It’s the rare person who wants to be alone. For most of us, inner psychological happiness is enhanced when we’re socially connected with others. And it’s a two-way street. Social connection with others is one of the surest paths to our own psychological happiness.
That’s why it’s amazing to realize that most of our social connections are based on convenience! How can something so important to our happiness be seemingly left to chance? Certainly, we maintain some very close relationships even when they’re decidedly inconvenient. But much of our interaction with others is based on where we happen to work or live.
In the First, Second, and Fourth Ages, convenience may well rule the day. However, the Third Age is the greatest opportunity we’ll ever have to build social connections and relationships, consciously. A deeper, more mature understanding of ourselves means that we seek activities in life that align with our interests, strengths, and values. In consciously seeking out those activities, we’re more likely to connect with others who are also doing the same thing. That’s a different dynamic than mere convenience.
Like many people, you may not realize that when you retire, most of your social connections and friendships from work will wither and die. You can end up socially isolated. Or you can develop new connections, based on new conveniences. Even better, you can choose to make your Third Age the happiest time of your life because of the conscious connections that you create in that stage of life.
A note about terminology: If you don’t spend much time reading or thinking about “relationships,” feel free to substitute any of the following:
• Contacts
• Connections
• Friends and family
• Kith and kin
• People you know
• Social circle
During the First Age of life, the world of education was often an awkward place. Acceptance by our peers was the most important thing in the world to us, and yet we were just beginning to figure ourselves out. We felt socially insecure. Some of us were in the popular crowd (probably you) and some in the geeky crowd (that was me), but we all had relationships with other students. That’s because, day in and day out, we were thrown together into similar circumstances and activities. It was natural to get to know other people because we interacted with them every day. Something called the Automatic Relationship Generator went to work on our behalf, and it created a social network for us.
Then we changed to another school or left the world of education altogether, and what happened? How many of those school relationships kept going, and how many withered and died? Dig out your school yearbooks and leaf through them. How many of the friends who wrote those long, heartfelt notes are you still in touch with? A few of those relationships may have survived, or even grown and developed. But chances are, most of them are only a distant memory. (Perhaps they weren’t dead, but merely dormant—look at Facebook!)
From the First Age, we moved on to the Second Age, and the world of work. Luckily, there was another Automatic Relationship Generator whirring away in that world, too. We were thrown into frequent contact with another group of people, again sharing similar circumstances and activities. The Automatic Relationship Generator took over and built another social network for us.
In the Second Age, we had other responsibilities, outside of work, that operated in a similar way. Children (if we had them) tend to pull us into environments with their own Automatic Relationship Generators: the neighborhood, sports teams, school events, a religious community, and so on. These generators kept creating social networks for us. How convenient.
Often, as we progress through the Second Age, we move around. New jobs, new neighborhoods, new towns, new states. Kids get older, change schools, find new interests; they drop old friends (and their parents, who may be our friends) and take up with new ones. How many of those relationships kept going? How many withered and died? Again, we’re fortunate (or dedicated and loyal) if more than a few of those friendships stay active. Can you see a pattern emerging here?
When you think about retirement, you may not give much thought to your social connections. After all, you’ve made life transitions before. And even though you’ve left friends behind before, you’ve always made new ones, haven’t you? We don’t stop to realize that school, work, parenting, and other responsibilities have been our Automatic Relationship Generators. But when we enter a life stage that doesn’t have those responsibilities—and those natural social connections—what will happen then?
You have, of course, been building deep, long-term relationships with friends and family members that will continue with you into your next stage of life. And, depending on how your life is structured, you may have some of those shared similar circumstances and daily activities that will get the Automatic Relationship Generator up and running again. Or you may not. (For some retirees, television or the Internet becomes an Automatic Relationship Generator. They build relationships with people who aren’t real or who aren’t real enough to have true relationships with.) Because most of us consider our personal relationships to be the most rewarding part of our lives, it’s worth a little planning to have plenty of good ones in it, wouldn’t you say?
