In current couples, the two usually work outside the home, so this situation is not so common, but in older people it is more pronounced. In fact, the increase in symptoms of anxiety and depression in women whose husbands have retired is so evident that a term has already been coined for this phenomenon: retired husband syndrome . The Japanese physician Nobuo Kurokawa was the one who deciphered this concept in the 1990s. He observed that in his country, where a fifth of the population is over 65 years of age , a worsening of the mental health of wives was very frequent when their partner stopped working permanently. The classic symptoms were sleep problems, lack of motivation, increased stress, or decreased appetite.
The causes of this discomfort come from the mixture of feelings that many women experience at this stage . On the one hand, for both them and their partner, stopping work seems a reason for joy. For the collective imagination, retirement is the dream we await throughout our working lives . But there are many variables associated with retirement that we do not take into account. On the one hand, the retiree may feel at first lost and without a sense of life. On the other, the couple suffers the stress of a coexistence to which they are not used. The husband with nothing to do also tends to get into his partner’s personal spaces that he had respected until now . In cultures where a more submissive role is encouraged in wives, it is more difficult to resolve this conflict. The retired wife tends to hide the negative feelings caused by the situation and tries to pretend that she lives in a false ideal state.
