This week my parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. I spent an unforgettable evening with them over a meal beside the dark and shiny Knysna lagoon. I was there on a trip to visit clients; they were on their way to celebrate at the same place they spent the first night of their honeymoon. We reflected on their life together, their choices, and their best moments. It was a privilege.
They both spoke about the other’s continued support and contribution to their personal wellbeing. But they also testified to each other’s personal growth as a source of their happiness, how my dad had become more patient with age and my mum more assertive.
My mum remarked that the last five years in a retirement village in Onrus have been the happiest of her life. Those years were not the easiest. She endured two hip replacements and a long recovery after a bad fall. With my dad’s loving care, she recovered and is once again the centre of our family’s wellbeing.
At lunch with clients the following day, we discussed this phenomenon of increasing happiness with age, and how people will often describe their current stage of life as the happiest one yet. The clients present, mostly retired and still healthy and active, concurred. I have found the same in myself. I am more content, but also more inspired and alive than ever.
However, they also agreed that this upward trend in happiness comes with conditions. Researchers who study wellbeing in later life have found that happiness does not rise automatically with age. It depends on whether a person’s health holds, and on the strength of the social fabric around them, their marriage, family, friendships, community. Where those things are weak or absent, the curve does not rise. Happiness can fall into old age instead of climbing.
Even if we assume that we can afford the care we will need, there is another risk. It is the health of a marriage, the presence of a spouse, siblings and close friends. It is the quality of the relationships that carry us once the busyness of career and child-rearing falls away. Financial security buys you options. It does not, on its own, buy you the relationships my parents have spent sixty years building.
It follows that we cannot simply assume our happiness will remain intact as we age. The risk of poor health rises. So does the risk of losing our most important supports, a spouse, a sibling, a close friend. There is a very real chance of becoming less happy rather than more.
It also follows that this stage after midlife, often the first decade of retirement, deserves to be seen for what it is. This is a window in which we typically still have our health, our freedom, our resources and our loved ones, all at once. That window does not stay open indefinitely. My parents were exceptionally fortunate, my mum’s recovery, my dad’s steady presence, both still at that table beside the lagoon.
Ps: The blog will take a spring break. I hope to return invigorated and inspired.
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Kind regards,
Sunél
