So I’ve Retired Early – Now Where Did All My Friends Go? Part 3 of 5: The Relationship Hurdle

Welcome to part 3 of our retirement series, where we’re diving into the wonderful world of friendships, and how they are most certainly not exempt from the multi-faceted impacts of retiring.

There is study after study after study documenting just how important friendships are in terms of a person’s happiness. Healthy friendships give us a sense of community, belonging, and a whole host of other emotional benefits.

Regardless of whether you are a classic introvert, extrovert, or fall somewhere in the middle of the scale, while the nature and quality of your friendship “needs” may change, the overarching necessity for connection doesn’t.

We are social creatures, and we all absolutely need a social connection to the world around us. In fact our brains require it, look no further than the impacts of solitary confinement to see what can happen to people when they lose those connections for any extended period of time.

So investing a decent amount of time into our friendships is probably a good call.  But we do want to ensure we are getting a  solid ROI on that investment.

One of the beautiful things about retirement, is that it provides a perfect opportunity to perform what I like to call a “Friends Cleanse”.

An opportunity to honestly assess the quality of your relationships, and intentionally make the decision to continue investing or cut your losses.

So what makes a friendship worth keeping?

Research has demonstrated that there are four key factors integral to building meaningful and lasting friendships.

• Proximity (How close we are geographically to the other person)
• Frequency (How regularly we see them)
• Commonality (The degree of similarity in our lives, views, etc)
• Secrets (While this is a bit of a wild card, but it’s been shown that the closest relationship are those where each party is comfortable sharing secrets with the other. Underscoring a strong degree of trust).

While a great friendship can survive without all four, it gets increasingly more difficult when you begin to chip away at multiple areas.

While there are always exceptions, these pillars can be a helpful tool in determining which of your friendships are going to survive your transition to retirement, and which ones it might be time to let go.

But in making this assessment, you’ll need to apply the parameters of your new retired lifestyle in order to get a true idea if you’ll remain compatible.

Now – you may be thinking, why do this at all? “Why not just keep all the friends I already have, and invest more time with them once I’m retired?”

Well – odds are, that’s going to work for some of your relationships, but think back to instances when you made your biggest life changes? Maybe you relocated for work when you left school? Or what about when you got married? Or when you had kids?

Now think about how those life changes impacted the existing relationships in your life? Did you lose commonality with people who were once very close friends? Did your lack of proximity to some people have a a dramatic impact on how frequently you got together?

Did your single friends with no kids have a tough time relating to why as a parent you suddenly don’t want to party until 2am? Or they won’t leave your dinner party at 10PM when you were hoping to be in bed by 1030 because your kids are early risers and don’t care how many bottles of wine your crushed the night before??? (I’ve decided to just start saying goodnight and going to bed. It’s awkward, but I’ve seen it in action and man does it work.)

Which brings us to retirement. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s a major life change that will absolutely impact your ability to relate to many of your friends (and vice versa).

While everybody’s experience in this area will vary based on their own individual personality type, how much they value their friendships, and the quality of those friendships, I’ve experienced a number of aspects in this transition that apply across a pretty broad spectrum.

Let’s split these impacts into two categories; 1 being the impacts on your existing friendships, and 2 being the impact on new ones.

Your Existing Friends

There are 3 things that I found happened after retirement when it comes to my relationships:

1 – A big chunk of my “friends” disappeared entirely from my life;

2 – A smaller chunk slowly lapsed into essentially non-existent relationships; and

3 – A handful of key relationships made the cut.

So let’s start with #1. For me, a substantial number of my friendships were centered around work. I relocated not long before starting my career, and ended up working a LOT of hours.

Those two factors resulted in the vast majority of my friendships being formed with my co-workers. Not exactly an uncommon occurrence for people who relocate from where they grew up.

The beauty of work friendships? Proximity, frequency and common ground are built in for you. Essentially, you barely have to try.

