The day my husband starts his retirement, I have my first boxing lesson. Marcus has been working as the foreign news editor of a major American network for 37 years, and has now decided he wants to stop while, as he puts it, ‘he can still do something else’.
His job was high pressure. He spent the first half of his career going to war zones and the second half sending other people to dangerous places, which I think he found more stressful.
During the 35 years we have been married, every big news event meant he would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, on end. He is now 62 and I don’t think he had a day off for any reason, including sickness, the whole time he was there. How will he cope without a steady diet of crisis management? And how will I manage a newly-leisured husband while I am still working full-time?
‘What are you going to do all day?’ I ask him, sounding rather like Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who is worried about the growing numbers of economically inactive over-50s dropping out of work. ‘Lots of things. Don’t worry I won’t be watching daytime TV.’
He spends his first day unpacking the spoils of his career — awards, certificates and so on — in the room he is now calling his office but a week ago was the spare bedroom.
During the 35 years we have been married, every big news event meant he would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, on end
I spend an hour with Connor, my boxing coach, who tells me that I need to hit harder.
April 2022: Two weeks in — my right hook improves
It crosses my mind that mine is the first generation of women who might have to deal with a husband enjoying his retirement while they are still working.
In the past, the majority retired to be with their stay-at-home wives and together they took up bridge and went on Saga cruises.
But women like me don’t want to give up hard-fought-for careers just as we get our glorious second wind. Having spent most of my adult life being a working mother, now that my children are pretty much launched, I want to enjoy the novel feeling of working without any maternal guilt.
I want to devote myself to it single-mindedly in the way men have always been allowed to, without fretting about getting to the school concert or parents evening on time.
I want to speed up and he wants to slow down. How is that going work? Will I still have to order the groceries and book the window cleaner if my husband is at home all day?
He didn’t leave his job to be a house-husband, but I don’t see why I should continue doing two jobs — my real job and all the unpaid labour that somehow women end up doing to run a home.
As I head out the door this morning to begin my nine-hour day working on my latest screenplay, my husband asks rather mournfully whether I would like to meet for lunch. I reply that a) I am working and b) I don’t have time for lunch.
Both are roughly true, but the real truth is that, much as I love my husband and enjoy his company, you can have too much of a good thing. My grandmother used to say about her husband’s golf playing: ‘Thank goodness he has a hobby. I married him for life, but not for lunch.’
My husband has always been too busy at work for hobbies — he doesn’t golf, sail or even cook.
I suggest that he might like to do a cooking course, and he looks at me as if I am mad. ‘Why would I do that?’ he asks, as he rearranges the blank notebooks on the desk in his pristine home office.
My boxing is coming on though. My right hook is beginning to matter.
My husband has always been too busy at work for hobbies — he doesn’t golf, sail or even cook
May: I hand over the household to-do list
My husband has decided he wants to write a book. In theory, I think this is a great idea. As a novelist and screenwriter myself, I could hardly think otherwise.
But I also know how tough it is to leave an office environment full of chatter about last night’s TV, and the new sandwich flavour at Pret, to sit alone in front of a reproachful laptop. It’s what I did myself ten years ago.
My solution to the problem of working-from-home loneliness was to join The London Library — a wonderful place to think and write in St James’s Square.
This morning, when my husband asks me, as he has every day without fail since he gave up work, ‘What are you doing today?’, I tell him that he should come with me to the library, where I set him up with a spouse membership. This seems to work very well until he takes the desk next to me because he can’t find his phone charger. Suddenly, the library begins to feel a bit like school and I send him away to sit somewhere else.
Later, in a whisper, I ask whether he would mind passing by the shop on his way home to replenish the household supply of toothpaste, which is running low.
For the entirety of our marriage, I have been the one to keep the house stocked with loo roll and shampoo. But now, since I’m still doing paid work and he is not, it seems to me that chore should devolve to him, or at the very least be shared.
He looks at me in surprise, but says that yes he will. Perhaps this retirement will be wonderful for both of us, I think — for the first time in my life, I can ditch the household to-do list and focus on work.
June: I brush my teeth with baking soda
Marcus is making progress on his book idea, but after 30 years of having an IT department on call, he is technologically challenged.
I have given him my old laptop, but it has different software to the one he is used to and he is struggling to make it work. I tell him to ask our own in-house IT expert, aka our youngest daughter, who is living at home while she does a master’s degree. She, however, finds that she is too busy to be a ‘digital coach’.
I spend an hour trying to sort the mish-mash of formats he has been working on, until I, too, am too busy. Now any young-ish person who comes through the door is asked if they can help with his font dilemmas.
In toothpaste news, Marcus forgot to buy it and for a while I pretended not to notice. On day 28, I began using one of those miniature tubes they give you on aeroplanes. I reminded him again.
Today, we still have no toothpaste and I brush my teeth with baking soda, which tastes horrible. I cave in and buy a tube on the way home.
I also up my boxing lessons to two a week.
