I was chatting to a young friend the other day and the subject of midlife crisis came up. Married for ten years, she’s 34 and has three small sons. She seemed more or less unaware that many divorces are caused by a husband having a midlife crisis (MLC) around or after the age of 40. I mentioned a neighbour of mine who ran off at 55 with a 24-year-old and my friend laughed and said jokingly that her husband wouldn’t hit 40 and run away from his family.
The conversation passed to other subjects.
I was struck, though, by her entirely insouciant attitude. It was clear that she just couldn’t imagine for a second that her husband could ever have a midlife crisis and leave his family. For her, male midlife crisis is something that happens to other people and the prospect of MLC hitting her family is entirely remote. Only other women’s husbands, she imagines, will experience MLC. Only other women’s husbands will run off and abandon their families.
The trouble is that MLC can happen to anyone – male or female – and happens very commonly to middle-aged men with wives and families. The sequel is often separation followed by divorce, and all the pain incurred by a broken family.
If you want to get a detailed idea of how comon and how destructive MLC can be, just visit the excellent online forum midlife.com. There, thousands of women just like my friend, who think MLC can never harm their families, recount their disbelief when their previously reliable or placid or loving husbands suddenly undergo astonishing personality changes, behave in ways they never behaved before, leave home and often entirely reject their wives, kids, friends and relatives.
In male midlife crisis, husbands are capable of abandoning the children they previously idolised. They can be exceptionally callous and cruel to their wives. Many wives watch astounded as their middle-aged husbands start hanging out with new friends half their age, dressing like teenagers and acting as if they’re going through a bad adolescence. Their interests and tastes may change suddenly and radically. It often becomes all but impossible to communicate with men in MLC as they become illogical and often plain peculiar.
Often a man undergoing a midlife crisis will spend money recklessly, engage in risky sexual behaviours, buy himself a shiny red sports car or Harley Davidson and ditch his wife for a younger woman, often a colleague or an old flame he’s contacted on Facebook or via Friends Reunited.
MLC is a serious and destructive problem and at its root is an acute identity crisis. Middle-aged women can and do experience midlife crises and their MLCs can be just as serious as those experienced by men. MLC however, is far more prevalent among middle-aged men.
Midlife Crisis is a Warped Version of a Normal Midlife Transition
MLC tends to hit men in their late 30s or early-, mid-40s. It can also hit them during their fifties. There is not necessarily any warning sign. This means that many women who have spent 20 or 30 years with a great husband and partner – the father of their children – can wake up, more or less one day, to find themselves dealing with a stranger they can hardly recognise.
Until it happens to you, you simply wouldn’t believe it was possible.
For many people, midlife is a time for re-evaluating and reasssessing their lives. For some people that can be a profoundly uncomfortable exercise. Many of the hopes young men, particularly, have in their youth are likely to have been dashed by midlife. Ambitious projects may have come to nothing. Career prospects may have been disappointed. Midlife can generate a sense that time – so generous during our youth – is starting to run out. These experiences, for people with good or reasonably good mental and emotional health, are manageable. Changes and adjustments can be made. Life adapts to the second stage of life – to midlife – and all is well. A degree of transition in midlife is, in fact, entirely normal and just as natural as it is in adolescence. Midlife marks the point at which most people understand their youth has drawn to a close and a new, more mature phase has begun.
Crisis at midlife, however, is a completely different phenomena. In MLC, life’s disappointments and frustrations are experienced as overwhelming and threatening. The end of youth provokes an identity crisis in which the middle-aged man (and sometimes woman) fights against being middle-aged.
All of us know longstanding, stable marriages that suddenly collapsed and ended in divorce when couples reached their forties or fifties. We all know apparently happy families that disintegrated overnight when the father / husband started an extra-marital affair and subsequently ran off with his young mistress. In midlife crisis, in MLC, what accompanies that behaviour is a peculiar and often completely baffling personality change. The infidelity in itself – the existence of the Other Woman – is not the defining issue. Instead, taking a mistress is one of many new out-of-character behaviours a man in midlife crisis will exhibit as he panics about aging, loss of youth, identity and masculinity.
In Midlife Crisis, Behaviour Becomes Wildly out of Character
Once your husband or partner is in midlife crisis, he’ll change his tastes in everything from food to music to clothes to women. If he even bothers to talk to you, he’s likely to express views which are the polar opposite of the views he held for the first four or five decades of his life. He won’t see anything irrational in that either. He’s likely to want and seek upheaval. He may talk of wanting drama in his life. At the very least, he’ll want change and he may tell you he has to sell your home, move to another continent, change his career diametrically, or marry a woman he’s just met who has two or three children by another man.
He’s also likely to be worried about his hair if it’s thinning, and his body if he feels it’s less muscular than when he was young. Whenever a man joins a gym, or starts going to a gym, at or around 40, 45 or 50, it’s a warning sign. He may tell you he’s simply intending to get fit but there’s very often a whole other MLC agenda. He may also become suddenly and strangely preoccupied with sex. When a man’s sexual behaviour changes in midlife, it’s often because he’s in midlife crisis (MLC) and has begun a secret affair with another woman. He may demand sexual acts that never interested him before – or simply announce that he’s having an affair with another woman and look completely baffled when his wife becomes distraught.
