Retired Guy Syndrome

Twenty years ago, my brother invented something he called Retired Guy Syndrome. Our stepfather had retired, and my brother watched him spend a day like this: One morning, Cliff decided it was time to replace a defective cabinet hinge. He went to the hardware store, looked around, bought something plausible, came home. The hinge turned out to be the wrong size. He removed the cabinet door and returned with it to the hardware store. In the process of installing the new (correct) hinge, he banged too hard on the cabinet door and splintered the wood. Now he had to return to the store for wood glue. And on it went, for many hours.

A few years later, my brother asked my mother to join him for lunch out at their favorite Mexican restaurant. She looked troubled and said, “I have to deposit a check today.” My brother sweet-talked her into doing both. 

You get the picture. Cliff got the hinge fixed, but it took the entire day. (He liked to tinker. My guess is that he swore a lot when he split the cabinet door but largely enjoyed the day.) In her eighties, my mother found it hard to contemplate more than one task per day. That’s what my brother meant by Retired Guy Syndrome. And I do sometimes feel the threat of it hovering in the far distance. 

Retired Guy Syndrome is not the same as “Retired Husband Syndrome.” That was described in 1984 by C. C. Johnson, a doctor of psychosomatic medicine, and strangely enough, it doesn’t diagnose the way some men used to collapse in front of the television when they retired, rarely to move again. It was the wives that the doctor was seeing in his office, and those wives were going nuts. After years of organizing their houses and hours for themselves, suddenly their men were lumping around the house all day. Some kept the television volume up and the ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, some expected three prepared meals,, and some micromanaged their wives’ shopping or cooking. Very few offered to cook, shop, or clean. The doctor’s patients complained of anxiety and depression; they developed ulcers.

That was the ‘80s, but apparently it’s a huge problem right now in Japan. Men still work extremely long hours there, socialize almost exclusively with their male colleagues, and expect their wives to manage the home and children without them. When those men are suddenly at home all day, with no subordinates to boss around and no interests to engage them, things can get ugly. Estimates of Japanese women suffering from RHS hover as high as 60%. The divorce rate among older couples has risen.

But in the United States, at least in my part of it, women have worked most of their lives and have planned their retirements to sync with those of their spouses. There are issues to work out, for sure. (Are we really going to eat three meals a day together? Who cooks, and how often? Do we allow ourselves to be consulted on a calendar question at any time, or only at scheduled times? If we cut back to one car, who gets it when?) Covid has probably exacerbated all this because there are so few places to go these days. But no husbands I know sit around all day every day watching television, and no wives I know still do all the household tasks they used to do.

My husband and I adjusted to the retirement schedule gradually. When he cut back on his work, we agreed that I would do the same. During the schoolyear, we would work regular loads, but I’d find a replacement for the summer semester, and we’d head up to our cottage in Nova Scotia for the entire summer. We wrote our novels, we bicycled, we went out to dinner with friends, we took turns cooking. I did most of the grocery shopping, he organized the trash and recycling (a Big Deal in Nova Scotia). He dealt with repairmen, I weeded the garden. We ate lunch together on our beach almost every day. It was great.

But we did find it easy to lose track of the day of the week. That’s what became our version of Retired Guy Syndrome. We could tell from the angle of the sunlight roughly what time it was. (Besides, we had our phones.) But was the town library open today? Was that film really showing this evening? Had we just missed trash day? What we needed was a weekly clock.

Amazingly enough, we found one. It has one hand that circles around over the course of a week, with the “twelve o’clock” position denoting Sunday at noon. It hangs prominently in our cottage, and we consult it regularly. It’s even pretty. And how quickly the hand seems to fly on its weekly round when we’re up there!

Now a lot of us are suffering mildly from a related problem: Covid Time Slip. (Yes, I just invented the term.) There are enough hours in the day to get stuff done, but little sense of urgency. It’s awfully easy to drift through the day and never get to those big, demanding projects. Unfortunately, Covid is dragging on longer than we ever believed possible. Fewer hours of daylight and colder temperatures (which means fewer outdoor social engagements) are likely to make the problem worse this winter.

One thing I’ve started doing is taking classes. It helps structure the days, and the classes push my brain into motion. What about you? Share your strategies for surviving—and maybe even enjoying—the coming months.