The Domestic Gap
I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch
At twelve thirty in the afternoon I was standing in the kitchen, holding the lid down on our coffee bean grinder, when Ola’s voice came from the other side of our open-plan living space.
“I’m on a call.”
I knew she was on a call. I could hear the call — something about Q1 metrics and client deliverables, the familiar cadence of her consulting work drifting down from the other side of our home where her desk lives. That’s why I was being quiet. I was being exceptionally quiet. I was grinding coffee beans with the stealth of a man defusing a time bomb.
“The grinding,” she said. “They can hear it.”
I took myself and my coffee grinder into the utility room, shut the door and continued to grind. I was attempting to make myself a fresh ground coffee, just like I used to grab in the office between meetings without thinking, now apparently a territorial incursion requiring diplomatic clearance.
I put down the coffee grinder and returned to the kitchen. Instinct told me that returning to boil the kettle, accompanied by clanking mugs would be a fool’s folly. I poured myself an orange juice instead. At the other side of the room, Ola smoothly resumed her discussion about conversion funnels.
This is the Domestic Gap.
The Stage, Not the Backdrop
The Identity Gap was about losing your professional self — the blank space where the job title used to sit. The Domestic Gap is about what fills that space. And for most of us, what fills it is home.
When I was working, home was where I arrived. It was backdrop. Ola and I operated in parallel — morning handoffs, evening reunions, weekends. There was a rhythm to it. The departures and returns created their own structure. We missed each other just enough to be pleased when the other one appeared.
Then I stepped back. And Ola didn’t.
She’s still in harness — a consultant with a UK digital agency, busy enough that her calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by someone having a breakdown. She works from home, which sounds convenient until you realise that “home” is now also my entire operational theatre. Her office is downstairs in the open-plan living space, adjacent to the kitchen. My Man Office is upstairs in what used to be a spare bedroom. The distance between us is approximately twenty-five steps and an entire universe of temporal experience.
She’s in work time — linear, deadline-driven, punctuated by client calls and Slack notifications. I’m in retirement time — cyclical, unscheduled, marked mainly by the question of what to have for lunch and whether I should risk the coffee grinder.
We’re living in the same house in different realities.
The Becoming Problem
Here’s what the research says that nobody mentions: it’s not being retired that strains marriages. It’s becoming retired.
Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at Cornell, tracked over 500 married couples through retirement. Her central finding: newly retired couples report more marital conflict than either the still-working or the long-term retired. The transition period — the first year or two — is where the friction lives.
I find this oddly comforting. It suggests the current awkwardness isn’t permanent. We’re in the becoming phase. The crossing. Two years in, apparently, most couples find their rhythm.
But during the crossing? That’s when the choreography breaks down. That’s when you discover that the structure of work was performing silent maintenance on your marriage, creating the separations and reunions that made the relationship feel like a relationship, rather than two people occupying the same square footage.
Moen’s research identified the configuration with highest friction: husband retired while wife continues working.
That would be us.
The Asynchronous Configuration
Only 11 percent of couples retire at the same time. Most stagger it, often for very sensible financial reasons. Ola’s at her peak earning years. It made sense for me to step back first. Our spreadsheet logic was impeccable.
What the spreadsheet didn’t capture was the psychological tax.
I’ve been alone all day. I’ve read the news. I’ve completed my daily walk along the Amman River Valley. I’ve reorganised my desk drawer again and discovered a collection of cables for devices I no longer own. By noon, I’m ready for human contact. By five, I’m practically vibrating with unspent conversational energy.
Ola comes offline depleted. She’s been managing clients, navigating internal politics, solving problems that require actual cognitive effort. What she wants is silence. A cup of tea. Fifteen minutes where nobody asks her anything.
What she gets is me, hovering near the kitchen, ready to share my thoughts on the latest political scandal, or the odour from the neighbour’s chimney that smells awfully like burning car tyres. I like to mix it up a bit — I’m more than happy to move onto the article I read about Portuguese fiscal policy and its implications for British expats.
“That’s interesting,” she says, in a tone that means please stop talking.
The research calls this the demand-withdraw pattern. One partner seeks engagement; the other seeks space. He pursues; she retreats. The gap widens.
