they’re busy renovating their homes, and they want to discuss the many movies they’re viewing. They’re happy to flaunt the variety of cultural events they have time to attend, while those who become more involved in community and political life talk at length about these activities. At the same time, many of my retired friends become less and less curious about my work life, and I feel more and more constrained talking about it. Various emotions surface: will talking about my work arouse their envy, their sense of my stupidity for still working, their unease with the difference in our lives? The balance of conversation is tilted toward my inquiry into their retirement activities. They happily share their travels with me, but they, perhaps, also are worried about stressing their leisure pleasures too much, lest I feel left out, even though my curiosity is sincere. These friendships remain strong based more on past experiences together than on our present lives.

I do admit to a certain unspoken criticism that I have about my retired feminist friends entering a grandmother form of “the feminine mystique.” Have they also retired from feminism? They are available to baby-sit on call; they dote on their grandchildren as much as any 1950s mom did on her children, reveling in their every new skill; they appear to be living the alternate non-career parenting life that

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represents a part of their psyche that, perhaps, they longed for much of their adult life.

Fortunately, I have a number of non-retired friends, but I miss the special closeness formerly enjoyed with the retired friends. Someday I will retire, and I plan to never be less interested than I currently am in the work lives of the non-retired.

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