Retirement- Vacation for Men Only?

For many men, retirement is like a dream vacation—a permanent, all-inclusive stay at Club Lazy. Think golf in the morning, naps in the afternoon, and watching every episode of Law & Order without guilt. Now, add a personal assistant who will satisfy your every need, and this dream vacation will become a never-ending Nirvana. Meanwhile, the story is quite different for women who often approach retirement with a sinking feeling, as if someone just handed them a longer to-do list titled “Forever”, and guess who a man’s personal assistant is in retirement? Yup, you got it right, it’s wifey.

Let’s face it—society’s been handing men and women different playbooks for centuries. Men were told, “Work hard, retire like a king,” while women got, “Work hard… then work harder, but now from home.” Retirement for men often means swapping the briefcase for the chance to enjoy all the finer things in life without clocking into a 9 to 5 job,  but for women, it’s just trading one set of responsibilities for another, with bonus interruptions like, “Honey, what’s for lunch?” as if meal prep was part of the retirement package.

The natural solution to this gender inequity might seem simple. If you’re a woman, don’t marry and then you won’t have to serve your partner. However, the gender pay gap in the U.S. as of 2023 indicates that women earn about 83 cents for every dollar men earn. This means that women have less money to invest for retirement and lower earnings lead to reduced contributions to retirement plans and lower social security benefits. Less money equates to less retirement fun. You might not have a man to take care of, but that trip to Hawaii may have to be put off.

Men dream of retirement as an endless summer, but for women, it’s just more of the same second shift they’ve been pulling since the dawn of time. While he’s cleaning his golf clubs, she’s fine-tuning the vacuum. It seems that some men believe that toilets are self-cleaning and food magically appears in the refrigerator. Even if household help has been engaged to keep the house in order, someone arranges and supervises their duties, and that someone is usually not the man of the house. The harsh realities of maintaining a household puncture the illusion that retirement is a 24-hour funfest.

If retirement is going to feel like a vacation for men and women, something’s got to give. Maybe it’s time for men to pick up some of the chores—or at least learn how to find their socks without yelling, “Where’d you put them?” When a man utters the words, “ Just let me know what you need help with,” a woman hears that the task is her responsibility and an explosive situation has been ignited.

Retirement should be a chance for both partners to rediscover each other and experience things together that, in the past, they had no time for. It’s time for men to realize that women weren’t born knowing how to cook and clean-they learned because they had to. A man who has balanced a multi-million dollar budget can certainly learn how to cook a chicken. Retirement must be a vacation for both men and women or someone’s going to need a vacation from retirement.