Lifestyle

An Illinois Man Who Retired at 55 Couldn’t Wait to Share His Early Mornings With His Wife. Then She Urged Him to Leave Her Alone for the First 2 Hours: “It Sounds Romantic, Right? Well, Maybe It Isn’t”

By Curtis Jones · November 3, 2026

For years, Jim pictured retirement the way many working people do: finally having all that time with his spouse. Then he actually retired, and his wife set one gentle ground rule.

Jim, who lives in a small town in Illinois, says on his YouTube channel that he retired in July 2024 at 55 after nearly 27 years of shift work at an industrial plant. In a video posted Oct. 27 on Jim Living the Retired Life (@jimrinard1969), he describes dreaming about spending quality time with your spouse once the 40-hour weeks end. “It sounds romantic, right? Well, maybe it isn’t,” he said.

He explains what happened in the video “I Love You, But Please Go Away.”

Jim calls himself a morning person. “I get up about 5:00 in the morning,” he said, sometimes 6, while his wife, who goes to bed later, usually gets up around 7 or 7:30.

In his first days of retirement, Jim said, he would have his coffee and his quiet morning to himself. Then his wife would get up, and he “would begin to just hit her with all these things that I’ve either learned or read about or was planning for the day.”

That did not last long. “We come to an agreement really quick by her urging that I just calm down and leave her alone for the first 2 hours,” he said. His reasoning was simple. “I had 2 hours to myself a morning,” he said, and he figured she deserved the same.

Jim said it was not something he had ever thought about before retiring. His advice to viewers is that retired couples will be together far more than they expect, and that it probably will not look the way they imagined. Spouses are still two separate people with their own interests and goals, he said. “You don’t have to have the same hobby,” he said. “There is some advantage to having some alone time for yourself.”

He has found his own. Jim started the YouTube channel, and when it neared 1,000 subscribers, the level at which he said he could start earning money from it, his wife helped him over the line. “My wife became my 1,000th subscriber on the condition that she would never have to watch any of my videos,” he said. He added that he doesn’t think she has ever watched one.

His wife had retired several years before he did, Jim said, to help their daughter with newborn twins. These days the couple babysit a lot, he said, with his wife managing the child care and Jim tagging along.

Older adults generally have more free time. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey for 2025, people 75 and older spent 7.4 hours a day on leisure and sports activities, more than any other age group. The survey’s detailed table shows people 65 to 74 averaged 6.9 hours a day, compared with about 4 hours for full-time workers.

Jim also left work earlier than most. In the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey, conducted with Greenwald Research, the median retirement age reported by retirees was 62, and three in four retirees said they had fully stopped working.

For couples heading into retirement, Jim’s suggestion is to talk it through ahead of time and come to an agreement about how time together and apart will be spent. Viewers shared their own versions. “The opposite for us. She’s up early, I’m not,” one commenter wrote. “Works for us.”

This article is for general information and is not financial or legal advice. Jim’s account of his retirement and marriage is as he described it in his video. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.