Sue Pimento

My dog Dottie is the best dinner guest I have ever had. She shows up early, eats whatever lands on the floor and has never once asked whether the gravy is gluten-free. She has also never cancelled by text eight minutes before the roast came out of the oven, which is more than I can say for a few of my two-legged friends. Lately I suspect a dog with no table manners is the only regular dinner guest a lot of people my age have left. I read two articles in the Toronto Star recently that backed up my suspicion. Both explored the slow death of the dinner party and, more troubling, the gradual disappearance of socializing from our lives. We’re inviting fewer people into our homes, going out less, joining fewer clubs and spending more evenings alone. Journalist Derek Thompson, digging through decades of lifestyle surveys, found that the share of adults who regularly have a friend over has dropped 70 per cent since 1975. Back then, 42 per cent of people hosted friends or family at least once a month. Today it’s 12 per cent. Somewhere between the TV remote and the self-checkout, we got remarkably good at entertaining ourselves without the inconvenience of involving other human beings. I could blame Netflix, social media, the price of a pound of butter or the sheer exhaustion of planning a menu for someone who doesn’t eat gluten, dairy, carbohydrates or anything that once had a mother. All of them are guilty. For those of us in the retirement chapter, though, something more serious is going on. We’re slowly losing the habit of being together, and for seniors that habit holds up a lot of the house. Unlike an RRSP, friendships don’t grow when you leave them alone. Loneliness Moves In Without Calling First One of the great ironies of retirement is that we spend forty years dreaming about having more time, then discover that time with nobody to share it goes stale faster than an open bag of chips. At work, people come at you whether you like it or not. There are colleagues, customers, office birthdays, the Tuesday meeting that could have been an email and the office character who makes you question the entire hiring process. We grumble about the interruptions, yet they hand us connection, belonging, someone who notices when we don’t show up and a reason to put on real pants. Some of those friendships survive retirement. Plenty of others turn out to have been built around the coffee machine, and they quietly fade the day we hand in our security passes. Then retirement arrives and the whole social scaffolding comes down over a long weekend. The first few months feel glorious. No alarm, no commute, no Tuesday meeting. Just you, your coffee and the delicious freedom of doing absolutely nothing. After more than twenty-five years in banking, I had earned the right to sit quietly without somebody asking me for a sales forecast. Solitude like that is a treat, and the trouble starts when the treat becomes the whole menu. It happens so gradually we barely notice. We skip one invitation because we’re tired and stop hosting because it’s too much work. We promise to call an old friend next week, next week turns into next month, and before long our social calendar has all the excitement of a dentist’s waiting room. Being alone and being lonely are two different animals. Plenty of people who live by themselves have full, noisy lives, and plenty of married couples eat dinner in silence across the same table. Loneliness is the distance between the connection you have and the connection you want, and that distance has a way of widening while we’re busy telling everyone we’re fine. Your Heart Is Keeping Score The consequences go well past having no one to dissect the latest episode of Slow Horses with. Research has linked chronic loneliness and social isolation to higher rates of heart disease, depression, cognitive decline and early death. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness found that poor social connection carries a 29 per cent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 per cent higher risk of stroke. Those are cholesterol-sized numbers, and I have yet to meet a doctor who writes a prescription for Thursday night euchre. We fuss over our blood pressure, bone density and protein intake. We count steps, lift weights, swallow supplements the size of a hockey puck and show up dutifully for every appointment. Friendship rarely makes the checklist. I teach three fitness classes a week, and I’ve learned the squats are only part of what people come for. Some of my regulars arrive early just to chat. They notice when someone is missing, swap recipes, celebrate birthdays and compare notes on everything from knee replacements to grandchildren. They come for the workout and stay for the friends, the laughing and the gossip by the water fountain, which probably burns a few calories of its own. I’m convinced the ten minutes of chatter before class does as much good as the forty-five minutes of exercise that follow, and nobody has ever pulled a hamstring catching up. For anyone who has lost a spouse, lost some mobility or watched friends move to Kelowna or pass on, those connections matter even more. Isolation is sneaky because it feeds itself. The less we see people, the more awkward it feels to see them, and the couch gets a little comfier every year. Nobody Needs a Charcuterie Board Somewhere along the way, having people over turned into a production requiring a menu plan, a deep clean, three rounds of calendar