Mathers' 10 Rules for Surviving Retirement Without Losing Your Mind or Your Marriage.

A Necessary Introduction

I turned 67 last week and celebrated by throwing out my back reaching for the TV remote. It was not even a dramatic reach. It was the kind of half lean, half stretch that would not have registered as physical activity at any point in my previous 66 years. But at 67, apparently, my spine has decided that any movement it was not briefed on in advance constitutes a hostile act.

The paramedic who responded was perhaps 25 years old. He asked me how I hurt myself. I told him. He did not laugh, which was generous of him, but I could see him storing the story away to tell his friends later. I do not blame him. It is a funny story when it is not your spine.

I have been retired for four years. In that time I have learned things about myself, my marriage, my body, and my remote control that I wish someone had told me earlier. Nobody did, because the retirement advice industry is too busy telling you about your 401k to mention that you might lose your mind, your friends, and your will to put on pants.

So here are my 10 rules. They are not financial rules. Your financial advisor has those covered, assuming you have a financial advisor, and if you do not, that is a conversation for another day. These are rules for the part of retirement that nobody puts in the brochure.

Rule 1. Your Spouse Married You for Better or Worse but Not for Lunch Every Day.

On my first Monday of retirement, I walked into the kitchen at noon and said to my wife, "What are we having for lunch?" She looked at me the way a cat looks at a closed door. Not angry. Not upset. Just profoundly calculating.

"We," she said, "are not having anything. I am having leftover soup. You are having whatever you find."

This was my introduction to one of the great unspoken truths of retirement. Your spouse has a life. That life has a rhythm. That rhythm was established over the decades you were at work, and it does not include you standing in the kitchen at noon asking questions.

My friend Dennis retired and immediately started following his wife around the house suggesting improvements. The kitchen could use new cabinet handles. The guest bathroom needed a different shade of paint. The living room furniture might work better if they rearranged it. His wife, a woman of great patience and terrifying precision, finally said, "Dennis, I have run this house for 38 years. If you would like to manage something, there is a garage full of your tools that could use organizing."

Dennis organized the garage. It took him two days. Then he was back in the kitchen. They are still married, but it was a close thing for a while there.

The rule is this. Give your spouse the same space they had when you were working. Go somewhere. Do something. Come back at a reasonable hour. Say something interesting about what you did. This is not complicated but it requires you to accept that your retirement is your project, not a joint venture that includes reorganizing someone else's kitchen.

Rule 2. Get a Hobby That Requires Leaving the House. Your Partner Needs to Miss You.

I am not talking about golf, though golf counts. I am not talking about anything specific. I am talking about having a reason to put on shoes and walk through a door to a place where your spouse is not.

My hobby is woodworking. I am not good at it. The birdhouse I made last spring looks like it was designed by someone who has never seen a bird or a house. But the woodworking shop is twenty minutes from my home, and for the three hours I am there each Tuesday and Thursday, my wife has the house to herself. She reads. She calls her friends. She watches whatever she wants on television without me asking who that character is every four minutes.

When I come home, she is glad to see me. Not because I was gone so long that she was worried. Because I was gone long enough that the sight of me is pleasant rather than inevitable.

The missing is important. You cannot miss someone who is always there. You cannot be excited to see someone you saw four minutes ago. Absence does not just make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart remember why it was fond in the first place.

Find a thing. Go to the thing. Come home from the thing. Tell your spouse one amusing detail about the thing. This is the formula for a retirement marriage that works.

Rule 3. Stop Giving Advice Nobody Asked For. Your Children Survived This Long Without Your Input on Their Thermostat Settings.

I visited my daughter last Thanksgiving. She keeps her house at 74 degrees. Seventy four. I grew up in a house where my father considered 65 degrees a luxury and anything above 68 an act of financial recklessness. So naturally, I said something.

"Seventy four seems a bit high, don't you think?" I said, in the tone of voice that all fathers believe sounds casual and all daughters recognize as the opening argument in a trial they did not agree to attend.

My daughter looked at me. "Dad," she said, "I pay my own electric bill. In my own house. That I bought with my own money."

She was right. She was completely right. And I knew she was right even as the words were leaving my mouth. But retirement gives you so much free time that your brain starts looking for things to manage, and your children's thermostats, grocery choices, driving routes, and parenting decisions are right there, looking manageable.

They are not yours to manage. They were never yours to manage. The fact that you once changed their diapers does not grant you a permanent advisory role in their household temperature policy.

I have a new rule. Before I say anything to my adult children that could be interpreted as advice, I ask myself one question. Did they ask? If they did not ask, I do not say it. This rule has improved my relationship with my children more than any other single change I have made in retirement. The thermostat stays at 74. My daughter calls me more often. Everybody wins.

Rule 4. Exercise Is Not Optional. Pick Something You Hate Less Than Dying.

I do not enjoy exercise. I never have. People who say they love running are either lying or have a different definition of the word love than I do. I have tried running. It felt like punishment for a crime I could not remember committing.

