Replying to a commenter Tyler it could have Fortunately…

Transcript

Dave asks, did my struggle to transition smoothly into retirement affect my marriage? I'll tell you how it could have affected my marriage. I mean, it probably did, but not to any permanent degree. But there are two big things that were happening. There are a bunch of big things that were happening. But the two big things that I saw starting to screw with my perspective, number one and the biggest one was I lost all of my validation when I stopped working. You know, I was a business owner, so people were coming to me with problems every day, and I was, by and large, helping solve them. And that gave me a ton of validation. And also, as a business owner, I got a lot of attention from the people that I worked with because I paid them for their attention. And, you know, once I left the business, I didn't have that anymore. So. So I felt completely unvalidated. And that caused me to perceive that I wasn't receiving validation or that I was receiving less validation than I was accustomed to. And without digging into it, I started thinking, why are the people around me not validating me anymore? And, of course, with a little bit of introspection, I realized, well, they're validating me more. I'm not getting that massive amount of validation from work. So I feel unvalidated. So naturally, I'm blaming it on the people closest to me. So I had to figure that piece out. The second thing was Amy and I have what I call a decoupled retirement. I'm retired. She's still working. That creates just a slew of little dynamics that you would never have considered. And, you know, one of them, a pretty big one, was when we used to both work, we'd both get home from work and we'd both be in wind down period. You know, we'd be like, you know, kind of going through the house, doing our things. And it was just like another day, another hour of the day, et cetera. But when I retired, I kind of like subconsciously expected that when Amy got home from work, she'd be like, huzzah, it's time for us to spend time together now. Now that I'm here, let's, let's make sure that we're really dedicating this time to each other because I've been gone all day and you've been here by yourself. And like, I had to realize like her world didn't change. She's still working just like when I was working. So I had to understand that she wasn't quote unquote, not paying attention to me. She was just living her life like she normally did, paying the same amount of attention to me. She always did after work. I was just expecting more attention. So I had to be able to pay attention to her and get her to do things. And then I had to get her to do things. My situation had changed. So once I got my head around those two things and bear in mind, like she was going way above and beyond to compensate for all this stuff as best she could, because, you know, first of all, she didn't know any of what was happening because I don't tell people anything, but also because she just knew she knew that I was kind of struggling to get transitioned into retirement. So she was like doing everything she could to kind of like, But she did it anyway because she cares about me. So those are two things that could have definitely affected my marriage had I not been really on high alert for all the crazy stuff my mind was going to do to jack with my perspectives. So I would say as you transition into retirement, you really do have to question all of your perspectives because your mind is going to start screwing with you. And it's going to start getting confused about where the deficits originate. So in my case, I had a deficit of validation. It originated from my loss of work. My mind was telling me the people around me weren't validating me anymore. I had a deficit of feeling like we were spending quality time. We were spending as much quality time as we always had. I just had a bunch more time that I was spending. I was spending alone. So comparatively, it looked like we weren't spending as much time together. So things to watch out for.