negotiations and the knife skills of a MasterChef finalist. When did friendship start demanding matching dinnerware and a charcuterie board arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree? Whatever happened to putting on the kettle? I grew up in a time when people dropped by. Sometimes they called first and sometimes they didn’t. There was usually a pot of coffee, a tin of something in the cupboard and enough conversation to fill an afternoon. If the house was a mess, you moved the newspaper off the chair and told them to sit down. Dottie, I’ll point out, has never once inspected my baseboards. She has never critiqued the soup, commented on the throw pillows or asked whether the cheese was locally sourced. She simply shows up delighted, which is the entire job description of a good guest. Meanwhile, our friends are sitting at home in their sweatpants wondering why nobody calls. So invite them over anyway. Serve soup, order pizza or make egg salad sandwiches and leave the crusts on. Better still, tell everyone to bring something and call it a potluck. Years from now, the story everyone retells will be the night the tea came out of Marjorie’s nose and the whole table stayed two hours past dessert. And if anyone judges your housekeeping, hand them the Swiffer on their way out. Somebody Has to Send the First Text One of the most telling points in the Star pieces was that people generally enjoy a get-together once they’re actually there. What they’ve lost is the will to organize one. We’re all standing at the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone else to go first, and at our age that can be a long wait. So go first. Retirement hands most of us more control over our calendars than we had while we were working, raising kids and trying to remember whose turn it was to pick up the dry cleaning. Call a friend and suggest a walk. Invite the neighbour for coffee. Start a monthly potluck, a cribbage night or a standing Friday lunch at the diner where the server already knows your order. Join a book club, volunteer, take a class at the community centre or phone the friend you’ve been meaning to call since the Mulroney years. Mix up the ages, too, and don’t limit your guest list to people who remember when television had three channels. Younger friends bring new energy. We bring experience and, as anyone who has followed my campaign against grandsplaining knows, a supply of unsolicited advice we’d be wise to ration. If we’re honest, they could teach us a thing or two, starting with how to get the TV back to the right input after the grandkids leave. And please stop keeping score. Some people are born organizers. Others are thrilled to show up but couldn’t plan a two-car parade. One friend hosts the dinner, another brings the butter tarts, and someone else remembers every birthday or makes the phone call when life goes sideways. All of it counts. If you’re always the one doing the inviting, congratulations, you’ve found your calling. Keep at it. One Invitation, Two Lives You never really know how lonely someone else might be. The neighbour who waves cheerfully from her driveway may be struggling since her husband died. The friend who keeps saying no may be finding the stairs a little harder every month. The fellow from the gym might go home to a quiet house and not say another word to anyone until his next workout. Sometimes the person who turns you down needs a second invitation, one that makes yes easier. Sometimes we’re the ones waiting for somebody to ask. An invitation costs us one phone call and can make somebody’s whole week. I spent my working life helping people prepare for retirement financially. I’ve just published a whole book on it, Your Retirement Reset, and I’ll keep beating that drum. Even so, a healthy RRSP is cold comfort if your world has shrunk to the size of your living room. That’s why my philosophy has always been Hip, Fit & Financially Free. A good retirement runs on money, movement, purpose, curiosity, laughter and people, with a heavy pour on the people. We need friends who make us laugh, challenge our thinking, drag us out for a walk and occasionally tell us we’re full of beans, and we need to be that friend for somebody else. So here’s your assignment. Before Sunday, invite someone to do something. Coffee, lunch, a walk, a bowl of soup or an afternoon visit all count. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, expensive or even especially well planned. Then do it again next week, and the week after that, until somebody starts inviting you back. We spend years making sure our money will last as long as we do. Our friendships deserve the same attention. If the dinner party really is on life support, I nominate our generation to revive it. We’ve already brought back vinyl records, bell-bottoms and pickleball, so a potluck can’t be that hard. Dottie has kindly volunteered to handle cleanup under the table. Don’t retire... ReWire! And for heaven’s sake, put the kettle on and invite somebody over. Sue Further Reading Bradbury, C. (2026, October 10). The lost supper. Toronto Star. Gurney, M. (2026, October 10). Social isolation is becoming a big problem. The solution may be simpler than you think. Toronto Star. My Book is Available for Order: I hope you will consider ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. Published by ECW Press and is available through Indigo or Amazon and McNally Robinson. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it.