I’ve started late afternoon jazz guitar lessons — online, with a teacher who has the patience of a saint. Not because I have any plans to find employment at the Uplands Jazz Club, even though I would be one of the younger players. It’s because I’ve learned that my presence at 5pm, when she’s just escaped her final call of the day, is not a gift. It’s an imposition.
The Wet Leaf
British women have a phrase for this: he’s “under my feet.” A spatial metaphor — the husband as obstacle, the wife constantly navigating around this large, stationary object who seems to have no particular purpose but won’t go away.
The Japanese have an even less flattering vocabulary. They gave the phenomenon a clinical name: Retired Husband Syndrome. Identified by Dr Nobuo Kurokawa in 1991, it’s estimated to affect 60 percent of older Japanese women with retired husbands. The cultural metaphor is nureochiba — “wet fallen leaf.” A leaf that sticks to the bottom of a shoe and cannot be swept away. The husband who follows his wife everywhere, lacking independent volition.
I am trying very hard not to be the wet leaf.
The Lunch Clause
“I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch.”
The phrase is attributed to Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. It became the title of a psychologist’s book on retirement marriages. Its endurance reveals something: the unspoken assumption that marriage included built-in breathing room.
For decades, Ola and I ate lunch separately. She was at her office; I was at mine, or on a client site, or working from a café somewhere. Lunch was autonomous territory. A sandwich shop or café of choice, without negotiation. A meal that didn’t require coordination.
Now lunch is a question. Every day. Sometimes asked aloud — “what are we doing for lunch?” — and sometimes just hanging there, implied, as I hover toward the kitchen around noon and notice her on a call.
The Duchess was right. I didn’t marry Ola for lunch. Neither of us imagined three daily meals requiring choreography. But here we are, and the coffee grinder incident was not the first of its kind.
I’ve learned to schedule lunches around Ola’s meeting diary. Or just cancel the coffee. The adaptations are small, but they accumulate.
The Territory Question
Here’s where it starts to feel uncomfortable.
Ola has managed our home for years. She has systems. Routines. Preferences about everything from where the mugs go to how the dishwasher gets loaded. (Plates on the left, bowls at an angle, cups on the top rack facing down — I have absorbed this ritual through repeated correction.)
When I first stepped back, I tried to be helpful. I did the vacuum cleaning. I washed up by hand to save the dishwasher. I reorganised the crockery cupboard by height and type. It’s been decades since I left the Army but I still lean back on military structure when no better logic can be applied.
I thought I was being considerate.
Ola saw it as criticism. Systems that had worked for years, suddenly being ‘improved’ by someone who’d barely noticed them before.
The research literature is full of this. An American study mentions an engineer husband who reorganised the pantry alphabetically after retiring. His wife, who did most of the cooking, didn’t appreciate the liberty. Another couple installed acoustic barriers between their home workspaces. Someone stapled vintage velour curtains to a ceiling.
I haven’t stapled anything yet. But I’ve learned to ask before helping. And I’ve learned that “helping” in someone else’s territory often isn’t help at all, it’s interference dressed up as virtue.
The crockery cupboard has been quietly returned to its original chaos. I’ve stopped noticing.
The Golden Years Myth
There’s a comforting idea that marital satisfaction follows a U-curve — dipping mid-life, then rising in the “golden years.” Retirement as a romantic renaissance. The empty nest refilled with rediscovered intimacy.
Sadly the data doesn’t support it.
A 17-year longitudinal study found the apparent upturn is survival bias. Unhappy couples divorce; they disappear from the samples long before retirement years begin. What’s left looks happier because the miserable have exited. The U-curve isn’t couples improving — it’s the ones who remain failing to see what might be coming, their guard dropped.
What the research actually shows: retirement heightens what already exists. Couples with strong foundations build on them. Couples with fractures watch them widen.
The grey divorce statistics are sobering. Over-50s now account for 36 percent of divorcing Americans, up from 8 percent in 1970. In the UK, divorces among men over 65 increased by 46 percent in a single decade. And perhaps unsurprisingly, over 60 percent of these divorces are initiated by women.
I’m not catastrophising. Most couples don’t divorce. Ola and I are not heading for the courts — despite intrusive coffee grinding activities, we are still best friends. But I understand now why some do. The Domestic Gap reveals what was always there. Thirty years of masked incompatibility separated by the distance of working lives, suddenly unmasked by close proximity.
