Lifestyle Men in Retirement: Not Always a Winning Combo 5/2/2024 | By Dawn Fallik To be a man in the 21st century is to live in a time of social changes and challenges — from medical issues to social connections to divorce rates — that deeply affect life for men in retirement or even the ability to retire. Older men today can experience a kind of psychic bifurcation. They came of age amid the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, but their formative years were deeply planted in the traditional, patriarchal world of suburbs, segregation, and sexual stereotyping. And as they aged, their roles in the family and society became less obvious. Retired, they no longer had jobs to define themselves. Their health deteriorated. Relationships outside the home frayed, and their positions in the family eroded as wives and grown children assumed greater responsibilities. The result: Men, who tend to die earlier than women, spend their time in retirement grappling with intensifying mental health issues and often find themselves with few friends or relationships outside their immediate families. “Men are basically stuck in the 1950s model of masculinity,” says Ronald Levant, 81, who has been studying the psychology of men for more than 40 years. For many years, he directed the Fatherhood Project at Boston University, helping men to become better fathers — something he learned when he retained partial custody of his daughter after his divorce. Men, particularly those in their 70s and 80s, spent a childhood with “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” as role models. Now that they are retired, they are seeing a life where women went through major social change — from single digit employment in the 1950s to 50% of the labor force by 1985 — but for many men, their social world stood still. “For the first time, there were intergenerational conversations between mothers and aunts and daughters about changing roles and how to navigate gender in this new world,” Levant says. “Nothing like that occurred for men.” It has been a challenge, particularly for older men, to find new role models. While Ted Lasso may be a good fit for the younger generation of men, it’s challenging to find a role model for male retirement in 2024. In his books, such as “The Secrets Men Keep” and “Courageous Aging,” Ken Druck addresses the unwillingness of many men to discuss their struggles, from mental health to medical challenges to the social changes that happen with aging. But he thinks that things are starting to improve. Many men, he says, are learning to shed their expectations of “what it means to be a man” that they learned when they were children. “There are some men who did the work, worked on their relationships with women, and became aware of their own insecurities, and what a ‘masculine’ behavior was, men who were interested in diversifying their portfolio of their identity and their sense of meaning and purpose,” he says. Dawn Fallik is a contributing writer at Kiplinger Retirement Report. For more on this and similar money topics, visit Kiplinger.com. ©2024 The Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Read more about positive retirement options on Seniors Guide: How to Try Out Retirement Abroad As an Amazon Associate, Seniors Guide earns from qualifying purchases of linked books and other products. Read More Dawn Fallik