Dear Coleen
My wife and I both turned 80 towards the end of last year and had a big joint party with our children, grandchildren and friends. However, we’ve had quite different attitudes to this milestone birthday.
Over the past 20 or 30 years, I’ve remained quite young at heart, and I still feel adventurous and would like to travel, but my wife has become very insular and hates going anywhere outside of her comfort zone.
We are both very fortunate to still be in good health, so it frustrates me no end that she won’t do more things. I see our friends of a similar age going abroad, taking cruises and having a very active social life, while we’re pottering around at home a lot of the time.
She enjoys having family over to our house, she’ll go out and do a grocery shop with me and we have the occasional pub lunch together, but that’s it.
She’s not unhappy, though, just stuck in her ways. I have tried suggesting a foreign holiday but she won’t hear of it.
She says she hates flying now and isn’t interested in being stuck on a cruise ship for weeks.
Do you think she’s being miserable or am I expecting too much of her?
Coleen says
Well, maybe. I think foreign travel can feel daunting and stressful for some people, even when they’re a lot younger. If she’s never been that interested in it, I can understand why she’s even less so now.
However, if she’s happy to let you go maybe that’s a good compromise. There may be certain things you could do or trips you could take with other people to spread your wings a bit.
You don’t have to be joined at the hip all the time. We do change as we get older and part of being in a long-term relationship is the ability to adjust to those changes and compromise.
You and your wife have obviously done a fantastic job of this so far, so I think it’s a question of coming up with plans that will suit you both. Work out what you’d like to do together and, the rest of the time, do what you want on your own. My parents had very different social lives as they got older – my dad liked to stay in and watch telly, while Mum was never at home. They had dinner together and that was it but it worked for them.
You and your wife are in a fantastic situation – you have your health and plenty of family and friends – so try to embrace the future positively and accept it’s OK to want to do different things sometimes.
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