Samson Complex Takes Its Toll

Women must deal. Men don’t have to.

Women have a biologically timed BOOM menopause - that forces them to acknowledge they are changing. But men don’t have to face aging. At least not as early as women do.

In their First Adulthood (between the ages of 30 to 45), most men pour out tremendous energy toward achieving success and often dangerously suppress their emotional needs. At least until their 40s, men can gain strong personal identities and a sense of self-worth simply from engaging their aggressive instincts in a struggle for dominance and position in the social hierarchy.

But these aggressive instincts are an appetite like the sexual drive: They build up, a man satisfies them, and they build up again. By the time a man reaches middle life, however, he is not as easily filled up merely by engaging in the competitive struggle. He is being simultaneously challenged by younger men and women whose aggressive instincts are still raw and uncontrollable. His body doesn’t work quite the way it did. His job may not be as secure as he thought it would be. Even the most successful men of this age feel some ebbing in the thrill of the chase, a want of meaning beneath the mask of invulnerable masculinity.

Such men often meet the crossroads at 50 with the involuntary reflex of Samson, expecting that they must continue to show the same physical strength and emotional veneer they prided themselves on in youth.

What most men want to do at 50 is to stay where they are, to keep what they’ve got. They don’t want to make a passage. Since they haven’t had to face inexorable limitations before, they don’t think there is anything they can do about aging, except to ignore it.

In middle life a man’s suppressed emotional needs usually come to the surface. As this is happening, his surly teenage children are probably rebelling, his older children are leaving home for good, and his wife is becoming more assertive. If his wife is roughly the same age, she is likely to be either bouncing off the walls with menopausal mood swings or soaring with postponed ambitions, joining non-profit boards or political campaigns and paying less attention to him.

With all these fears and losses on their minds, what do men worry about first?

Losing hair.

In almost all the group interviews where men gathered with me to discuss the ups and downs of middle life, the conversation began with their hair.

It would seem that losing their hair is for men the first public sign of weakening, as if hair were what Samson believed it to be: the symbol of a man’s power and sexual prowess.

The other object that inevitably provoked frustrated confessions in the men’s group interviews was their ability to do sports. Almost universally, men note the ebbing of their youthful physical strength as another of the first signs of encroaching middle age.

The Samson Complex is particularly acute for men of the Silent (born 1930-1945) and World War II (born 1914-1929) generations. Let their wives worry about “relationships”; the domain of these men was work and sports, which often became the exclusive sources of their male identity. Anyone who listens to older men today should know that most of them are confused and floundering to find new definitions of masculinity and sources of emotional security. And why not? Just about everything that they have been conditioned to believe defines their masculinity has come under attack.

Men at middle life probably face the roughest path of all in mapping the new adult life across time. Generally, it is a much harder passage for men than for women. When women in midlife go back to college and then find jobs that give them some dignity, and paychecks that give them some authority, they are exhilarated. The psychic compensation is greater for women because they started with so much less. To make a passage to the Age of Mastery (45-65) often means for men giving up being the master.

What do they get for it?

The chance to create a new self. Men are going to live much longer than they expected and, if they keep speeding along the old track, refusing to give up their Samson identity, they will miss the turnoff to Second Adulthood. They will age anyway, but it won’t be fun.

The question is, How to prepare to enjoy a Second Adulthood?

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate