As a GG can I bring a little reality to all this confusion.

TGMarla is retired.
TGMarla's wife has a very demanding job, apparently over 6 days in the week. Not only is it very demanding but she has very little time for her own pursuits nor time with her family.

The elements I am stressing here are the wife's earning and employment capacity versus TGMarla's apparent joyous lifestyle of total feminine indolence and indulgence. Nowhere does she state how much housework, cooking or domestic duties she performs while flouncing around for hours on end. Nor whether she has any outside pursuits which make for a healthy, balanced lifestyle.

Now those of you in relationships will have gathered that we women are funny creatures. Hormones awash, and when can you be sure of what we really think?

If Marla presents her wife with details of how she would prefer to spend her time, her wife is going to go straight to a comparison of how she, the genuine woman, spends hers.

This comparison may be be detrimental to Marla, particularly if her wife feels aggrieved that she is bearing an unfair burden of both work and domestic duties.

Now womens' ideas of fairness are inconvenient at best. How many of you have got a roasting for parading your latest shade of nailpolish whilst your wife brushes the yard/cleans the toilet/scours the pans etc?

The major issue here is retirement expectations versus the practicalities of a wage-earning partner. Presumably Marla's wife works because Marla's pension is not great enough to afford for her not to. Therefore the wage earning wife gets the major opinion . That said there are many couples on another site I belong to who have worked out a compromise. Some of this depends on how rooms are used in the home, or when family and friends can drop by unannounced, or how much time is spent together outside the home.

Therefore if Marla weighed up what would be a reasonable amount of time to dress (NOT days at a time, and sometimes much less than the full regalia) BEFORE broaching the subject with her wife she would have covered all the female objections I have pointed out here.

A word of warning. If Marla's wife gets wind of the fact that much of joint future retirement is going to be spent dressed, therby drastically reducing her expectations of things that can be done in retirement (travel, new hobbies, socialising, visiting family etc) the conversation is going to be tricky.

Maybe some honesty now would be worth avoiding future misunderstandings....?