Women Ride Midlife Wave

“I always thought it was men who went through midlife crisis. I identified it with men who ran off with 21-year-old girls,” said Laurie, who, in 1987 (when we first met), was 38 years old. “But now, I swear, my generation - all my women friends in our age group of late 30s to mid40s - we’re all going through a midlife crisis!”

Laurie was a college junior at Ohio University during the tumultuous year of 1970, when the Kent State killings of antiwar students shattered the trust between generations. She dated a man for almost seven years before daring to commit to marriage. Back then she valued her scholar husband because “he would always be there if I needed him; he was a stabilizing factor for me. … But I was a different person then.”

For some 15 years between the mid-‘70s and ‘80s, Laurie developed at zoom speed. She worked her way up from a receptionist to the executive director of her own organization. On the question of children, she decided in her early 30s: “I’d rather have an identity than a baby.”

Laurie’s commitment to her career has become increasingly serious. Her cultural and metaphysical interests have expanded. Approaching 40, she viewed her marriage in an entirely new light: She wanted to continue to develop; her husband didn’t.

The moment of truth occurred during a two-week driving trip to Newfoundland. There was a place along that rugged coast where the tide surges in with almost the force of a tidal wave. She looked forward for the whole trip to witnessing this marvel of nature. They arrived at the spot 45 minutes before the phenomenon was to occur.

“We can’t wait around for something to happen,” her husband said. “We have to get to the hotel before dark.”

There was no loud argument, simply the sudden unbridgeable gulf between the people they had married and the people they had become. They had come upon the season of divorce.

“I have gone so far beyond my husband, and he just hasn’t caught up,” Laurie told me. “I keep grappling with the same questions: ‘Why is he so uninteresting now? Should I leave him? Will I then spend the rest of my life being supersuccessful, and alone?’ I’ve been in great turmoil. But then I realized, it’s not that we married the wrong men. It’s because we HAD to change, and they didn’t.”

The striking thing about Laurie’s dilemma was that it replicated almost word for word the frustration that used to be expressed by men of 30 about their wives. They used to complain, “I’ve grown, and you haven’t.” Twenty years ago in my book “Passages,” I called that phenomenon Catch-30 for Couples.

Today it could be called Catch-40 for Couples. The parts are simply reversed. The wife is now the one bored with a stable, narrowly directed workadaddy, while the husband is the one envious of her enlarged vision of herself and the exhilaration she feels in her expanded powers.

Having faced down so many obstacles, Laurie, like so many of her female contemporaries, has become confident and strong and terrifyingly autonomous. Meanwhile, the men of her generation feel overwhelmed by these women and at the same time terrified by their need for women.

With all these sociological changes coming to a head at the same time as couples arrive at the edge of middlescence, it is not surprising that the breakup age of first marriages for this generation soared in their early 40s.

xxxx

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