My heart is with you, Madmeg. How sad and disappointing! I agree with all the suggestions made. Just want to add that not having a set purpose may be affecting dh badly. Up until 7 years ago, he had work, and then he had fixing up the house. Now he has what? Deciding where to go on holiday? Honing his photography skills? These are great, but he may not see them as being as "necessary" as his prior goals.
He may just need some time to adjust to his new role in life. But I could be wrong. So yes, a health checkup , both physical and mental, is in order. Would he do it? I hope so.
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I despair!
(140 Posts)Could you have a telephone appointment with his Go and ask his GP to call him in for a health check. Gp would then have the background information. You could attend with dh to ensure he answers his doctor honestly...and speak up if he does not.
This seems to be quite a familiar story when men retire. As others have said, there may be a physical reason for your husband's slowness and apparent lack of interest in anything.
I think men often get depressed when they retire. They find it hard to adapt. My D.H. was a nightmare for the first few years. Some days now he just wants to sit and watch TV all day. I have a whole range of activities i do on my own but we do manage to go out together some times. I see retirement as a chance to do all those things I never had time for before but think Mr M. Just sees it as a chance to do nothing. When we are working we don't usually spend a lot of time with our partners so our differences can be magnified in retirement. Would recommend health checks though.
A friend of ours is 73, very fit and active, despite having had a triple bypass last year. (We were all shocked when he had the heart attack, not overweight, always on the go etc.)
Madmeg, it does sound as if your DH either has some sort of depression or has just decided to suddenly be "old", I would think the former is more likely.
Good luck in trying to get him to your GP, I can speak from experience on that front, never did manage to get Mr P to go.
Could you persuade him to see the doc? - or might your family be able to? It certainly seems that this is what is needed.
Definitely sounds like a health problem and depression or, sadly, dementia, both sound likely possibilities.
I would certainly recommend taking all the advice on here if only to rule anything out and be reassured.
A lot of alarm bells ringing here. Could he be suffering from depression or possibly early dementia?
Try to persuade him to go to the doctors and go with him.
He may well have early dementia symptoms, the gradual shrinking of the horizons, the distancing himself from the wider world, the slowing down, the word confusion. Has he seen a doctor for any reason over the last couple of years?
He may also just be enjoying the slowing down of retirement! A bit of slobbing out, sofa surfing, being lazy, getting up late etc or he may have been so wrapped up in his work that he has become unable to follow other interests. He could be BORED!He could also be LAZY and has just managed to disguise this up to now.
Oh dear, so many possibilities. I think you need to eliminate the possibility of dementia before giving in to the temptation of administering a massive boot up the backside !
I agree, it sounds very like depression. The very best of luck.
Sad to read this Madmeg , will he see a Dr ?It could be depression or may be the start of Dementia, it would be a good idea to find out then you will know what you are up against at the moment you are in limbo .good luck
At 71 my OH was fit and able , could walk the legs off me , now 10 years later he is chairbound with Parkinson's Disease , he started by not lifting his feet and downhill from that , so a health check is definitely in order
A health check might be in order
I've been married for almost 45 years. It's not been a brilliant marriage, but we've loved and raised two children, done well in our careers, enjoyed reasonably good health and are not strapped for cash.
Apologies for the long rant.
We took early retirement about 7 years ago and spent the first 4 years bringing our shabby house up to date (mostly done by ourselves). We never really discussed what we wanted to do in retirement but I know he always wanted to improve his photography skills, see a bit of the world and have a model railway (he has most of the kit in boxes). None of it has happened, and he doesn't show any interest in making it, or anything else, happen.
He sleeps 10 hours plus a night, so it's late morning before he gets up, so too late to go anywhere interesting. He thinks that driving 10 miles is a long journey, so being in a rural area means even the next town is too far for him.
He has no plans for the rest of his/our life. It is down to me to organise holidays and he tags along. It is down to me to arrange to visit our girls and grandchildren, and he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing anything with them (they are aged 5 and 3) - he sits in a chair and watches them play. He would happily stay at home every day and potter.
His conversation is non-existent. Today I tried to discuss the success or otherwise of comprehensive schools and he seems to have forgotten what they were, calling them Secondary Moderns, and telling me that our daughters went to grammar schools (they didn't). And this is a man who spent years of his life involved in politics, both local and national, and whose career was in Higher Education. The conversation ended with me in tears cos his arguments were factually wrong and he couldn't see that they were. He told me I was being bossy.
The girls have noticed all this too, and basically have stopped including him in conversations involving anything that requires advice or an opinion - they just ask me, and welcome my input. The most they get from him is "I don't know" or worse, incorrect advice, or even worse a badly-told joke instead that they have heard tens of times before.
Before we took early retirement 7 years ago he talked of developing his photography skills, travelling Europe in our caravan, setting up a model railway (he has all the kit in boxes in the loft). But he's made no effort to pursue any of these. I found him a photography class but after a few sessions he declared it wasn't useful to him. I have drawn up plans to convert our garage for a fabulous model railway but he has barely looked at them saying he is "not sure about it". As for travelling Europe, he now thinks a ten-mile journey is long-distance and suddenly has declared that he has always hated driving - this man had a Triumph Spitfire when I met him!
He is slow and plodding at everything now (he never was fast, but it all seems worse), declaring that "it is bad for you to rush about" and "I like taking my time". Meanwhile I am boiling with rage inside. Even his speech is now laboriously slow, and I've noticed friends losing concentration and wandering off before he has finished his point - which is usually not even interesting.
Everyone thinks he is a "nice man", and he is. He wouldn't ever insult anyone or hurt any living thing. But two friends recently told me "He's a lovely man, but heck, he's hard work isn't he?".
He's nearly 71 (I'm 65). Is this what 71-year-olds are supposed to be like and am I being unrealistic expecting him to have enthusiasm for things? I certainly still have plans and enthusiasm, and could cheerfully take myself off alone to do them, but I'd much rather we did it as a couple, or at least know that if I were off doing something, he would be doing his own thing too.
How do I spend the rest of my life with this bore? Can I chivvy him up in some way to be more lively and positive? When people ask how he is, his standard reply is "Oh, not too bad considering". Considering what? He is fit as a flea.
I say he is as fit as a flea. This is another bugbear (and I apologise again for the length of my post). As I said earlier, his hobby involves politics, so you can imagine that with County Council elections in May and the General Election in June, we have been out delivering leaflets every day. Except I have delivered 80% of them myself, either because he was too tired to come with me, or because he was so slow. I must add that I am not fit. I am more than a little in the obese range on the charts, and he is at the bottom end of "overweight". One particular day we were delivering on a modern estate of semis and I devised a route for each of us that would end up back at the car. If either of us got to the car first, we would carry on and meet the other later down the road. So I did my half, and back to the car. I carried on. And on. And on. By now I was worrying that I was sticking a leaflet through a door he had already done. So I phoned him. Yes, he was fine, he was just round the corner. I had delivered 175 leaflets to his 35. When I queried it with him I was told that his arthritis was playing up. What arthritis? Never been mentioned before. But okay, his knee was hurting. A few days later we were doing another round with the same plan but I made sure that his houses had no steps or steep drives. I did 160 with steps and slopes to his 20 on the flat. His response was "Just because you can go like fury doesn't mean I have to do the same". But surely that isn't normal to have done so little? Is it another example of him having no enthusiasm?
Sorry for the long post, I didn't know what to leave out to give you a proper picture.
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