Odds are, you even have some degree of built in “secrets”. Complaining about your horrible boss, or venting about your crappy co-worker who constantly makes personal phone calls at a decibel level that makes you wonder if they’ve ever had their hearing checked.

But when all those factors are removed, and your contact with those people hinges on your own willingness (and theirs) to maintain the relationship, well that is a whole other thing.

As I learned very quickly, neither I – nor many of my friends found each other all that interesting once we lost the biggest piece of common ground, frequency and proximity we had.

Remove that structure of work, and for many “friendships”, there is often little left by way of the essential ingredients of meaningful interaction.

But the same thing happened with a lot of my non-work friends. We ended up being in such different places in our lives, that it was difficult to relate to each other. And that impact cut both ways.

Not only was it hard for many of them to understand how exactly I managed to pull off early retirement (despite being more than happy to talk about it with anyone who is willing!), for those who’d had entirely different life experiences with money, completely different perspectives on how to manage money, and zero interest in changing their habits, it didn’t leave a lot of room to talk about my new found freedom, or for them to vent about their ongoing money problems.

I found this especially true of friendships where we made similar incomes. It was just way too hard for some of those friends to wrap their heads around how I could be retiring, when they were still living pay cheque to pay cheque.

Which brings me to point #2, the friendships that I thought would last, but instead lapsed into non-existence.

It takes a serious commitment to maintain the friendships that stem from your work environment, even the ones that you really value.

To really throw a curve ball into things, the time invested into those relationships now has to take place outside of working hours. Which you might have done to some degree pre-retirement, but now it ALL has been done outside of work hours.

Not so much of a problem for your retired self – but potentially a HUGE problem for the other person.

They are still putting in their 40+ hours a week, with already limited time outside of the work schedule to fit in activities, family commitments, and their “other” friends outside the work place. So frankly – it’s a big ask.

Consider the work friends you have now. How many would you voluntarily move entirely from your work time zone, into your personal time zone?

This one is going to happen – even to friendships you would like to maintain, but you can’t hold it against the other person, they simply don’t/won’t have the same luxury of available time as you.

It was also in this space of friendships where I found that the very unpleasant emotion of envy came into play.

Envy is an emotion we would all like to pretend doesn’t occur in friendships. Unfortunately, envy is a very base human emotion/reaction, and like any major life changes that send people down very different paths, retirement is plenty fertile soil for this unpleasant emotion to fester. And envy is a feeling that can quickly end even the best of friendships.

Financial security and the ability to retire are pretty major pressure points for a lot of people. For someone who is having non-stop money problems, it can be pretty difficult to maintain a positive and healthy friendship with someone who just retired in their 30’s/40’s. Certainly not impossible – but it does pose some difficulties.

The important aspect here is to be aware of it. If you see it beginning to build in any of your friendships, by all means do your best to diffuse it if possible, but if not, it may be time to end that friendship before the toxicity spreads.

Another danger zone to watch out for in your existing relationships is those friends who suddenly feel that because you are retired, they can utilize your time to make their own lives easier. While I am all for helping out friends, there’s definitely a fine line between giving a helping hand and having your time abused.

I thought learning to say no at work had a steep learning curve – learning to say no to your friends can be an even bigger challenge, but in retirement, it’s a very necessary skill. Lest you spend all the time you worked so hard to regain putting out other peoples fires.

Even with the best of intentions, odds are some of the relationships you intend to maintain will in actuality lapse over time, and guess what? That’s ok. In fact – it’s probably for the best.

Which brings me to point #3. The ones that make the cut.

Of all the work relationships I had, 2 have made the retirement cut. Where I (and they) will go out of their way to ensure we stay in touch and see each other regularly.

Undoubtedly – these were the relationships where all of the four pillars of friendship were the strongest. We had substantial commonality (at work, and personally), we saw each other daily, live in close proximity, and shared plenty of secrets. (And yes – we all shared a boss that provided a lot of conversational fodder.)