A husband in midlife crisis almost always has another woman. The Other Woman is useful because she is either young, or simply new. That means she has no idea who the MLC male is. Consequently, she can accept whatever he tells her about himself. For example, he may have been stable and married for 20 years and have 3 children. But if he tells his new, Other Woman that he’s a free spirit – a really crazy guy who heeds no rules – she can accept that. She’ll accept his new MLC identity, though it’s often reckless and always unstable. An MLC male will often also drink to excess, experiment with drugs, engage in risky sexual behaviour and spend money he hasn’t got, running up dangerous debts.
Men in midlife crisis become extremely selfish. They develop a huge sense of entitlement. Even if a man has been a doting husband and father for 20 years, once he goes into crisis he will feel that absolutely nothing matters except himself and his needs and desires. Amazingly for his family, he won’t care a jot for his wife, his kids or the wider world. For a man in MLC, it’s suddenly all about him.
Even worse for his wife is that, even as her MLC husband is destroying the marriage and the family, he’ll be blaming her for everything he does. If he has a mistress, it’s his wife’s fault. If he abandons his children, it’s his wife’s fault. In MLC, if a husband fails to get a pay rise, you can be sure he feels certain that it’s his wife’s fault. Men in midlife crisis become irrationally angry and tend to rewrite the history of their marriages. They will often “discover” that they were unhappy with their wives for the past five years. Or ten years. Or twenty or thirty years. Unable to deal with the guilt of destroying their families, MLC men will often accuse their astonished wives of making them unhappy all through their long marriages. Until the wives of MLC men understand the phenomenon of MLC, they are frequently astounded at the grenade which MLC throws into their marriages and families. They tend to think their husbands are unique in behaving so strangely and that perhaps their marriages were simply more weak and fragile than they imagined.
MLC Cannot be Stopped and Cannot be ‘Cured’
For many wives faced with the bizarre problem of MLC, the most pressing question is how to get their previously kind and stable husband back to normal.
Unfortunately, midlife crisis doesn’t work like that. A man in MLC is having a profound identity crisis. It simply doesn’t matter what anyone says to him, or who remonstrates with him, he’ll go through his MLC just as a teenager will go through a stormy adolescence. There’s no short cut. A man in MLC will not ‘get’ any insights offered to him if they don’t fit with the chaos churning in his head. To the outside world, to his wife, kids, family and colleagues it may be obvious that running away with a girl 30 years younger is foolish. Or it may be obvious that leaving home to live with a gypsy woman 20 years older, or running off to marry a Thai prostitute, is pretty crazy. But to the man in MLC, these choices seem perfectly rational and actually essential. Anyone trying to argue against an MLC choice is dismissed. Anyone trying to warn an MLCer against making a mistake is ignored.
One of the most positive resources online for women whose husbands are in midlife crisis is midlifeclub.com Women from all over the world describe their husbands’ personality changes in midlife crisis, discuss their experiences and offer each other support. (There are men too, though fewer, who discuss their wives’ MLCs.) When you hear these thousands of stories recounted over time, you are astonished by the similarities in men’s MLC behaviour – right down to the vocabulary MLCers use. There are also men on the forum who, having gone through their own midlife crisis, explain how addled and fogged their brains were in those MLC years.
The point of understanding midife crisis is that understanding helps you cope with a partner’s MLC more effectively. The best approach to a husband’s midlife crisis is to occupy yourself with you, not him. This is not something that’s immediately apparent. At first, one’s instinct is to help the person who seems to have become insane and who is about to throw away his marriage, family, children’s love and property. But in fact, once your partner / husband is in MLC you can do nothing better than leave him to get on with it and try to protect yourself from the fallout his MLC will inevitably generate. Without a shadow of a doubt, he will be gone for some time – and he may never return as the man you knew, and built your family with. Once in MLC, the man you married is going through a ‘personality earthquake’ and may never be the same again.
Some MLCers, it’s true, do emerge from “the fog” and reconciliation sometimes does happen between husband and wife. But partners often end up divorced while the crisis is in full swing and need to start their relationship again from scratch if the husband emerges from his crisis. Many more marriages end forever in divorce and family break-down because of male midlife crisis, with all the attendant emotional, social and financial pain that that involves. Family homes are lost, children are abandoned, wives are left suddenly single at midlife.
But whatever the eventual outcome of a male midlife crisis, an understanding of the phenomenon of MLC can be a very real help to a wife once her husband’s in crisis. Which is why I would thoroughly recommend a visit to the midlife club at midlifeclub.com If your husband suddenly has an MLC and you’re left reeling, you will find masses of information and support at this site. Once a man is in MLC, there are only 2 possibilities for his wife / marriage. One is divorce; the other is reconciliation. In either case, you will benefit from the discussion at the midlifeclub.com forum. In the first case, because divorce and rebuilding your life are extremely hard to cope with. And in the second case, because reconciling with a cheating, midlife crisis husband is equally hard to cope with.
