The differential impact of retirement on social and emotional loneliness

Abstract Loneliness is relatively common among older adults and variation in loneliness can partially be explained by the occurrence of various life events. One such event is retirement. However, research on the impact of retirement on loneliness has yielded conflicting results. We address this by studying the impact of retirement on within-person change on two dimensions of loneliness: social and emotional. We argue that retirement might have opposing implications for these two dimensions of loneliness, which can thus serve as an explanation for the contradictory results reported in the literature. Furthermore, we include partner status and partner’s retirement status as factors that may determine the size and direction of the effect of retirement. We propose five hypotheses based on detailed theoretical reasoning, which we investigate using 3-wave large scale (n = 5,238) panel data from the Netherlands, collected in 2015, 2018, and 2023. The results show that retirement only affects emotional loneliness, not social loneliness. Among people with a partner, emotional loneliness increases following retirement, while it decreases among unpartnered retirees. We interpret this finding as retirees being quite capable of substituting the socially integrative function of work, and that retirement can provoke conflict and expose pre-existing issues within romantic relationships.