But here is the thing about retirement that nobody mentions in the brochure. You will sit down. A lot. You will sit to watch television. Sit to read. Sit to eat. Sit to have coffee. Sit to have a second coffee. Before you know it, you have spent eight hours in a chair and the only muscle you have exercised is your right index finger scrolling through your phone.

My doctor, who is young enough to be my grandson and cheerful enough to be annoying about it, told me I needed 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. I told him that seemed like a lot. He said, "It is about 22 minutes a day. You spend longer than that reading the back of cereal boxes." He was not wrong.

So I walk. Every morning, I put on shoes and walk for 30 minutes. I do not walk fast. I do not walk with purpose. I walk like a man who has nowhere to be and is comfortable with that fact. Some days I listen to a podcast. Some days I just look at trees and think about lunch.

The point is not to become an athlete. The point is to avoid becoming furniture. Your body at 67 is like a car with 200,000 miles on it. It still runs, but only if you drive it regularly. Leave it in the garage for a month and things start to seize up.

Pick the exercise you hate the least. Walking. Swimming. A stationary bike in front of the television. Yoga, if you can say the word yoga without rolling your eyes, which I cannot. It does not matter what it is. It matters that you do it.

Rule 5. Call Your Friends. They Are Not Going to Call You. Everyone Is Waiting for Everyone Else to Call First.

When you work, friendship is effortless. You see people every day. You complain about the coffee together. You share stories in the hallway. Friendship at work requires no maintenance because the proximity does all the work.

When you retire, the proximity vanishes. And with it, gradually, go the friendships. Not because anyone stops caring. Because everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move.

My friend George and I worked together for sixteen years. When I retired, we said we would have lunch every month. We had lunch twice. Then three months went by. Then six. Then a year. Then I ran into him at the hardware store and we stood there in the paint aisle saying, "We really need to get together" with the same conviction with which people say, "I really need to eat more vegetables."

I went home and called him that night. We had dinner the following week. It was wonderful. We laughed for two hours about things that happened in 2014. And I realized that the only thing standing between me and that dinner was a phone call that neither of us was making.

Be the one who calls. Be the one who suggests lunch. Be the one who says "next Thursday at noon" instead of "sometime soon." Sometime soon is where friendships go to die. Next Thursday at noon is where they survive.

Rule 6. Learn to Cook Three Meals. Not Because Your Spouse Will Thank You but Because Eventually You Will Be Alone with a Stove and No Plan.

I am going to say something that nobody wants to think about. Statistically, one of you will outlive the other. If you are a man who has never cooked a meal, and I was that man until four years ago, this is a problem that future you will face with a refrigerator full of condiments and no idea how to turn any of them into dinner.

My wife went to visit her sister for two weeks last year. By day three, I had eaten cereal for dinner twice and ordered delivery once. By day five, I was standing in the kitchen looking at a raw chicken with the same expression a dog makes when you show it a card trick. Interested but completely unable to process what was happening.

I asked my wife to teach me three meals before she went on her next trip. She taught me a pasta with sauce, a basic stir fry, and how to roast a chicken. The chicken was the hardest. Not technically hard. Hard in the sense that I had to accept that I was a grown man who had never put a chicken in an oven.

Three meals. That is the number. You can rotate three meals indefinitely. Monday is pasta. Wednesday is stir fry. Friday is chicken. The other days, you eat leftovers. This is not gourmet cooking. This is survival. And survival is the baseline.

Rule 7. Stop Telling Young People How Things Used to Be. They Do Not Care and You Sound Like a Ken Burns Documentary Nobody Requested.

I catch myself doing this at least twice a week. A cashier tells me the total and I say, "You know, when I was your age, a gallon of milk cost 89 cents." The cashier nods politely. She does not care. She has never cared. She is thinking about her break and I am delivering a lecture on the economic history of dairy products.

We all do this. We do it because we find the contrast between then and now genuinely astonishing. We remember when gas was a dollar. We remember when you could buy a house for what a used car costs now. We remember when phones were attached to walls and television had four channels, and every single one of these memories is fascinating to us and absolutely deadening to anyone under 40.

The young people in your life do not need a historical comparison to validate their experience. They know things are expensive. They know the world has changed. What they need from you is presence, not a timeline.

I have replaced "When I was your age" with "Tell me what that is like for you." It is a better sentence in every possible way. It invites conversation instead of shutting it down. It says I am interested in your experience instead of I am nostalgic for mine.

Save the Ken Burns commentary for your friends. They are the only ones who will appreciate it because they were there. And they have their own version they are waiting to tell you.

Rule 8. Spend Money on Experiences, Not Things. Your Kids Are Going to Throw the Things Away Anyway.

My mother had a china cabinet. In that china cabinet was a set of dishes she received as a wedding gift in 1957. She used them exactly never. They sat behind glass for 60 years, occasionally getting dusted, perpetually getting admired, and ultimately getting donated to Goodwill three weeks after she passed away because none of her four children had room for a china cabinet.

