Early in his career, John Gottman, a founder of the Gottman Institute, a center devoted to the study of successful marriages, believed that the best predictor of happiness in retirement would be a robust “second identity” for one or both members of the couple outside of work. “So if you were a mechanic but you also sang in the choir, in church on weekends, or you flew hang gliders or something like that, and it was important to you,” Gottman thought, then the pain of the loss of one identity would be dulled by the full emergence of the second.
But research over the years has found only a limited effect of a second identity on happiness in that phase of life. The much more important factor, Gottman told me, is the quality of the marriage before retirement. The Health and Retirement Study, a sweeping national research project now in its 32nd year, found that an unhappy marriage predicts unhappiness in retirement more than declines in wealth or even health, says Mo Wang, a professor at the University of Florida who studies the retirement adjustment.