My husband completely covered up the fact that he retired two years ago and has been pretending to go to work ever since. He made up stories about work events. I only found out by seeing the pension payments into our joint account. He is 68 and has reapplied on spec to his old company. He hasn’t had any response but continues to wait for one.
When asked about what he does, he says he sits in cafes and does crossword puzzles. He is always on his phone. He delays and denies talking about being on the pension and any activities such as volunteering, doing courses etc. How can I reboot open communication?
Eleanor says: Oh this makes me sad for you both. It reminds me of people in the Depression who got laid off and didn’t tell their families, just took their lunch in the paper bag and sat on a park bench.
Obviously he’s deceived you, and that’s got to feel bad – you might well be quite angry. As well as the surprise discovery that he’s retired, there’s the equally tough surprise that, for reasons totally opaque to you, he didn’t want or feel able to say so.
That’s a drastic thing to learn about your communicative environment! This was a big deception. It’s not as obviously explicable as, say, a lie to get out of trouble. And it doesn’t even sound as if he’s scrambling to explain things now that he’s been discovered; you said he still blocks efforts to talk about the pension. I think you’re right to feel communication needs a hard reboot.
My question (and I imagine yours) is: what did he want or need that made lying feel like the best way to get it? It might help to start there by quite literally just listening. The listening phase of acknowledging each other in relationships is very different from the adjudication phase, and different again from the fixing and improving phase. You mentioned a number of things from the latter camps – he doesn’t want to talk about classes, activities, courses, he’s delaying and denying. Separate and before that, there’s a task of understanding: why didn’t he want to share this?
I wonder if it might help to quarantine the questions of “what now” and “who’s right”, and focus on seeing if you can learn why he didn’t want to share this. I’m thinking of old school listening techniques like saying his point back to him, seeing if you can accurately sum up why such-and-such is important to him. You might be surprised by how illuminating this can be.
You think you’re saying back exactly what the other person just said, then they’ll say no, it’s not quite that, it’s this instead. Mutual chipping away gets you closer to proper understanding.
I know that’s a lot of work to put on you, and it means temporarily setting aside legitimate criticisms. But the pragmatics of communication often come apart from the morality of adjudication. You’re in a position now where something in him feels that talking isn’t worth it. I’m not saying that’s right – it might not be. It might be wildly unfair. But if it’s to change, he needs to get the sense that talking might produce different results than the ones he’s expecting. One way to do that is to just keep saying: this has revealed something really weird in our communication and I hope it can be different.
If he fights you on even that, you could tell him how this makes you feel – lonely, like he doesn’t trust you with things that are important to him. That way, continuing to not talk isn’t just framed as his preference. It makes it clear that, by clamming up, he’s actively continuing to do something that hurts you.
