Strong Relationships Make a Successful Retirement

Today we’re going to continue sharing thoughts from the book How to Retire by Christine Benz.

It’s a great book which I highly recommend. And as with the last article, I’ll be giving away a copy of the book at the end of this post.

We’ve already posted twice on this book as follows:

• How to Retire
• Planning for Retirement

You may want to check these out if you missed them.

Today’s chapter (we’ll cover part of chapter 3) is Christine’s interview with Laura Carstensen, a Stanford researcher on longevity. They covered a few topics but in this post we’ll highlight their discussion on the impact relationships play in having a happy life/retirement.

BTW, I shared my thoughts on this subject (which are fairly similar to Laura’s) in The Top Seven Retirement Activities, Part 2. Check out that post if you want another perspective on what we discuss below.

Living Longer, Happier Lives

We begin with this question from Christine:

You’ve studied longevity at length. What are the key factors that contribute to a long life?

Here’s Laura’s response:

Well, here’s the good news if you want to know what you can control: Genetics plays a much smaller role than our behavior and our lifestyle. Those people who parse genetics and lifestyle factors say it’s about 30% genetics and 70% how we live our lives. The point here is that developing a healthy lifestyle will go a long way toward a long and healthy life, even if your genes aren’t working in your favor for most things. It’s very much about your day-to-day life, and how you eat and move and socialize.

That’s good to know in and of itself, and since it sets the foundation for today’s discussion, I wanted to include it.

But Laura got into the heart of the conversation with her next comment:

What surprises a lot of people is that social relationships and happiness are powerful predictors of longevity. And much more obvious to most people is that the quality of the life you live is influenced by social relationships, probably more than money, except perhaps in the case of extreme poverty.

We evolved to experience a physiological response to being a part of something, being loved, being cared for, being part of a community. So it’s really important for people to continue those things as they get older. Its important throughout life. But as we get older, it becomes something you need to be consciously aware of, because we have fewer social structures around us that make sure those things are there.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but here are some of my main thoughts:

• “Social relationships and happiness are powerful predictors of longevity.” Is this new news to anyone? Not if you’ve been following along here for any amount of time. Article after article, post after post, and study after study reveals the same thing: having strong social connections is vital for a happy and successful life (and in this case, retirement.)
• It’s interesting to compare what she’s saying to exercising and eating right — two things people generally associate as ways to live longer/better. That’s because here she’s talking about two “touchy feely” subjects which help contribute to a longer life — your social relationships and happiness. Pretty interesting, huh?
• Social relationships are more important than money? Also very interesting, especially since there are a million books on getting your retirement finances right. And how many books are there on getting your retirement social relationships right?
• “We have fewer social structures around us (as we age).” Namely, these are the relationships we have around work — which mostly pass away when we retire. But there are others as well, such as the relationships we once had as parents — with our children themselves as well as the parental and friend relationships around school, sports, extracurricular activities, etc.
• That said, retirement also opens up the opportunity for new relationships of all sorts. I know for me that I’ve had new relationships at church, the gym, playing pickleball, online, etc. that I would most definitely not have if I hadn’t retired. But you need to be open and intentional about these as you can also become very isolated in retirement if you withdraw to your home and don’t get out.

Thankfully we all don’t have to worry bout developing 100 new friendships. Because as we’re about to find out, it’s not about the quantity of friends.

Quality Relationships are Key

Laura makes these points next:

For a long time, gerontologists had observed that social networks become smaller for older people, and they just assumed this must be why older people are sad and depressed. We’ve found out that older people aren’t sad and depressed. They’re less sad and depressed than middle-aged and younger people are.

It’s in part because these networks are smaller. What happens across midlife is that people begin to prune their social networks, deliberately making them smaller. You’re getting rid of some of the relationships you had mixed feelings about or that weren’t particularly satisfying. As we live our lives, we end up with lots of people in our social networks. Sometimes they’re coworkers, sometimes they’re the parents of our children’s friends. We call these more distant relationships “peripheral others.” Those are the ones that fall away and lead to networks getting smaller.

The inner circles that people have, the relationships that are predictable and long, and emotionally significant—they stay. So you end up with a social network that’s been distilled in a really powerfully good way. Now you’re surrounded mostly by people you really care about, and people who care about you.

