Midlife crisis is a little researched but common problem. The jokey image of a man in midlife crisis (MLC) is that he’ll dress like a teenager, start working out all of a sudden, buy himself a shiny red sports car or Harley Davidson and possibly ditch his wife for a younger girl, often a colleague or old flame rekindled by Facebook or Friends Reunited.
All those factors may indeed come into play. But MLC is a serious and destructive problem and at its root is a searing identity crisis. Although middle-aged women can experience midlife crises just as severely as men do, MLC is far more prevalent among men.
Midlife Crisis is an Extreme Version of Normal Midlife Transition
MLC generally hits a man with little warning in his late 30s or early 40s but can also hit during the fifties. Midlife is a time when most of us fairly naturally assess our lives and for some people that can be an uncomfortable exercise. Many of the hopes held in our youth may have been dashed by midlife – projects may have floundered, career ambitions may be unfulfilled. And midlife brings a natural sense that time is running out. However disppointing or frustrating those experiences may be, most people with reasonably good mental and emotional health can come to terms with them, perhaps making some changes or adjustments, and life goes on. In fact, a degree of transition in midlife is normal and necessary just as it is in adolescence.
Crisis at midlife is altogether different. In MLC, life’s disappointments and frustrations are experienced as overwhelming and threatening. Everyone knows longstanding and apparently stable marriages that suddenly broke down and ended in divorce when the couple reached their forties or fifties, families that fell apart because the husband began an extra-marital affair and subsequently ran off. In MLC, what goes along with that behaviour is a peculiar, dramatic and often baffling set of personality changes. The infidelity in itself is not the defining issue. Rather, the acquisition of a mistress is one of numerous symptoms of chaos and confusion in a man’s mind as he feels totally panicked by ageing, loss of youth, detachment and instability.
His tastes in just about everything from music to food to clothes are likely to change almost overnight. He’s also likely, if he talks to his wife and family at all, to express views which are the exact opposite of the views he held for the first half of his life. He won’t see any inconsistency in that either. He’s likely to want and cause upheaval, may insist on selling the house or moving to another continent or becoming a carpenter when he’s always been an English lecturer. Or he may just run away like a scalded cat.
He’ll be extremely concerned about his hair, his looks and his body and preoccupied with sex. His sexual behaviour with his wife may change, subtly or dramatically, making her wonder what’s influencing him. He may become highly secretive or simply announce he’s seeing another woman and look baffled that his wife is so upset. There is almost always another woman in the equation when a man has a midlife crisis. Her value is often simply either that she is new and so she doesn’t know who has been up until now or she’s from his youth and brings his ‘young’ identity back to him. Either way, she’s chosen because she accepts his new persona, which is often reckless and always unstable. He may also drink, experiment with drugs, engage in risky sexual activity and spend money he hasn’t got.
Men in MLC become extremely selfish and develop a limitless sense of entitlement. He may have been a doting husband and father for 25 years but in crisis nothing matters except himself and his needs and wants. Not his wife, not his children and not the wider world.
Even worse for his wife is that she’ll get the blame for how he feels. Men in midlife crisis are often very angry and rewrite the history of their marriages, ‘discovering’ that they were rarely or never happy. Unable to deal with the guilt of destroying their families they accuse their often stunned wives of making them unhappy.
MLC Can’t Be Stopped or ‘Cured’
For many wives, the most pressing question when faced with these developments in a hitherto happy and kind husband is how to help him stabilise and get the marriage back to normal.
Unfortunately, MLC doesn’t work like that. A man in MLC is having a profound internal crisis and literally no matter what anyone says he’ll go through it just as a teenager may go through a particularly stormy adolescence. It’s a developmental crisis if you like. There’s no short cut for the MLCer and no short cut for his wife or family either. He won’t connect with any insights anyone offers him if they don’t fit with the chaos swirling in his head.
One of the most helpful resources on the net for people whose partners are in midlife crisis is midlifeclub.com People from all over the world, men as well as women, who were left reeling by a partner’s personality change and wildly out-of-character behaviour, discuss their experiences and lend each other suport. Hearing the many hundreds of stories recounted there, partners are reassured to recognise the astonishing similarities in MLC behaviour right down to the vocabulary MLCers use. There are also people on the forum who have gone through midlife crisis and explain how fogged their brains were in their MLC years.
The best approach to a partner’s midlife crisis is to occupy yourself with you, not him. Once he’s in MLC you can only leave him to get on with it and try to protect yourself from the worst fallout. He’ll be gone for some time. The man you knew may never re-emerge from the personality earthquake he’s going through. Some MLCers do emerge and reconciliation between husband and wife, often divorced while the crisis is in full swing, does sometimes happen. But partners need in effect to start their relationship from scratch. Many more marriages end in divorce and family break-up due to male midlife crisis, with all the attendant emotional, social and financial pain. Homes are lost, children are hurt, wives are left unexpectedly alone at midlife. Whatever the eventual outcome though, understanding the mechanisms of MLC is a real help to a wife once her husband’s in crisis.