I have given him my old laptop, but it has different software to the one he is used to and he is struggling to make it work
July: I’m still hoping for a domestic god
The good news is that Marcus is very involved in his book. The bad news is that he treats it with the same level of furrowed-brow intensity as he gave to his old job.
I am very glad he has found something to do, but I am not sure it gives him an excuse not to walk the dogs, remember to buy toothpaste, or book a window cleaner.
Like most men of his generation, Marcus has always been theoretically for equality on the home-front — when the children were small, there was lots of performative nappy changing and careful scrutiny of different baby buggy features — but when it comes to the humdrum stuff of domestic life (remembering the teacher’s name, knowing which child doesn’t eat bananas this week), well, that is inevitably women’s work.
But now, it’s time the men got with the programme.
There was a part of me, in fact, that was hoping Marcus would not only take on the mundane tasks of running a home but become a full-on domestic god in his retirement. He is naturally tidy and has great taste, after all.
I go ten rounds with Connor. He says midlife women whose husbands are at home are his best pupils.
September: Where can I hang my punch bag!
Today is a busy day: I have a breakfast meeting with a TV exec, a lunch with a publisher and then I am chairing an evening discussion on How To Get Published at The London Library. I told Marcus my schedule the night before. ‘But who is going to walk the dogs?’ he asks.
Not for the first time I wonder where in the house we could hang a punch bag. But I pretend he is joking, which of course he is. I think.
I ask him to clear the rubbish in the garden, but he says that he is too busy with his book. I want to say that, while he has been writing his proposal, I have actually finished a TV pilot, a play and two articles.
Not that anyone is comparing productivity rates, but I look at the piles of leaves in the garden with resentful eyes. I could just do it myself, of course, but that would set a precedent. This is uncharted territory and it is important I create the map. Either that, or he gets another job.
Later, I meet a headhunter at a party who tells me she gets calls all the time from wives wondering if there are any opportunities for their recently retired husbands. ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘I never get any calls from husbands about their wives.’
I think that is because most women have spent at least some time at home — either looking after children or because they work freelance. They know how to multitask and manage their time so it all gets done. They nurture their friendships, and welcome activities that involve making more friends.
I sign up for a Scottish dancing class in the neighbourhood and ask my husband if he would like to come with me. He gives me a look which says: ‘What, spend an hour sweating among total strangers? I would rather have my fingernails torn out by trained badgers.’
I go alone and have a tremendous time while Marcus watches the 24-hour news channel at home.
Moost women have spent at least some time at home — either looking after children or because they work freelance
January 2023: Retired? Moi? Non!
Marcus does not like it if I say he is retired. He is merely ‘working differently’.
Of course, if we were French, there would be nothing unusual about a 62-year-old retiring. In fact, the streets of Paris are full of people protesting that their retirement age is going up from 62 to 64. But for whatever reason, the English are a bit suspicious of early retirement. Not that Marcus is retired, you understand. He is writing a book.
Connor wonders who I am thinking about as I smash into his pad with my right uppercut.
February: Duty calls
The people who are really reaping the benefits of Marcus’s economic inactivity are his parents. They are in reasonable shape for 92 and 85, but there is no doubt that having their son on call makes their lives much easier.
He takes them to Italy for a fortnight, and helps them repel the telephone scammers. For all my griping, there is something very impressive about the way he looks after them. It is the sort of unselfish care that usually ends up being done by daughters, not sons. Perhaps that’s a sign it will no longer be the women who are expected to stay at home to care for the elderly.
March: the benefits of a live-in ‘nurse’
I come down with flu. I am very rarely ill — working mothers don’t have time to get sick — but I am struck down with a fever and sore throat. For the first time ever in my adult life, there is someone at home to look after me. Marcus is heroic about bringing me tea and cold flannels.
It is a wonderful thing to feel cared for, even if I am utterly wretched physically. I feel lucky to have such a supportive husband who has the time and the patience to look after a querulous invalid.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if he was the one who was ill, he would not get such good treatment. I begin to appreciate how nice it is to have a full-time, stay-at-home spouse, of either sex.
One year on: The joy of time spent apart
We are beginning to get the hang of the R-word. The secret is to spend enough time apart so that you look forward to being together.
Over the last year we have avoided each other for six weeks in total — his trips away with his parents; my research expeditions and spa trips with the girls. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
My advice for anyone who finds themselves in our position, is to nurture a mutual interest. Marcus and I have discovered we both like growing things. Gardening is one of the few hobbies where you can work together in companionable silence. I have some friends who find scuba diving similarly satisfying. Whatever it is, you should be able to be together but apart.
And communication is all. If you are a spreadsheet type, make one and divide up the tasks, and have a calendar you both use religiously.
I don’t think I will ever stop writing; it is something I love, but I do appreciate having a husband who is no longer fretting about the safety of his team in Baghdad.
For me, it’s beginning to feel as though the small stuff no longer has to be sweated. On the big things, like looking after his family, his priorities were already in the right place. The added bonus? I now have arms like corded ropes from all that boxing.
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