Hahaha. So yes, we lose work relationships as well as the ancillary ones here and there. But do they matter that much?

I enjoyed and liked many people that I worked with in my 28-year career, but do I really want to keep in touch with most of them? No. I don’t even want to keep in touch with 95% of them.

Of the hundreds of people I worked with through the years, I have contact with maybe 10 of them at least once a year. Now don’t get me wrong, if I saw someone I liked from 20 years ago I would be happy to see them and chat. But are they part of my regular, social network? Nope. Not even close.

Those 10 (or so) are ones I still text, private message, email, etc. every now and then. They aren’t close relationships but I do consider them part of my social network. But the vast majority of past co-workers are not. We’ve simply lost contact.

My close friends these days are mostly family members. Add in an outside friend here and there and I’m living the exact life (relationship-wise) that Laura is describing above.

Marrying Friends

The conversation continues along these lines, but there’s a random (to me) comment that I wanted to throw in here just to share it:

Here’s a fact that surprised me at first: When men are widowed, they often remarry, and they remarry very good friends of their wives. That makes a lot of sense, because these are people that they know. People like other people by virtue of who else likes them. So they’ve been carefully selected. It’s not that common for a person to meet somebody brand new and go on to marry them. It’s much more likely that they’ll have someone enter that network who was always kind of hovering around.

Really? Is that true? I guess it’s how you define “often.” To me it doesn’t happen often.

Everyone I know who’s gotten remarried has married someone new. Or maybe they were “hovering around” and I never knew it.

I was curious so I googled around a bit and found my perceptions to be generally true. Here are some key findings on this remarrying subject and my thoughts on them:

• “Only around 20% of men over 60 remarry after the death of their spouse.” So even if 100% of the men who get remarried were to remarry friends of their former wives, it still wouldn’t be “often” as 20% is the ceiling.
• “Higher monthly income and education levels have been found to be predictors for widowers to become involved in a new romance.” Interesting. Is it because they are more active, “out there,” etc.?
• “Greater psychological well-being is correlated with being remarried or in a new romance after a spouse’s death.” So are 80% of men harming their well-being by not getting remarried?

Anyway, that was an interesting side discussion but take it all with a grain of salt.

How Many Connections to Be Happy?

I hear (and have written) that you need to have strong social relationships to be happy in retirement. This sort of thought/advice/thinking is fairly well documented and advised by bloggers, authors, and other “experts.”

But that always leads me to ask what that means exactly…in particular, how many close relationships do you need to be happy? And how deep do the relationships need to be to count? As someone wanting a great life, I want these relationships if they will make life better, but as an introvert I want to do that with the least number of relationships as possible. Hahaha.

Laura provides us with a guideline as follows:

If you have fewer than three or four people in your network who are so close that you can’t imagine life without them, then you’re in trouble. People die, things happen. There needs to be some kind of buffer there.

I’ll compare this to the advice given by Wes Moss, who’s done extensive research on what makes retirees happy.

In Wes Moss Interview on the Happiest Retirees, I asked Wes the following question:

For social interactions you recommend that people have at least three close connections — people they can confide in. The data says that unhappy retirees have 2.6 people and happy retirees have 3.6, so why didn’t you go with four (three seems to be between happy and unhappy)

His response:

It’s all about the inflection point of happiness.

Having two or fewer close connections actually makes you 2.2 times more likely to be unhappy.

Hitting that magical three number sets people up to be happier, and the more close friends the better.

There’s no happiness plateau with close connections.

I followed up with:

Do family members count in the numbers of close connections or are they just “extra” social connections?

To which he replied:

Close connections are people that you trust, who love you unconditionally, and completely see you for who you are. This can absolutely include family members.

It’s less important about where people fall on the family or friend category, it’s more important about the depth of relationship.

This can be a brother, sister, college roommate, neighbor, or golf buddy.

So, it appears that to be happy in retirement, on average, you need three or more close relationships…and the more the better. Both Wes and Laura seem to agree on these numbers as well as the closeness of the relationships.

This is good news for me as I can satisfy these requirements within my family alone…wife, kids (including son-in-law), and dad. That’s five. I have too many! Maybe I need to cut one or two loose. Hahaha.