In my last article, I wrote about couples retiring together. The dishwasher. The thermostat. The 1,500 Tuesdays. If you are retiring solo, you may have read it with a certain amount of satisfaction, thinking, Thank God I don't have to deal with that. Sorry. This week is about you. There are, admittedly, some advantages to retiring solo. Nobody questions why you bought another pair of golf shoes. The thermostat stays exactly where you left it. If the dishwasher is loaded incorrectly, the list of suspects is short. You can eat dinner at 4:30 or 9:00, watch whatever you want on television, and go to bed with a book without anyone asking when you are going to turn out the light. But retiring solo has its own complications. While you may be living without a partner, you aren't retiring without relationships. In fact, those relationships may matter more than ever. Adult children, siblings, friends and neighbours begin to take on different roles in our lives. Work friendships fade. Social circles shift. Things we once did as two may now have to be done as one. Underneath all of that is a question we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about when we plan for retirement: Who are your people? When Solo Wasn't the Plan There are people who retire solo by choice, people who arrive there after a divorce, and people who would give almost anything not to be there at all. Statistics Canada reported that 4.4 million Canadians lived alone in 2021, representing 15 per cent of adults. Living alone becomes increasingly common as we age (Statistics Canada, 2022). But numbers can only tell us how many people live alone. They can't tell us how they got there, and that matters. For someone who has lost a spouse after decades together, solo life isn't necessarily an exciting new chapter of independence. There is an empty chair at dinner and a quietness in the house that wasn't there before. But I suspect some of the hardest losses are much smaller. There is nobody to ask whether you fed the dog, what time you want to leave, whether you need anything from the grocery store, or what you feel like having for dinner. Nothing profound, just thousands of tiny conversations that made up a life. The older I get, the more I realize how much of life unfolds in those unremarkable moments. We photograph birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and vacations, but sometimes the person drinking coffee across from you on an ordinary Tuesday morning turns out to be the event. For anyone who finds themselves alone because somebody died, I think we need to be careful with our cheerful retirement advice. There is no timetable for rebuilding a life, and grief doesn't respond well to project plans, motivational sayings or well-meaning people telling you it's time to "get out there." Eventually, though, perhaps the question begins to change. "How do I live without this person?" can slowly become "What might my life become now?". That isn't replacing anyone. It's continuing, carrying them with you. Living Alone and Being Lonely Are Not the Same Thing You can live alone and have a wonderfully full life. You can also be married and profoundly lonely. A second toothbrush has never been a reliable measure of human connection. Still, retirement removes something many of us didn't realize work was providing: a surprising number of people. Think about an ordinary working day. Someone says good morning. Someone asks about your weekend. There is coffee, hallway chatter, gossip, meetings, lunch, and the person who drops by your office to tell you something that absolutely could have been an email. None of those interactions seemed particularly important at the time, but together they created the social fabric of the day. Then one Friday you retire, and come Monday morning, most of it is gone. Research supports what many retirees discover instinctively. Social isolation and loneliness are related but not the same. Low social participation among older Canadians has been linked to poorer health and a higher risk of mortality. In other words, those seemingly insignificant interactions may not be so insignificant after all (Gilmour & Ramage-Morin, 2020). I see a version of this in the fitness classes I teach. People don't just arrive, exercise and leave. They come early. They talk. They know who has a bad knee, who just got back from Florida, who has a grandchild who got into university, and who hasn't shown up for a couple of classes. Sometimes I think the ten minutes before class are every bit as important as the class itself. Someone is expecting you, and there is something wonderfully ordinary and incredibly important about that. Who Are Your People? Couples tend to have a built-in default. Something happens, and you tell your spouse. You need a ride home after a medical procedure, and there is an obvious candidate. You have a terrible day, hear a ridiculous story, or get wonderful news, and you know who you're going to call first. When you're solo, that role can gradually shift to a best friend, sibling, neighbour or adult child. Before long, one person has become the emergency contact, travel companion, dinner date, sounding board, tech support and the person expected to answer the phone when something goes bump in the night. That's a fairly demanding job description. Your daughter may adore you, yet not want to be your entire social life. Your best friend may love travelling with you, but occasionally want to travel with someone else. Your sister may happily drive you home from a colonoscopy. Friendship has limits, but apparently that isn't one of them. Maybe the answer isn't to find your person at all. Maybe it's to find your people. Who could you call at 2 a.m.? Who makes you laugh? Who would notice if you hadn't heard from them for a few days? Who knows when you need company and when you need to be left alone? Who can tell you you're being ridiculous and still survive the experience? We have spent decades being told to diversify our investment portfolios. I think our relationship portfolios deserve the same consideration. And there is another side of independence that we don't talk about enough. Independence is wonderful, right up until the day you get tired of it. There is a difference between being perfectly capable of handling something yourself and occasionally wishing you didn't have to. The furnace breaks, the car won't start, or you have an important medical appointment, and, of course, you can deal with it. Sometimes what you miss isn't help. It's backup. Someone who simply says, "I'll come with you," even though you both know you could go alone. Your Children Love You. They Also Have Lives. Retirement can rewrite the relationship with adult children, too. You retire, and they hear: Mom has time. Suddenly there are grandchildren to pick up, dogs to sit, deliveries to receive, and errands