To design a new retirement that features social engagement instead of disengagement, we need to look at the structure of relationships, not so much from an emotional perspective as from a social science perspective. (Emotions are in there, though, whether we acknowledge them or not!) First of all, the potential variety of relationships is endless. It could take lifetimes to truly experience them all: parent, child, sibling, friend, lover, confidante, mentor, cheerleader, partner, caregiver—you could go on and on. You could compile another list of less personal, more instrumental relationships, too: colleague, teammate, coworker, client, vendor, supervisor, collaborator, neighbor, and so on. You could even compile a list of contentious relationships that are mostly based on friction, but let’s focus instead on supportive ones.
Robert Putnam, a sociologist at Harvard, has an idea about what all strong and healthy relationships share. Even though they’re endlessly different, they’re all the same in one basic respect: They’re based on trust and reciprocity. Those two factors, together, are the basis for the kinds of relationships that most of us want to create in the Third Age.
The first factor, trust, is a familiar concept. It’s almost impossible to have a positive relationship with someone you don’t trust. The word trust is frequently used in an adjective form to describe a relationship; that is, a trusted friend, a trusted source, a trusted teacher or counselor. You want relationships with people you feel are trustworthy. But you have different levels of trust for different relationships. You may trust the paperboy to have your paper on the doorstep at 7:00 A.M.; you may also trust your adult child to make medical decisions for you if you’re in a coma and on life support. Those are two very different levels of trust. Also, trust can have different qualities, even at the same level. Trusting your lover with your heart and trusting your cardiac surgeon with your heart are both very high levels of trust. But each has a different quality. What about the second factor, reciprocity? That’s not as familiar a word. But we all know what it means when it comes to relationships. If you do something for someone and they don’t reciprocate, you may not do something for them again. You don’t build a relationship, in that case. Or perhaps you’ve had a relationship that was reciprocal and then one of you stopped reciprocating and the relationship changed. Reciprocation could be emotional support, money, information, food, communication, back rubs, understanding, or whatever. (Remember the reciprocal exchange within family members in retirement economics?) And it doesn’t have to be like for like; it can be mix and match. The bottom line is this: You know it when you’re getting it, and you know it when you ain’t getting it. That’s reciprocity.
There’s another important thing to know about relationships, and it relates even more particularly to Third Age planning. Putnam also suggests that there are two broad types: bonding relationships and bridging relationships. This is a bit of a simplification, because relationships can exist somewhere along a continuum between them rather than at just one end or the other. But it’s a good way to start thinking about your relationships for the next stage of life (and right now, too).
Bonding relationships are the ones you have with people who are like you. You can make anything you want of “people who are like you.” You’re the only judge of which people in your social network are “like you.” However you identify this, you feel that these people are more like you, and you bond with them. Bonding means that they are a source of support for you. (There are lots of different kinds of support: emotional, financial, logistical, informational—think of all the kinds you’ve given and received.) These people also provide what is sometimes called your strong ties.
What about the people in your social network who are not like you? Those are the people with whom you’re more likely to have a bridging relationship—that is, you are, in effect, crossing over your differences to have the relationship. You rely on these people for information rather than support. The very fact that they’re not like you means that they probably have different sources of information than you have. People who are more like you are more likely to have the same sources of information that you do, which isn’t that helpful! By bridging out, you tap into additional sources of information. These people provide what are sometimes called your weak ties.
A strong social network for making life transitions, including the Third Age and your retirement, has both types: bonding relationships for support, and bridging relationships for information. Without your social network, you’d be all alone and in the dark. You can easily think of times when you’ve drawn on your social network for support, be it emotional, financial, or logistical. And you can easily think of times when you’ve drawn on your social network for information about getting a job, deciding where to live, or choosing which products or services to buy. You’ll need to do this for the new retirement, too. This is especially true if you may be looking for a job; one of your pillars of retirement income, remember, is Keep Working. The best jobs usually come from social networking, not from job listings! So totally aside from preventing loneliness, having a strong social network—relationships—helps you get along in the world. That’s why you need to do some planning, well in advance, to ensure that you’ll have a network you can continue to count on as you transition through life.
