Work provides more social infrastructure than most people consciously recognize until it’s gone. The daily contact with colleagues — the corridor conversations, the shared projects, the ambient belonging to a community with a common purpose — produces a baseline of human connection that retirement r…
Research is unambiguous on a point that popular culture tends to either ignore or treat as surprising: sexual intimacy remains important to most people well into their 60s, 70s, and beyond. A study of single adults aged 60–83 found that over 97% considered sexual intimacy important in a romantic rel…
Friendship is the relationship category that adults over 50 are most likely to neglect and most likely to regret neglecting. Career demands, family obligations, and the inertia of established social patterns conspire to push deliberate friendship investment down the priority list for decades — and m…
The family relationships of people over 50 are in active reconfiguration in ways that rarely get the attention they deserve. Children who were dependent are now adults with their own lives, opinions, and families. Parents who were independent are now aging into needs that require attention and plann…
Financial issues are among the leading contributors to relationship stress and relationship dissolution at every age, but the specific financial landscape of relationships after 50 is different enough from earlier-life financial dynamics that it warrants its own attention. People over 50 bring to ne…
Illness and caregiving are dimensions of relationships after 50 that arrive with greater frequency and greater weight than at any earlier life stage, and they test relationships in specific ways that health and happiness do not. The relationship between two healthy, independent adults who are choosi…
People over 50 have typically developed a sophisticated set of strategies for avoiding difficult conversations — and an equally sophisticated awareness that those strategies have costs. The colleague whose behavior you addressed obliquely rather than directly, the friendship that gradually cooled be…
Few experiences in a parent’s life are more painful than the realization that an adult child has withdrawn — either completely, in the form of deliberate no-contact, or gradually, in the form of increasing distance, unanswered calls, and a relationship that has been reduced to obligatory holidays an…
“Boundaries” has become one of the most used and most misunderstood words in the popular psychology of relationships. It is frequently invoked as though it primarily means telling other people what they are not allowed to do — a kind of relational rulebook that, if properly published and enforced, w…
Most close friendships don’t end dramatically. They end slowly — through the accumulation of less frequent contact, shallower conversations, gradually more polite and less honest exchanges, and the growing sense that the person you’re having coffee with every few months is someone you used to know r…