A Retirement Dilemma For Seniors

Bob Waskover never really planned his retirement.

"I look in the mirror, and I don't see myself as 75," he says. "I still think I'm 40."

Then one day, 14 years ago, he stopped working and started playing, assuming his new partner in fun would be his wife.

"I thought it would be like it was before, before I retired," he says. "When she was just a housewife and whenever I wanted, she was there."

But, as CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, Barbara Waskover had other ideas.

She took on not one, but three new careers as a full-time volunteer, a speech-maker and a child advocate.

"I was resurrecting myself," she says. "I was no longer just a mother. I became a person. I found me."

And Bob resented it, picking on her about everything - down to the way she folded his socks.

For the first time, their marriage was in trouble.

Bob says he was frustrated and bored, and he took it out on her.

"Well I just said to him, 'You either get a job, or I'm going to get a lawyer,'" says Barbara.

And she was serious.

He's retired. She's working. It's so common among today's seniors there's even a term for it now: half-retirement.

More than two million American couples are now the first generation to go through it.

There is no script to work from, so they have to improvise.

Harry and Nancy Everhart are making three major adjustments at once: their recent move from Pennsylvania to Florida, his early retirement as a middle-school teacher and her new career as a college professor teaching library science.

She's only 49 and could work for another 25 years.

"I feel like I'm just getting started in what I've wanted to do my whole life," she says.

Harry says so far, so good.

But their adjustments are just beginning.

"Nancy makes a lot more money than I do," he says. "She has more voting rights than I do."

In the end, the Waskovers worked it out.

Bob got a part-time job selling insurance -- and lightened up. And they both discovered something.

"We're much more interesting to each other," says Barbara

And she says Bob is not picking on her as much.

"It took years but it's going to be a happy ending," says Bob.

And that's everyone's retirement dream.

More and more, it's also a work-in-progress.