that somehow land on the desk of the person who no longer has one. Much of this can be wonderful. Having more time for family is one of retirement's great gifts, and being involved with grandchildren can bring enormous joy and purpose. But helping can quietly become being on call, just as needing companionship can quietly become expecting your children to provide it. Nobody has necessarily done anything wrong. The relationship changed, and nobody held a meeting. So maybe hold one. Your children can be an important part of your retirement without being responsible for creating it, and you can be important in their lives without automatically becoming the unpaid Uber driver, dog walker, daycare provider, or the person who waits between noon and 5:00 for the new dishwasher to arrive. Love each other. Help each other. Just don't confuse retirement with unlimited availability. Learning to Occupy the World as One Then there are all the little firsts. The first restaurant. The first trip. Maybe, eventually, the first date. You walk into a restaurant and say, "Table for one." The host smiles brightly. "Right this way," and off you go, past the tables by the window, past the cozy booth, and around the corner to a tiny table directly outside the noisy kitchen door. Apparently, this is where they keep the single people. "Table for one" can be funny until you remember that, for some people, it used to be a table for two. But I wouldn't give up restaurants because of it. Sit at the bar. Bring a book. Become a regular somewhere. Ask another solo friend to join you sometimes, and other times don't. Take yourself somewhere nice because good food and a decent table aren't benefits reserved for couples. I especially wouldn't overlook the neighbourhood diner or watering hole. These places often become little communities. One of the women in my spinning class is in her 80s and started a euchre club that became so popular that she now has a waiting list. I love that story because she didn't wait for someone to invite her into a social life. She created one and then invited everybody else. Sometimes community isn't something you find. It's something you build. Travel requires a little nerve, too. There is something liberating about choosing where you go, when you get up, and whether visiting six museums in one afternoon sounds fascinating or like a human-rights violation. Then you discover the single supplement, the travel industry's charming way of saying, "Congratulations on your independence." That will be another $1,800. There may also be a moment when you see something beautiful and instinctively turn to share it with someone who isn't there. That's the part the travel brochures don't mention. But there may also come a morning when you realize you've travelled to somewhere you wanted to go, figured it out, and had a wonderful time. Both feelings can be true. And then, perhaps, there is dating. If you're my vintage, you may remember the old Canadian Togethers dating-service commercial: "Adult, alone, unattached? Tired of the bar scene?" I can practically hear it. Back then, joining a dating service seemed positively daring. Today, strangers can reject one another from the comfort of their sofas with a single swipe. Apparently, this is progress. Some people would rather have another colonoscopy. Others discover, happily, that companionship, romance and sex did not get the memo about retiring at 65. Enjoy it. Take your time. Keep your head along with your heart. Being 70 does not make everyone trustworthy. Age brings wisdom, just not universally. Make Yourself Expected Somewhere The more I think about solo retirement, the less I believe the goal is to ensure you're never alone. Solitude can be wonderful. There is pleasure in having your own space, your own routines, and no one asking why you're eating cereal for dinner. What matters is having somewhere you belong. Become a regular at the coffee shop where they know your order. Join the fitness class where someone notices when your bike is empty. Volunteer somewhere that counts on you. Make the lunch date. Know your neighbours. Join the euchre game, or, like my spinning participant, start one. Put things on the calendar, because Tuesday can quickly become Friday when nobody expects you anywhere. And don't just build a life full of people you can call when you need something. Build one where people call you. Be the person who remembers a birthday, walks someone's dog when they're sick, makes the lasagna, gives a ride, listens to the story, or notices when someone else hasn't shown up. There is enormous purpose in being needed. Connection isn't simply having a support system. It's participating in other people's lives and allowing them to participate in yours. The Public Health Agency of Canada identifies retirement, illness and the loss of a spouse as later-life transitions that can strain our sense of independence and connection, and encourages older adults to stay connected with family, friends, health professionals and community organizations (Public Health Agency of Canada, n.d.). That sounds very official. I would translate it more simply: keep showing up. And if your world starts to feel smaller, pay attention. If loneliness becomes persistent, tell someone. Call a friend. Talk to your doctor. Look for a community group. In Canada, 211 is a free and confidential service that connects people with government and community-based, non-clinical health and social services. In most of Canada, you can simply dial 2-1-1 (211 Canada, n.d.). Asking for company isn't imposing. You may find the other person was hoping someone would call, too. We spend a lot of retirement planning asking whether we have enough money. If you're retiring solo, perhaps there are two other questions worth asking just as seriously: Who are my people? And whose person am I? Maybe that's the real difference between retiring solo and retiring alone. One describes who lives in your house. The other describes how you live in the world. So build your community before you desperately need one. Be brave enough to walk into the restaurant, book the trip, take the class, call the friend, and occasionally admit you'd like some company. Create reasons to get dressed in the morning and places where someone notices your arrival. More importantly, create a life in which your absence would leave a small hole in someone else's day. And if the restaurant tries to seat you beside the kitchen, smile and ask for the table by the window. The couples get the dishwasher. Surely we can give the solos the good table. Don’t retire... ReWire! Sue My Book is Available for Order: I hope you will consider ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. Published by ECW Press and is available through Indigo or Amazon and McNally Robinson. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it.

