Sometimes Couples Get Out Of Sync
Wouldn’t it be nice if human behavior, as represented by the Sexual Diamond, played out as neatly as the geometrically perfect diamond, automatically bringing the sexes closer together? Actually, it creates a new dynamic. Today men and women in middle life don’t just gently move back together; in fact, some couples may feel more out of sync than ever.
Current historical trends are exaggerating the Sexual Diamond. Role reversals that would otherwise be more gradual and easily assimilated are being accelerated. The gender crossover can throw husbands and wives out of sync. Yet the confusion of this Crossover Crisis has received little attention.
A typical role reversal situation was described to me by Dr. Judith Rosener, who was contentedly occupied into her 40s as “just a corporate wife,” tending children, doing volunteer work and playing tennis.
She went back to school in midlife, part time, with no career plans in mind. At least not until she was 52 when - watch out, world! - she found herself engrossed in a lateblooming career as a popular writer and lecturer. She locked up tenure as a full-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Irvine, but more amazing, even to her, she went on to write a best-selling book about male and female leadership styles. “All of a sudden as a professor with all these lecture engagements and royalties, I find myself making big bucks. I’m writing thousanddollar checks to political candidates and giving money to issues I care about. I have a new book coming out. … It is the most exciting time in my life.”
That is her perspective at age 65. Her husband, a former chief executive officer, is now 71. He just wants her physically there, sitting beside him, she says. He admits he preferred it when she was “just a wife,” so she sometimes feels torn. “The world is opening up to us women,” she says, “while our husbands are slowing down professionally. … Many of the men married to women like me are having a really tough time. Their husbands are very jealous of the time they spend working.”
This is an increasingly common predicament. As more men over 50 are being induced to retract out of the work world earlier than they wished, their wives, freed from family duties, are being seduced at the same stage to expand fully into the world.
Over the years, as former director of the Jung Institute, Aryeh Maidenbaum has observed, the Sexual Diamond is becoming more pronounced. “When women get to their 50s, they feel so much energy freed up. They’re more likely to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got 30 years ahead of me!’ Men so often see this stage as a loss of power, of potency. The sense of mortality really starts settling in for men about 50. They become very threatened that they’re less needed by women.”
When men begin to enjoy cooking, or landscaping their homes, or take up musical instruments they once loved, or explore spiritual or philosophic realms, it is obvious that a major reorganization of their personalities is in progress. Instead of fighting a transition that allows them to be more, these men are tapping into new sources of energy and pleasure that are available to them naturally.
The men of highest well-being in all my surveys fit this model. They become much more open to new experiences in middle life and find it reinvigorates their senses and adds new flavor to life. They do not equate their expanding aesthetic interests with being “passive” or “feminized.” By allowing themselves to stretch well beyond the narrow stereotype of “masculine,” they turn the Sexual Diamond into a jewel that can make middle life sparkle.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate