They’ll get up in the morning, have breakfast, pick up a prescription at the doctor’s, go to the supermarket – always together. Many older couples spend 24 hours a day together, some of them cramped in a small flat much of the time.
Despite their spatial closeness, emotional distance between them may grow – and perhaps the nagging realisation that they no longer have anything to say to each other.
“Often, too, when one’s on the phone [and the other within earshot], they’ll press the speaker button. So not even phone calls give them something new to tell each other,” says Michael Vogt, a professor of social work at Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany.
It is not unusual that couple relationships evolve this way as the partners grow older, he says, since their social contacts increasingly thin out: “Friends die, their kids live far away.”