At the beginning of the Second Age, we start to build relationships related to our work. The more of these relationships we develop, the more successful we’re likely to be in our career. In fact, a good predictor of our productivity on the job is whether we have a best friend at work for support or information or both. And by the same token, the more successful we are in our career, the more our relationships can end up being concentrated among people we know through work, if not exclusively at work. That’s the way it is for most of the years we spend in the Second Age, and it’s a good thing.
But when we approach the end of our career, if a big part of our social network is still concentrated among people we know through work (rather than outside of work), we may be headed for trouble. Most of those work-related relationships will fade away. So as you get closer to the end of your career, it makes sense to do two things:
1. Consciously build social networks that are not related to your job. Those relationships won’t be affected when you retire the way that work relationships will be. If anything, they may be affected in a positive way, because you’ll have more time and energy to devote to them after you retire.
2. Consciously build deeper relationships with some of the people in your job-related social network. Some of these folks have the potential for being your lifelong friends. But if you wait until after you leave that job, you may have lost your chance. It’s easier to build lasting relationships with these potential lifelong friends while you’re still working with them, particularly if you make the effort to share time outside of work. By putting in the time and energy to establish relationships that extend beyond the work environment, you increase the likelihood that the relationships will survive when you leave the workplace.
Now that you know about the Three Levels of Retirement Happiness, introduced in the last chapter, you can apply the same thinking to the happiness that you get from your social connections and relationships. When you think back on the ones in your life that have brought you the most happiness, you can even see which type. Some were mostly fun, some were mostly engaging, and some were mostly meaningful. And it stands to reason that some of your best relationships embraced all three approaches to happiness. A trifecta!
Even though these relationships may have originated through the Automatic Relationship Generators in the worlds of education or work, they went on to become rewarding and valued because they incorporated your approaches to happiness. Because this process has been operating in your life already, imagine how it might operate in the new retirement, too. Remember, there is no Automatic Relationship Generator in retirement.
If you can, you’d probably like to preserve your relationships from your career and also build new relationships for the next stage of life, whatever it ends up being. How might that happen? Let’s apply the Three Levels of Retirement Happiness:
• First Level. This level is about pleasant, lighthearted fun, and some of your work relationships are built on just having a good time. These are people that you like hanging out with, and you may have common interests outside of work. Work relationships based on pleasure may be more likely to survive if they expand to the second level (engagement) or the third level (meaning); for example, you both take up a challenging hobby together (for shared engagement) or join a community project or political organization (for a shared sense of meaning).
• Second Level. This level is about engagement, or using your skills and strengths for a well-matched challenge. These relationships are based on shared flow experiences, which can definitely happen in some jobs. When you’re really in sync with coworkers on a project, you can develop this kind of strong relationship. But when you leave that work, that shared flow generally disappears along with the shared challenge.
• Third Level. This level is about meaning, or feeling that you’re in the service of something larger than yourself. If you and your coworkers really care about the greater purpose of your work, that creates a bond. This could be especially true if you consider your work to be a type of calling. Of course, retirement changes that; it takes you out of the context in which you’re sharing that sense of meaning. What might these relationships be based on after you no longer work together? The following exercise will help you identify three examples of involvement for building relationships based on the three levels of happiness.
The worlds of education and work usually function as Automatic Relationship Generators, creating social relationships through shared daily activities with other people. These relationships bring happiness in the form of pleasure, engagement, meaning, or some combination of these.
Because the world of retirement doesn’t have an Automatic Relationship Generator, to have the social relationships that you want in retirement you need to identify your own relationship generators: life activities, memberships, or environments that perform a social function similar to that of education or work. Getting involved in these creates the shared activities from which relationships grow.