Introverts are Ok

Next we get into the differences between introverts and extroverts with the following from Laura:

But there’s no evidence that extroversion — high sociality — is better for people than low sociality, within constraints. If you’re completely isolated, if you don’t have anybody in your life who cares about you, you’re in trouble. But that’s not the same as being an introvert.

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re an introvert or extrovert as long as you have those three meaningful relationships in your life.

Once those are met/surpassed, you are good to go!

I imagine this comes as very welcome news to many reading this. Hahaha.

Virtual Relationships

And finally, we wrap up our discussion for today with Christine asking:

What about virtual communities — social media networks — or even the fact that a lot of us stay in close touch with our friends and family via text messages? Can you talk about virtual communication and virtual socialization versus doing those things in person?

Here’s Laura’s take:

We have so much to learn about this. It’s such a good question, and I think about it for myself. I have friends who live thousands of miles away and are really meaningful to me. 

We do communicate. What we don’t know yet is what the ratio of virtual contact to face-to-face contact needs to be. With almost all close relationships that have evolved over time to become virtual, there was a period where you did know the person well face to face. These are like old college friends, or a coworker you used to see a lot. When you have that kind of foundation, it’s easier and almost only positive to be able to supplement that with virtual contact.

The question is, can you form a strong relationship if it’s virtual from the get-go? We just don’t really know the answer to that question.

It’s also important to think about supplementing our virtual contact with face-to-face contact. With these friends we mostly communicate with by text or by phone, if we never saw them again, or went ten years or 20 years without seeing them, would something change? We don’t know the answer to that, either. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it did over time.

A few comments here:

• No one knows…the jury is still out. I would personally say that it likely depends on the sort of virtual contact, what’s been discussed, how often, at what depth, and so on. But that’s only a guess.
• I agree 100% with her thoughts on past in-person friendships that are now maintained via text, email, etc. These can still be strong and vital to your retirement happiness. They are even better if they are supplemented with occasional face-to-face meetings.
• I have three friends from college who I would consider good friends. We were very close 40 years ago (even living in the same house for a few years at formative times in our lives). In the past several years we’ve seen each other at a college reunion and also spent a couple days together at an Airbnb. Now we just text (we’re spread all over the country), maybe once every other month or so. But we keep in contact and are “close.”
• Another relationship I have is with a cousin who I didn’t see much of as a kid (I was significantly older than him.) But we reconnected a few years ago at a family event, hit it off, and subsequent to that (through text) I found out he’s part of the FIRE movement! Now we have tons in common, chat regularly via text, and hope to get together soon in person.
• I have two “close” friends who are “online first and only” friends. Both of them have been reading my sites for a couple decades now and we’ve corresponded via email many times. They are both part of the Millionaire Money Mentors (MMM) and I hope to meet each of them in person one day.
• There are many friends who I first met online and then we connected in person at the MMM conferences. When we get together it’s like seeing old friends since we know so much about each other and we chat almost every day. I have become somewhat close with a few of them, chatting outside the conferences and regular forum threads (via text and direct messages) and even meeting some in person outside the conferences (meals together, day-trips with spouses, hosting one in our NC house, etc.)

One thing they didn’t cover in this relationship conversation is the impact of pets. Now obviously pets can’t have the same relationship with a person as people do, but I wonder if they fill some of the needs people get out of relationships — like companionship (which helps combat loneliness). Just wondering as many people treat their pets like people (and may love them more). FWIW, this says pets do offer at least some social benefits (especially dogs).

There’s actually a lot more to cover from this chapter but we need to discuss that next time.

Stay tuned!

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As I said above, I’m giving away a copy of How to Retire on every post I do about the book. Here’s how to you can enter:

• Leave a comment below telling me what you liked best about this post, what you think you can use, or something you learned from it. Basically just share anything meaningful related to the content above (note: “please enter me to win” and similar comments will not be considered out of pure weakness! At least put a bit of effort into it!) This should be fun!
• Be sure to leave your email address when you leave the comment so I will know how to reach you if you win (the email address will not be visible to anyone other than me).
• The winners will be selected by me at random a few days after this post goes live. I’ll announce who wins in my own comment.
• I’ll email the winner, get their address, and send them a book from Amazon.

As with most giveaways, there are rules. Here they are.

Good luck!!!!