The loneliness that nobody mentions before you move — anyone else go through this?

Helga, I've read this thread three times now, and I think it's the most honest one on the forum.

What surprised me about the loneliness in retirement is how it hit Sue and me differently. Sue found her people within months: a painting class, two neighbours, a Wednesday coffee that is now an institution. I found the house, the garden and the car. Men of my generation, I've come to realise, were never very good at making friends on purpose. At work it happened by accident, and nobody tells you that when work stops, the accident stops too.

What finally helped was a walking group of mostly retired men from four or five countries, who meet on Saturday mornings and argue about football and pensions in three languages. I nearly didn't go, because it sounded like the kind of thing I'd have mocked at fifty. Now it's the fixed point of my week. So, for the men reading this especially: the recurring thing Kwame mentioned applies to us too. We just have to swallow our pride and turn up.

Ben, thank you for writing that. My husband is exactly the man you describe, and I'm going to show him your post before we move. I think he'll listen to another retired man more than to me.

Small update from me, since this is my thread. The weekly group is still going, and we've added a second fixed thing, a language café on Thursdays, which is humbling but lovely. I sit with a Spanish widow who wants to practise her English and a Dutch retired teacher who corrects everyone's grammar, including the Spanish widow's Spanish. We laugh a lot.

What I'd tell anyone who finds this thread later: the loneliness didn't disappear because of one big change. It faded because of two or three small fixed things, repeated every week until the faces became friends. There was no single day when it lifted. I simply noticed one Sunday afternoon that I hadn't felt that particular ache for a while.

And Ben is right, the pride is the hardest part to get past, for men and women both. Going to a group for lonely people feels like admitting something. But nobody at the table is thinking about that. They're just glad another person came.

Reading this as someone much younger, the pattern is the same. Fixed things, same people, every week. It's almost boring how well it works.

Walking group of retired men arguing about pensions in three languages sounds exactly like my kind of thing. There might be one near us. Thank you, Ben, and thank you for saying the part about pride out loud.