Last month, I found a jar of mustard at the back of my fridge with a best-before date of 2019. It looked and smelled fine. My wife watched me unscrew the lid like I was about to eat gas-station sushi, and I threw the mustard away. I wish Canadians gave their retirement plans the same hard look, because most of the advice we hand people over 55 carries a best-before date of 1990, the year my parents' retirement began. They met at the grocery chain where they both worked, and each left with a defined-benefit pension: a monthly cheque that arrived for the rest of their lives, regardless of what the stock market did. Their employer bore the investment risk. Their job was to show up at the retirement party and eat the cake. That plan stood on three legs: a workplace pension, CPP and Old Age Security, and a paid-off house you would eventually sell to trade down. In 1991, a 65-year-old Canadian man could expect to live about 16 more years and a woman about 20. A plan built for that stretch did its job. Look at those legs today. Only 37.7 per cent of paid workers in Canada belonged to a workplace pension plan of any kind in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, and coverage has been declining for two decades. For most people, the cheque that used to arrive like the newspaper has been replaced by a statement that reads like a horoscope. CPP and OAS were never meant to carry anyone alone. That leaves the house. A 2023 CPP Investments survey found that only 45 per cent of Canadians have a financial plan for retirement, yet about three in four Canadians aged 55 to 74 own their homes. For millions of families, the house was the plan: buy it, pay it off, and burn the mortgage papers in a roasting pan. The old playbook still has one instruction for that asset, unchanged since 1990: sell, move, and hope the condo is cheaper. Most like to stay in their neighbourhood. In Toronto, they usually can't afford to. The calendar changed, too. My parents' plan was built for that 15-to-20-year stretch. Today, Canadian financial planning standards give a 65-year-old couple an even chance of one living to 94, a retirement closer to 30 years. That is about 10 extra years of groceries, property tax and dental work, and nobody gave the plan a raise to cover them. Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, put his finger on it in his 2024 letter to investors: we have worked hard to help people live longer and much less hard to help them afford those extra years. Those years arrived just as the guaranteed pension cheque was disappearing, a change Fink called "a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty." When the man in charge of the world's largest pile of other people's money says so, I'd put down the mustard. Our system does a fine job of helping people pile up money, then goes quiet the moment they need that pile to become a paycheque. We hand people a savings target, a risk questionnaire and an RRSP deadline. On their last day of work, we hand them a bouquet. How much do you withdraw? Which account first? What happens to your OAS when your RRIF minimum pushes you past the clawback threshold? Where does the house fit? The old plan shrugs. The strain shows. Statistics Canada reports that among Canadians aged 65 to 74 who worked in 2022, almost half did so out of necessity. After a late-life divorce, my mother returned to part-time work at a grocery store. She had done everything the old plan asked of her. The usual reply is that people just need to save more. Telling a 72-year-old to save more is like telling a marathoner at kilometre 40 to train harder. An up-to-date plan opens with the question that matters at 65: how will this money cover the bills for 30 years? Home equity goes on the balance sheet at the first meeting, pulled from the drawer marked "emergencies and inheritance." Ninety-one per cent of Canadians say they want to live independently in their own homes for as long as possible, so a good plan offers ways to do that beyond a For Sale sign. And the industry that spent 40 years teaching people to save owes them the same energy in how to spend it. I have a modest proposal for the banks. Every February, you run RRSP season, complete with sailboat commercials. Give us an RRIF season to match, with the same budget, and put a drawdown plan in front of every client who turns 65. And while you are at it, switch the word "savings" to "spending" or "paycheque" on our bank account. Take your retirement plan out of the back of the fridge and check the date on the lid. If it says 1990, you know where it goes. My wife will be happy to show you the garbage. This Opinion Article was published in the Business Section of the Saturday Star and online Toronto Star on October 17, 2026,