Reconnecting as Empty Nesters

Having children should bring couples together—and it’s true that with children there is never any shortage of topics of conversation. However, what happens when your children leave home, and it’s just the two of you again? Many couples then realise that the only topics that they have discussed for years have been child-related. They no longer know each other as people, only as parents.

Worse, children leaving home often coincides with other life upheavals, such as menopause, and your own parents becoming more frail and needing more help or care. This can result in fewer opportunities to talk about anything that really matters—and this in turn can lay down future problems in your relationship. This page discusses how you can reconnect with your partner as ‘empty nesters’ and rebuild your relationship in a way that will work for you both into retirement.

What are ‘Empty Nesters’?

‘Empty nesters’ are people whose children have grown up and left home.

In other words, this is not people who chose to remain childless, or were unable to have children. This is a group who chose to have children, but whose children are no longer living in the parental home.

It is an interesting stage, because this group has spent at least 18 years—and possibly considerably longer if they have several children—with one or more children or young adults living at home. This is almost certainly considerably longer than they were together before children came along to change the dynamic. The abrupt change from family home to empty nest can be a very hard transition to make—often at least as hard as the original change from childless couple to parents.

There are many challenges that arise when your children leave home, including:

• Your sense of identity may be adrift. You have spent 20 years being someone’s parent. Your time and energy have been focused on bringing them up, getting them to clubs or school on time, ensuring that schoolwork was completed, and that they were happy and well-rounded people. What is your focus now?

• Your home may seem too big. The family home that seemed perfect or even too small when full of teenagers may now seem much too big. You may also find that the maintenance requirements are a struggle to manage.

• You miss your children. It’s natural to miss someone that you have lived with for so many years. They are an enormous part of your life.

There is more about how to manage on a personal level when your children leave home in our page on Coping When Your Children Leave Home.

However, there is also another challenge. You may well have drifted into being just parents, not a couple.

The energy required to parent children and young people is phenomenal. Many people find that parenting takes all their time and energy, and they no longer have any time for themselves or each other, particularly when their children are small.

This can mean that they drift apart, except as parents. They still talk, but only about the children. When their children leave home, that topic of conversation is suddenly no longer available—or at least, not as necessary. What are you going to talk about now?

It is time to start reconnecting as a couple, not just as parents.

Rebuilding Relationships

The process of building a new relationship as empty nesters is infinitely easier if you have started it before your children leave home.

Indeed, it is ideal if you have managed to maintain your relationship as a couple all through your parenting years. However, we all know that the world is not an ideal place.

As your children grow up, they still need you—but they need your immediate attention less. You can leave them at home alone and go out for a couple of hours together to do something you enjoy. You can even go away overnight if you want.

Take these opportunities, and spend time together, just the two of you.

This will help you to remember why you like each other enough to have chosen to be together.

Hopefully you have grown together over the years, rather than apart.

However, if you find that you don’t really know each other any longer, there is an easy answer: get to know each other again.

Ideas for getting to know each other again include:

1. Talk about small things

You probably used to talk about everything: what you did at work, what you liked doing, what you were reading or watching, how you felt about everything under the sun. Over time, that may have stopped.

Start the process again by talking about the small stuff.

Make up for the last few years of relatively lack of curiosity by talking about everything: the books that you have read and really enjoyed, or small things that you have done or wanted to do, and the purchases or activities that have given you joy. Reconnect on the little things that make you both tick, and enjoy finding out about each other again.

2. Be prepared to talk about the big things too

Connect on the small things—but you also need to be able to talk about your feelings.

How are you managing the process of your children leaving home? How do you feel about the years to come? Are you positive or a bit frightened about how you will cope? Do you want to downsize or are you delighted to have all that space?

Talk about what really matters to you both, and make sure that you understand and can support each other.

3. Do something you used to enjoy—together

Most people find that there were things that they used to do together before children that were impractical once children came along. Sometimes it may have been possible to restart those activities later, with the children—but not always.

You now have the opportunity to go and do those things again.

You already know that these are things you enjoy—so what’s stopping you?

4. Do something new together

What are the things that you have always wanted to do, but which were too expensive with children in tow?

There are so many things that are just too expensive for three or more people, or impractical with under 18s.

Now is your chance to try them out!

Whether your taste runs to theme parks, pottery classes, or city breaks abroad, you can try them out, and find new interests together—and once again, the key word is ‘together’. It’s no good trying to reconnect by both acquiring new, but separate, hobbies.

5. Get intimate again

There is at least a reasonable chance that your sex life has dwindled over time. It is hard to stay interested in a house containing children and then teenagers because of the threat of interruption.

Now is your chance to rekindle your sex lives.

This may be complicated by some of the pressures imposed by perimenopause and menopause (and our page on Perimenopause and Health explains more). However, without getting into too much detail here, there are plenty of ways round most of the issues via a good pharmacy or a consultation with a doctor.

A Final Thought: What if Reconnecting Doesn’t Work?

This is a very real fear for many people: you have grown so far apart in the years of parenting that you no longer have anything in common.

Indeed, ‘silver splitters’ and ‘silver separators’ (older people divorcing) are a recognised phenomenon. However, the data suggest that this is nothing new, and also that it is not really changing (see box).

In other words, you might become part of the statistics about divorce among empty nesters. However, if you put in a bit of work together on your relationship, you are more likely to become part of the much larger group of people remaining happily married into retirement and beyond.