NewRetirement Retirement News Digest

She Wants a Career and He Wants Golf. Now What?

WITH his longtime New York City estate and business law practice winding down, Robert Rubinger was ready to retire five years ago, at age 76. But his wife, Nancy, who was then 66, was not.

Ms. Rubinger had started working at a nonprofit organization only 13 years earlier, after the couple’s two children were grown. “I was really having a very good time,” she said. “I find it extremely gratifying to help people.”

So Mr. Rubinger happily retired, while his wife happily kept working. But problems cropped up.

“There were some mornings when I would have liked to have slept in, and he’s fast asleep,” Ms. Rubinger recalled. She would ask herself, Why do I have to go out in the snow and rain?

Then, when she got home from work at 7:30 p.m., she would ask her husband whether he had made plans for dinner. No, he would reply, “I’m waiting for you.”

Ms. Rubinger said, laughing, “I would suggest that maybe it would be a good idea that he would do a little bit more” around the house, but finally she gave up. “I knew it would be a lost cause.”

Her husband’s version: Housework, he said, “was never part of my life. She would have to guide me, but we never had any real deep discussions as to what my role would be.”

Scenes like this are becoming more common as the first mass generation of career women reaches the traditional retirement ages of 60 to 65. Experts on aging say that the phenomenon began about five years ago and will continue to expand as more women enter their 60s. These are the wives who swept into the work force in the late 1970s and early ’80s, just as the women’s movement was pushing open career doors. Many had stayed home taking care of the house and family, and often, like Ms. Rubinger, put off entering the work force until their children were in school, in college or even grown.

“In the past, other generations for the most part only had to deal with one retirement,” said Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota. But nowadays, when the husband is ready to relax after four decades of work, the wife might have barely begun her working life. “Wives often feel, I finally got rid of the kids, I’m finally moving up in the job, and I don’t want to retire,” Dr. Moen said. “There’s just a mismatch between the two.”

Of course, even a traditional retirement, like any life-cycle transition, can cause strains in a marriage, so the timing mismatch just adds one more hitch. There may be arguments over washing the dishes, vacations and moving. Roles that have been set in stone for decades are upturned. “When you’re retired at different times, there are very different agendas,” said Maryanne Vandervelde, author of the book “Retirement for Two” and a founder of the Institute for Couples in Retirement in Seattle.

The cases usually involve a retired husband and a wife who is still working, like the Rubingers, rather than the other way around. The feminist movement and the fact that many women are entering the working world late in life make up only part of the picture. Wives in this generation also tend to be younger than their spouses and thus further from retirement age. Moreover, experts like Dr. Moen say that men are more likely to have the kind of work that pushes them to retire, because of physically demanding labor that they can no longer do or generous pensions that allow them the luxury of quitting.

Housework is probably the No. 1 cause of friction. When both spouses were working, the woman might have done most of the cooking and cleaning. Now, Dr. Moen said, “He’s home all day, and the wives feel he should do more.”