These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement.
“The relationship can have an identity crisis,” says Allison Howe, a therapist who works primarily with couples in New York. Howe says retirement is a time when the issues that couples have been avoiding — aided by the distractions of work or child rearing or both — come roaring to the forefront. “There are disagreements now about how to envision this new stage of life,” she says. “The retirement phase amplifies everything, actually — the absence of true collaboration, whether they were really friends, whether they had a shared narrative. All of these things get heightened now because we have less time.”