Dear LPG, 

I think that most people in the UK will agree that, for some reason, men seem to end up with fewer people around them once they retire than the ladies do, and this often makes for a lonelier life when that time comes.  

Perhaps it is changing now, but I think the average working wife and mother of the 1970s and 1980s were forced to have more interests than men at similar stages. Many of my male work colleagues would spend evenings having a drink on the way home, where we would talk about our children while avoiding the chaos that bedtime at home would bring. There are many more husbands who get involved with all that now, but when I was a dad, I and many of my colleagues avoided all that sort of thing.

I spent so much of my working life focussing on my job, getting promoted and earning more money while often, the ladies of that era did so much more even if they did not have a job. The ladies retiring now might well be the first generation who spent their working lives not being happy to work part-time and wanted a successful career, arguably at the expense of family life. They are now more likely to share, with their partners, the tasks of being there to collect the little ones from school and in the shops on the way home each night before rushing back to get dinner ready. When I go out and about these days, I see as many fathers as possible on the way to school with the children than mums, and there is now no embarrassment when you see a young Dad pushing a pram down the road.

It is funny how priorities change. Life has a habit of leaving a lot of us alone as we get older, and those ex-mums who are, by now, likely to be Grandmothers seem to have so many more commitments than us ex Dads/Granddads who were so much more caught up with our careers back in the day.

So, when I found myself retired, even though I had a list of things I wanted to achieve, despondency and the fact that you have to set your timelines changed my focus and left me with relatively little to focus on.  I was introduced to a few lunch clubs for the elderly. Still, it is hard to go from being one of the world’s workers to being old virtually overnight. There is still the pub, but even for us men, walking into one that might be your geographical local where you have not spent much time over the years and consequently don’t know many of the people is not easy.

It sounds pretty depressing now that I have written all this down, but there is light at the end of this tunnel.

Having got to the other side of this dilemma, I found the hardest thing to do was walk into a club or some unfamiliar setting where you knew no one and introduce yourself. I looked to see what the internet had to say about where to start because I think that many people, even if they were good at meeting people when they were younger, find it hard to turn to someone and just start talking.

RB, Crofton Park.

RB offers a few ideas…

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