It probably doesn’t hurt that all three of us seem to take turns carrying the torch and making sure we all make time to get together. That way the responsibility of keeping the friendships on track is not just falling to one person (as it often can).

The same is true of the non-work friends. Each and every one where the four pillars were strongest – made it past the friend’s cleanse.

The best part – once you get to this point, you no longer have to worry about screening your calls because you reeeaaalllllyyy don’t want to talk to or get together with certain people.

Now you can look forward to hearing from ALL of your friends, because you genuinely want to talk to them!

Making New Friends

Given that retirement is a whole new chapter of life, with a lot of new experiences, it only makes sense that its a great opportunity to make some new friendships too!

Not to say your old friends aren’t awesome – after you’ve done a thorough housecleaning of the relationships you want to invest in during retirement, you probably have a skookum list of people that you want to hang out with.

The creme de la creme of your friendships.

BUT – odds are, they probably aren’t about to head off into early retirement with you. If they are – LUCKY YOU! Seriously – super lucky.

But for most, if you want to find other early retired folk to travel with, talk shop, or otherwise hang around with, you’re probably going to have to branch out and look for some new friendships.

Not to say your new friendships should be restricted to early retirement people, but safe to say that if you just keep adding more friends who can only hang out on evenings and weekends, you are rapidly going to run out of time to invest in those friendships.

And overall – it’s nice to have a broad spectrum of friendships. People that colour your life with different perspectives, life experience, idea’s and personalities. Who wants 20 of the exact same cookie cutter friends?

So how to find people who are retired.

Well – Mike and I tried to join a beginners bridge club, but turns out it’s restricted to people age 55+. Talk about age discrimination!

In fact, after looking pretty hard, most structured activities during daytime hours are exclusively restricted to those under 5, or those over 55. (Whatever – I didn’t want to join your aqua-aerobics class anyway….I mean, unless you’ll make an age exception….then I’ll join….they really do look like they are having fun.)

So while it’s very easy for me to meet other stay-at-home moms with toddlers, its no so easy to meet early retired moms with toddlers.

All in – after nearly two years of thinking it would be nice to just meet early retirees “organically”, I’m ready to admit that it appears the best way to meet people in similar circumstances is (not surprisingly) is to make use of a local meetup in your community.

Despite the fact that it would be nice to have ER friends to share that common ground with, making new friends in general is really as simple as getting out there and pursuing your own interests.

Whether it’s working with a volunteer program, helping out at your kids school, coaching one of their activities, being a helping parent on the sidelines, or joining your own recreational sports league, anything along those lines will provide a forum to meet people with a common interest, with a set degree of frequency, and in all likelihood, geographic proximity. All of which greatly increases your odds of building new and  meaningful relationships.

The Bottom Line

The key of Early Retirement is to be mindful of your relationships.

Don’t keep friendships that aren’t bringing value into your life, as they will only serve to absorb the very valuable time you’ve worked so hard to free up.

Do get out into your community and participate. New relationships that are compatible with your new chapter of life will naturally form from there.

One of the great aspects of retired life is that it also opens the door to having a broad range of friendships with people of all ages.

Too often in life we restrict our relationships to those who are within a similar age range to ourselves. It’s a societal norm that can cause us to ignore the opportunity to form some really amazing, interesting and influential relationships with people who have substantially more life experience to offer, or conversely, the opportunity to mentor others just getting started.

While it’s sad to think of leaving friendships behind, we can’t all move along the exact same paths, at the exact same time, and therefore growing apart and forming new relationships is all part of the journey.

Celebrate the old, look forward to the new, and move into retirement with the knowledge that your existing relationships are unlikely to stay static for long.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s post, next week we’ll be turning our attention to the area of health and wellness, and what we can all do to improve our odds at enjoying our retired years for as long as possible!

If you haven’t already, hit the Freedom Fastrack button to subscribe, and get our weekly posts delivered straight to your inbox!

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/820499625842336590/