Why We started a RETIRED ACTIVE WOMEN Community

Now we can have a community that's about fun...not about our jobs!

When I excitedly announced my impending retirement, I pictured a stress-free life filled with lots of new friends, of traveling the world with friends, meeting friends for food and entertainment, reading for pleasure and talking about books with friends, taking up cycling (on an electric bike) and exploring my town with friends, taking fun classes with friends and chatting with friends several times a week.

In other words, I pictured my retirement being full of fun, surrounded by friends.

Then an already retired former colleague stopped my musings in their tracks. She told me to make sure I have all my friends solidly in place before I retire, because it’s almost impossible to make any new friends afterwards. She said no one tries to make friends with older women, and that most people actually try to avoid us.

What??? That doesn’t sound like fun … or very friendly.

I told my sister, who was also nearing retirement, about what my retired work colleague said. We decided we needed other opinions on the matter, so we asked more retired women we knew about their experiences with friends in retirement.

“I thought I’d have so much more time to hang out with friends, but unless they’re also retired, they don’t have time for me.” “My former work friends and I don’t have the same interests anymore. When I do see them, I really don’t care about their office politics, complaints and gossip, and they don’t care about my retirement. I end up pretending to be interested in my old work place just so I can have someone to talk to.” “Senior women are invisible to the world. You’ll see.” “I wish I hadn’t retired. Working myself to death was better than being alone.” “I thought my husband would be my company when I retired, but you can’t just talk to one person all the time. Where are all the other women who need more friends besides their husbands? Am I the only one?”

No, you’re not the only one!

Retirement was sounding awful, and not the way my sister or I wanted to spend the rest of our lives!

So the way we saw it, we had three choices:

1. Don’t retire.

2. Retire and not have much companionship outside our family.

OR

3. Create a community that would share in the type of retirements we want to experience: active, stimulating, fun and with lots of friends!

We chose door number three!

So after over a year of planning and building our website that will create the retirement community we want to experience, and finally retiring myself…

Here we are!

Welcome to Retired Active Women, where it is our intention to provide varied opportunities for women who are retired, nearing retirement and/or are over 50-years-old to interact with each other, experience companionship, be active, make friends, support each other and have fun both online and in person as we approach and enter our retirements. We have live online discussions, book clubs, support in creating local activities, international group trips, free events, volunteer ideas, forums for you to discuss a variety of topics, read or write blogs, a place to advertise your own post-retirement business to other retired women and so much more! Oh, this is going to be so much fun!

We invite you to join us at www.retiredactivewomen.com.