The first year after retirement

Before the date

1. What do you want your ordinary Tuesday to look like?
2. How much time do you want us to spend together, honestly?
3. How much time do you want on your own?
4. What are you most looking forward to, and what are you dreading?
5. What will you miss about work that is not the work?
6. What do you want to have started within a year?
7. Are we retiring at the same time, and what does it mean if not?
8. What are the numbers, exactly, and do we both understand them?

Question three is the one that goes unasked because it sounds like a rejection. It is not, and couples who never ask it find out through irritation instead.

Question eight matters because the money conversation is often had by one person. Both of you should be able to state the numbers. Money conversations.

Time and space

1. Where in this house is yours?
2. What do you want to do alone that you have never had time for?
3. What do you want to do together that we have never had time for?
4. What should we do separately that we currently do together out of habit?
5. How do we say "I need a few hours" without it being a problem?
6. What does a good day look like for each of us, specifically?
7. What would too much time together look like, and how would we notice?

Question nine is not trivial. Two people at home all day in a house arranged for one person being at home need somewhere each that is theirs, and the absence of it produces friction attributed to everything else.

The household

1. What does the division of work look like now, actually?
2. What has quietly shifted since the date, and did we agree to it?
3. What do you not want to become responsible for just because you are home?
4. What did I used to do that you have taken over, and is that what we want?
5. What are we both avoiding?
6. How do we decide, rather than drift?

Question eighteen is the important one, and it is the one that goes unsaid until it has already happened. Available is not the same as responsible, and the difference has to be stated because the default is that it is not.

Identity and the rest of it

1. Who are you now, when someone asks what you do?
2. What did work give you that you still need from somewhere?
3. Who do you talk to now that you do not see colleagues?
4. What are you avoiding thinking about?
5. What do you want to be true in five years?
6. What are you afraid this stage is?
7. What do you need from me that you have not asked for?
8. What should we do about the friends we only had through work?
9. What is the first thing we should actually book?

Questions twenty-two and twenty-four are underrated. Work supplies identity and it supplies most people's daily social contact, and losing the second is often the harder loss and the less expected one.

Question thirty is deliberately last and deliberately concrete. These conversations produce more when they end in something on a calendar.

How to use these

Start before the date, not after. The first set is a different conversation in advance than it is in month three.

A few at a time. Not an audit.

Both answer everything, including the partner who is not retiring, whose life has also changed and who is rarely asked about it.

Revisit at six months. Almost everything agreed in advance turns out to be slightly wrong, and the useful moment is the one where you find that out on purpose. The weekly check-in. · The mental load. · When you are both too tired to talk.

These questions are free, need no account, and work on paper. Nearvo is not therapy and does not assess a relationship. It asks one question a day, and shows each partner's answer only after both have replied.

Questions and answers