Children going to university is a bittersweet experience for many couples. While this key rite of passage is often celebrated – a marker of being a successful parental couple, it can also mean the loss of a parent’s major focus in life – the day-to-day role of school runs, endless loads of washing, and ferrying children to and from activities.
For many couples, the role of parenting whether it’s shared roughly equally or more the focus of one partner, dominates their lives, and when it’s ‘over’, if only for a ten week university term, it can leave a void in parents’ lives. While for some, this is an opportunity to socialise more, to have more freedom, even to holiday out-of-season, for others it can create a sudden realisation that the ‘couple’ relationship, distinct from the parental couple, has been neglected for some time. Partners can feel they have little in common with each other, in contrast to early on pre-family. They may have already developed quite separate interests, even friendship groups. Parenting remained the uniting factor, but that now is lost.
Not surprisingly, this life stage is often when couples apply for couples therapy. It can provide an opportunity to rediscover some of the qualities in each other, and in the relationship, which brought them together in the first place. Since many couples are having children later – in their late thirties and forties – the ‘empty nest’ can also be a precursor to retirement, when the couple will have even more time on their hands and start to wonder how much of it will be spent with one another. Work may be needed to help uncover or rediscover the meaning of the relationship, not simply the way time is spent.
This phenomenon can often start much earlier than when the last or only child leaves home. Mark and Ruth are a couple I worked with who have three children, now aged 18, 16 and 10. The wide age range seemed to reflect their long term emphasis on family and parenting, with the intimate or romantic couple part of them being less of a priority. In their case, it was the first child, not the last, that created anxieties about the future – where would they be left when all three had flown, even though this was still a few years away. And what would retirement entail?
In couples therapy, they gradually were able to rediscover some of the things that brought them together in the first place – a set of common values which they had started to taker for granted, and some shared passions for music and the arts which had been largely dormant for some time. They were also able to move their mind sets in relation to parenting from focusing solely on the activities of parenting to the sense of emerging achievement of having done a pretty good job, respecting the way they had split their roles along quite traditional homemaker and breadwinner lines.
As with all my blog posts, names and identifying details have been changed.