We were compatible. We still are. But we were compatible in a structure that no longer exists. We’re having to find out whether we’re compatible in this new one.
The Timeline
Here’s the hopeful part, if hope is what you’re after.
Moen’s research suggests two years or more for couples to settle into satisfying retirement. The first year is often the hardest — that’s where we are, in the thick of the becoming. The second year brings reorientation. By year three, most couples have found their rhythm.
Over 53 percent of couples report their marriage improves over time. Not immediately. Not without friction. But eventually.
The couples who’ve been through it offer variations on the same wisdom:
“Give yourself the time and the space and the grace, and give each other the leeway to make the adjustment. It won’t happen automatically.”
Time. Space. Grace. I’m trying to remember this when I’m standing in the kitchen with a coffee bean grinder, feeling like an intruder in my own home.
What Seems to Help
I’m not offering solutions. The Domestic Gap doesn’t close with a five-point plan, and I’m in no position to prescribe — I’m still doing the crossing myself.
But I’ve noticed patterns. Things that seem to ease the friction:
Structure that isn’t Ola. I need to create reasons to leave the house that don’t depend on her schedule. The mountain and coast path walks. The vague intention to learn jazz guitar (my guitars hang on the wall, keeping a tally of my excuses). The writing, which gives shape to mornings even when nothing else does. The point isn’t the activity. It’s that I have somewhere to be that doesn’t involve me hovering near her desk updating her on recent political news stories.
Protecting the Man Office. I have a shed, but I prefer the creature comforts of central heating and mains electricity. The Man Office is just fifteen steps up the stairs — here I’m in my domain. This room is mine. Furniture, cabinets and books arranged just how I like them. The desk faces the wall; it used to face the window, but the mountain valley proved too big a distraction for constructive progress. Ola doesn’t come up here during her working day, and I try not to go downstairs unless necessary. Physical separation within a shared house. It’s not a solution, but it’s a buffer.
The 70-30 reality. Some experts suggest successful retired couples spend roughly 70 percent of their time together and 30 percent apart. The paradox: the couples who thrive aren’t those who embrace constant togetherness — they’re the ones who deliberately protect separateness. Presence becomes more intentional. Absence becomes a gift you give each other.
Explicit conversation. We’ve started naming the friction rather than silently navigating it. “I need the kitchen quiet when I’m on a call” is easier than decoding sighs. “I’m going to disappear for the afternoon” is easier than guilt about abandonment. The lunch question has an answer now: we share a sandwich in between Ola’s meetings — she calls me, I make the coffee and she makes the sandwich. It’s not romantic. It’s functional.
Sitting With It
The Domestic Gap isn’t about failing at marriage. It’s about discovering that the marriage you built was partly constructed on scaffolding that’s no longer present.
Daily separations weren’t a failure in our relationship. They were a feature. They created the reunions. They made presence feel like presence, rather than mere proximity.
Now I’m learning what presence means when it’s no longer special. When it’s just the default state. When she’s on a client call and I’m grinding coffee beans with exaggerated care, trying not to exist too loudly.
The couples who navigate this well seem to understand something. The bridge across this gap requires two firm pillars, standing apart, to support the weight. Closeness and distance. Togetherness and autonomy. Neither alone works.
I’m writing this on Friday afternoon. Storm Goretti has passed and most of the garden is still upright. Ola’s downstairs on her end-of-week call — something about a company selling their brand name to another company and wondering what they should now use as an alternative. I can hear end-of-week tiredness in Ola’s voice; that one will have to wait until next week. The house is quiet otherwise. Birds chirping, a neighbour cutting logs, the particular silence of a Welsh January.
In an hour, she’ll come offline. I’ll go downstairs. We’ll have a cup of tea and talk about our days — though her day will have more content than mine, and I’ll have to resist the urge to share my running commentary about the power cuts after the storm.
This is the gap. We’re in it. We’re mapping it as we go.
Two years, the research says. We’re only a few months in. I’m trying to give us — and each other — the grace to make the adjustment.
It won’t be automatic. But it might be worth it.
The Domestic Gap is the third in the ‘Mind The Gap’ series — essays exploring the psychological territory of post-career transition. Next: The Structure Gap, or what happens when 2,500 hours a year suddenly need filling.
If this one landed — if you thought ‘yes, exactly’ — you know what to do.