For each of the Three Levels of Retirement Happiness, you can identify examples that would be likely to create and build social relationships. When you think about building these relationships from the perspective of the three levels, you’re thinking about involvement in activities, memberships, and environments based on your values, strengths, and interests.
Involvement in activities, memberships, or environments based on your values is more likely to create meaningful relationships. Involvement that’s based on using or developing your strengths is more likely to create engaged relationships. Involvement based on pursuing your interests is more likely to create pleasant relationships. Of course, all forms of involvement, and all social relationships, can develop on all three levels.
Beginning with the general list that follows, think of specific examples that could provide opportunities for social involvement during your next stage of life. Try to think of three or four opportunities for each of the levels. You will then choose one from each level as an example of the kind of involvement you’d like to explore and write them in the Life Circles exercise.
Examples of Relationship-Building Opportunities
| Alumni organizations | Extended family |
| Athletic teams | Faith communities |
| Charitable organizations | Performing arts organizations |
| Educational opportunities | Political organizations |
| Employment | Service clubs |
| Environmental groups |
What types of involvement would I like to explore, based on my values? These are social activities, memberships, or environments that would offer an opportunity to serve something larger than myself and could create a shared sense of purpose with other people.
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Engaging Relationships
What types of involvement would I like to explore, based on using or developing my strengths? These are social activities, memberships, or environments that would present a challenge and could create a shared sense of flow with other people.
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Pleasant Relationships
What types of involvement would I like to explore, based on just having fun? These are social activities, memberships, or environments that allow me to pursue my interests and could create a shared sense of enjoyment with other people.
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Now choose one specific example from each of the level—eaningful (M), engaging (E), and pleasant (P)—and write it on your Life Circle to use for your One Piece of Paper in chapter eleven.
For some, it may feel weird to contemplate where and how social connections and relationships might be built in retirement. They may wonder whether deliberately taking this action means they’re being insincere or manipulative. Is it like being a social climber or using other people? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. On the contrary! Building genuine relationships based on shared pleasures, shared engagement, or shared meaning is a very sincere and respectful way to connect with fellow human beings. It’s at least as honest and respectful as convenience, wouldn’t you say?
As is the case with any friendship, the underlying requirement for building and maintaining relationships this way is genuine connection. Aside from the shared experience of happiness, if the genuine connection is there, then it’s there. If it’s not, it’s not. By using the three levels as a starting point, at least we know where to look.
What about people who just happen to have DNA that’s very similar to our own? The old saying “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family” implies that we like our friends better. After all, we build those relationships from scratch. If our friendships don’t operate on at least one of the levels of happiness, they don’t endure.
But that may be true of our families as well. We all know that family relationships can become estranged—between parents and children, or among siblings. Perhaps the family relationships that endure are operating on the three levels, too. Many people use the greater time and freedom of the Third Age to reconnect with family. The three levels can even be a guide for connecting with family, and with old friends, too. In particular, this is a time of life to pay attention to what’s most meaningful to you!
In retirement, there’s one family relationship that’s in a category all its own. It sometimes even seems to transcend the requirements of trust and reciprocity. Ideally, it anchors the bonding end of the bonding and bridging continuum. And it has probably operated, at various times, on each of the three levels. This is, of course, your relationship with your significant other. There are many variations on this type of relationship, but for simplicity we’ll use the terms marriage and spouse, because they are the most common. (Even if you don’t have a significant other at the moment, keep reading. Who knows what the future may bring?)
One way to describe what happens to our relationship with our significant other in retirement is marriage on steroids. It becomes a bigger version of itself. Whatever a marriage is like before retirement, left to its own devices, tends to become more that way in retirement. A marriage that’s harmonious and loving can tend to become more harmonious and loving. A marriage that’s discordant and intolerant can tend to become more discordant and intolerant.
