'Retirement -- twice as much husband and half as much money.'

From Alice Jolly’s novella, A Saint in Swindon (2020)

When I read this sentence I laughed out loud: a pure visceral response to what I’d recently heard a friend tell me was the blight of the retirement life for the wife. It’s a lovely definition of the husband’s return to the home life— and in the hyphen/dash I see the figure of the husband passing over the threshold back into the house — ready to put his feet up and get in the way of the routines of his wife. Jolly’s sentence is a plain and simple sum of the ‘twice’ too-much-amount of husband at home that comes with male retirement. The implication is that her speaker would prefer twice as much money and half as much husband in this witty definition of the emotional accounts of married life.