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Change and Choices: The Importance of Communication
 Retirement will raise a host of issues for you and your spouse. Since one of you will have more time, should the daily chores be allocated differently? Can the interests you shared in your free time be expanded to fill three or four times as many hours together? How will your marriage respond to the changing roles in your lives as the importance of being a homemaker, breadwinner, a father or mother is altered? And what if one of you is ready to retire and the other wants to keep working?
Some of the marital stresses created by retirement can be dealt with in advance, while others will come up unexpectedly. By establishing a sense/spirit of cooperation early on you can go a long way toward making all the adjustments easier.
Retirement represents a time of change. Change means choices, and choices require decisions. Some decisions will be joint decisions that affect both of you equally--like: where should we live? Other decisions will be individual decisions but they will affect your spouse--like: should I take a particular part-time job? In all cases, talking through the options, batting around the pros and the cons, negotiating compromises will be critical. In other words, you and your spouse will have to communicate--openly and calmly.
Good communication has several benefits. First, it leads to better decisions. It's one thing to debate a decision in your own head, it's quite a different thing to discuss it with other people. Discussion often leads to clarity. Why else do corporations have boards of directors, why do executives have staffs? Staff work leads to better decisions. Second, if you and your spouse discuss decisions, you will both take ownership of the decision. If one of you had to make a compromise as part of the decision, you will feel less slighted. And if the decision does not work out, there will less back-biting.
One common problem couples face in planning for retirement is that retirement is a taboo subject. People often fear retirement, and with it the idea of growing old. People who dread the appearance of a wrinkle, and feel obliged to apologize for or lie about their age will not welcome a discussion about retirement. So retirement often becomes an off-limits topic, a mutually avoided danger zone.
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