Retiring together, or not

Retirement continues to change in many ways.This is certainly evident in terms of its timing,given the declining rate of labour force par-ticipation among older men between the 1970s and mid-1990s and its reversal in more recent years (Marshall and Ferrao 2007). Likewise, the process appears to be changing, given phenomena such as post-retirement employment (Schellenberg et al. 2006), phased retirement and diverse pathways into retire-ment (Nouroz and Stone 2006). Retirement is also changing in the extent to which it is being navigated by dual-earner couples. Throughout much of the 20th century, older couples faced only one retirement decision—the husband’s. Women who had paid employment during their life typically left the workforce at an early age to care for children and work on an unpaid basis in the home. However, with the dramatic rise and sus-tained participation of women in the paid labour force since the 1970s, retirement transitions of mar-ried couples have been transformed. Increasingly, couples must make two decisions rather than just one and must balance the preferences and con-straints of partners who both make substantial con-tributions to household income. This has added new complexities to retirement deci-sions. Researchers generally agree that couples prefer to retire together, in large part because retirement is more enjoyable when it can be shared with a spous