Sixty years of protecting dishes that nobody ate off of. Sixty years of saying, "Those are the good dishes. We will use them for a special occasion." The special occasion never came. Or rather, every occasion was special, but none was special enough for the dishes.

I think about that china cabinet every time I consider buying something. Will my children want this? The answer, for almost everything, is no. They do not want my coin collection. They do not want my golf trophies. They do not want the commemorative plates or the leather bound encyclopedia set or the signed baseball that I cannot prove is actually signed by anyone famous.

They will, however, remember the trip we took to Maine. They will remember the dinner where I laughed so hard that water came out of my nose. They will remember the afternoon I took my grandson fishing and he caught nothing but was so happy to be there that he talked about it for a month.

Buy the trip. Eat at the restaurant. Take the grandkids to the zoo. Leave the china cabinet at the store.

Rule 9. See the Doctor Even When Nothing Hurts. Especially When Nothing Hurts.

Men are particularly bad at this, and I say this as a man who once ignored a persistent cough for four months because I was convinced it would "work itself out." It did not work itself out. It was bronchitis. My doctor said, "Why did you wait four months?" I said, "I was busy." I was not busy. I was retired. I was watching television and coughing.

The things that will cause you the most trouble in your 70s and 80s are the things that have no symptoms in your 60s. High blood pressure feels like nothing. High cholesterol feels like nothing. The early stages of a dozen serious conditions feel like absolutely nothing at all. You feel fine right up until the moment you do not feel fine, and by then you have lost time that you cannot get back.

Get the annual physical. Get the bloodwork. Get the colonoscopy. Get the skin check. Get the hearing test, because I promise you, you are already saying "what" more often than you realize and your spouse is tired of repeating things.

I now go to every appointment my doctor recommends. Not because I enjoy sitting in waiting rooms reading magazines from 2019. Because my grandchildren are 4 and 7, and I have made plans that require me to be alive in 2040. Plans that involve fishing trips and birthdays and a standing offer to take them for ice cream every Thursday. Those plans require a body that works. A body that works requires maintenance. Maintenance requires a doctor.

Go to the doctor. Your future self will thank your present self. And your present self gets a lollipop if you ask nicely.

Rule 10. Wake Up Every Morning and Do One Thing That Scares You Slightly.

Not skydiving. I want to be clear about that. I am not suggesting you jump out of an airplane. I am 67 years old and my back went out reaching for the remote. Skydiving is not in the cards.

I mean something small. Something that makes your pulse go up just a little. Something that reminds you that you are still here and still capable of doing things you have not done before.

Last month, I went to a restaurant alone. This does not sound scary to most people, but I had never done it. In 67 years, I had never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table for one, and sat there by myself with a menu and no one to talk to. I was terrified. I was also, once I settled in, completely fine. The pasta was good. The waiter was kind. I read a book between courses. It was, and I mean this sincerely, one of the best meals of my year.

The week before that, I told my neighbor that I appreciated him. Just that. "I appreciate you, Bill." His face did something complicated. Men of our generation are not accustomed to other men expressing appreciation outside of a eulogy. But he smiled. He said, "I appreciate you too." We stood there for a moment in his driveway, two old men who had just said something real to each other, and then we went back to talking about the weather because that is what we do.

Try a food you have never tried. Walk into a store you have never entered. Sign up for a class. Tell someone you love them. Sit in the front row instead of the back. Ask a stranger for a recommendation. Raise your hand when the instructor asks for a volunteer.

Retirement can become very comfortable very fast. Comfort is wonderful until it becomes a cage. The cage is not made of bars. It is made of routine. The same chair, the same channel, the same route to the same store for the same groceries at the same time on the same day.

Break it. Gently. One small scary thing a day. Not because the scary things are important in themselves, but because doing them proves something to yourself that retirement can slowly make you forget. You are still growing. You are still learning. You are still alive in the fullest sense of the word.

And if all ten rules feel like too much to remember, just remember the last one. Do one thing today that scares you slightly. Everything else will follow.

A Final Word from a Man Who Threw Out His Back Reaching for the Remote

Retirement is the best thing that ever happened to me. It is also the hardest. Those two things are not contradictions. They are companions, like my wife and me, who have figured out that the secret to being in the same house all day is to spend a significant portion of that day not in the same house.

These rules are not commandments. They are suggestions from a man who has made every mistake on this list at least once and some of them repeatedly. I gave unsolicited advice. I skipped the doctor. I waited for my friends to call. I reorganized my wife's kitchen. I told a 22 year old cashier about milk prices in 1982. I did all of it, and I am still here, still married, still learning.

That is the real rule, I suppose. The one that contains all the others. Keep learning. Keep moving. Keep calling. Keep cooking. Keep doing things that scare you slightly.

And for the love of everything holy, keep the remote within arm's reach.