Why? It’s a simple matter of space and time. It’s the laws of physics, applied to marriage. Let’s assume that at least one marriage partner works outside the home—and these days, often both do. When the partners are still in full-productivity mode, they each have their own space at work and a space at home. On a daily basis, the two partners occupy two or three distinct locations in space. Also, because of the time allocated to work, the time that they spend interacting with each other is limited.
How are space and time altered in retirement? First, space is compressed. Instead of having two or three spaces to occupy, both partners occupy the same space—home. Second, time is expanded. Instead of time being allocated to work, it’s mostly spent interacting with each other. So what happens when these two highly energized particles come together in retirement? They’re either attracted to one another or repelled by one another. Marriage is like physics—or maybe more like rocket science. (To the moon, Alice!) Anticipating both partners’ shifts in space and time is an element of good life transition planning. Sometimes, what people think is an insoluble problem in physics is just a minor glitch in physical surroundings.
You’ve probably heard of at least one couple who were together for many years until one or both partners retired, then not long afterward, to everyone’s surprise, they filed for divorce. In some cases this isn’t due to the simple physics of space and time. It runs deeper. Once the two got to know each other again, they may have discovered that their interests or values had evolved in such diverging directions that they were no longer in sync. They decided that life was too short—or the retirement stage of life was too long—to put up with each other.
From a life stage planning perspective, what should you do about this possibility? If you’re in a bad marriage in the Second Age, should you accept the inevitable and jettison your partner to finally have the life you want in the freedom of the Third Age? Or should you try to repair that troubled relationship in advance, so it has a better chance of surviving the concentrated conditions of retirement? Each marriage is unique, and you could be happily surprised. There are marriages that limp along during the couple’s work life, languishing from inattention, and then become revitalized through conscious application of the more abundant time and energy of the Third Age. A new stage of life was exactly what the marriage needed!
When it comes to building a strong partner relationship, the stakes are high. No matter how socially engaged we are in the Third Age, as we approach the Fourth Age, our social circles inevitably become smaller. Our worlds shrink, our activity levels decline, we spend more and more time at home and in the company of our spouse. This tends to happen even for those of us who are relatively healthy and active. Our relationship with our spouse becomes a larger and larger part of our lives.
With age comes infirmity. In the Fourth Age, frequently one partner needs some type of care and the other partner provides it. The burden on the caregiver is great (and we can be thankful for the many books, groups, and other supportive resources now being devoted to the special needs of caregivers). Across the life course, many relationships are based on convenience. Becoming a caregiver is just the opposite. Nothing is more inconvenient than caring for another person. At the same time, needing care from another is very inconvenient, too. Our society values and promotes independence, and the loss of independence isn’t an easy adjustment. It’s not easy for either partner.
For a moment, think about your relationships—especially your marriage—in the Fourth Age. Imagine the inconvenience (and burden) of being the caregiver and also the inconvenience (and loss) of being the one who needs care.
Now stop for a moment to recognize your spouse as the person most willing to care for you, should that need arise. (This could apply to a caregiver who is not a spouse, too.) Pause to consider what that means, and to reflect on your relationship with that person in the following way:
1. Reconnect with what made the two of you fall in love with each other in the first place. What special chemistry brought you together so strongly? That’s what grew into this willingness to care for you.
2. Think of all of the times that your spouse has supported you, comforted you, and seen the best in you over the years. Remember that your spouse has already been your caregiver, in many other ways.
3. Imagine how grateful you would feel in the future, knowing that your spouse has truly come to your aid. Of course, you don’t need to wait to feel this gratitude. You can begin feeling it today and every day that the two of you are together. Ideally, you have a spouse who is your truest and closest companion on your journey.
Although your social connections and relationships are absolutely essential to your well-being, they are still only one part. The real power of designing your next stage of life is in bringing all the parts together. The final chapter of this book is where you’ll be able to collect the best of all these parts to create a unifying vision for the retirement you want to have.
1. Christopher McCandless, quoted by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996).
“What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been.”
—PARKER PALMER, American
author, educator, and activist
