Have you had your midlife crisis yet?

Sit with me, let’s talk about Midlife Crisis.

How do you get to a midlife crisis? When I turned 40 I was living in Southern California, divorced, and working full-time for Quiksilver in a field I loved. I was child-free and independent but I was also itchy. I was tired of living far from family and I was tired of the 72 and sunny monotony of California weather. I just wanted something different. 40 is the start of “midlife” when most people start to question their life choices or the empty nest begs the question, well now what?  Gen X-ers have always done things differently. A lot of us waited longer to get married and have kids. At 40, the kids were still little and no one was kicking them out of the nest because “midlife” had arrived and the adults were like now it’s MY TIME. I feel like 50 is the new midlife. I likened my 50th birthday to my Mid-Century Mark because I plan on living to 100. A lot of us have made many career changes over our working life. I sometimes feel like a cat with nine lives and I’m easily into my fourth or fifth at this point. Maybe we just hit the midlife crisis earlier and weren’t content to slog away in an unfulfilling job for 30 to 40 years just to get a retirement package and a Mont Blanc pen set. 

Either way, at 40 right on schedule I upended my life and moved from California to New York with no job prospects in sight. Parent’s worst nightmare. Thankfully my parents are supportive and even if they were freaking out about my life choices, I knew they had my back. The cliche is that midlife crises usually involve affairs, corvettes, walking out on long-term marriages, extensive plastic surgery, trophy wives, and boy toys for the cougars. But what if we could turn it around and make space for people to actually talk about what they are going through? You hate your job but you’re the breadwinner or at least an equal partner in the finances so you feel stuck. Your husband hasn’t touched you in months; and honestly, you’re fine with that. You haven’t been prioritizing your health because you’re just trying to keep your head above water with the gazillion activities your kids are involved in. All of these things add up to unhappy and unfulfilled lives and often times we get to the point where we feel like the only option for change is to burn the whole fucking house down. No one is listening. No one is feeling heard. Where are the matches? 

Back to our new friend Psychology Today,  “Midlife is often associated with unhappy events: the empty nest, menopause, infidelity, financial concerns, a growing sense of mortality, and unhappiness with the daily grind. Life in one’s 40s and 50s may seem like a natural time to tally one’s failures and disappointments. And yet it need not be thus. “ I would argue that it may also seem like a natural time to tally one’s successes but I’ve always been a glass-half-full type of girl. 

I’m not a therapist and I’ve had experiences with both really good and really bad practitioners but I have to say if you get to 40 and you haven’t been in therapy you are doing yourself a major disservice. We ALL have shit to work through. ALL OF US. Full stop. I did a lot of therapy in my early thirties after I went through a divorce. Divorce is hard and living in an unfulfilling marriage is hard and being single is hard when you’re taught your whole life to find Mr. Right and live happily ever after. I love a good Rom-Com but I had an epiphany at some point that the credits always roll when the two star-crossed lovers finally get together. They never start the movie there. What happens after the big white wedding? How do they navigate full-time jobs and infertility issues and colicky newborns and recessions and pick your own shit up off the floor days? 

Obviously, my first husband and I did not navigate any of that well, hence the divorce part. In hindsight, we got married way too young but that was the norm at the time. My parents could see the train wreck coming and never pressured me to get married. I was sure he was the one for me and Mike and I were going to live happily ever after if it killed me, which psychologically it kind of did. He was not a good husband. Yes, he provided a good life with his baseball career. We had money and nice things and I had the luxury of working if I wanted, which I did but I never pursued a career of any substance. Mike was jealous and any field that might have me working alongside men did not make him pleasant. My degree in Political Science gathered dust in a box because “his wife wasn’t going to work with any sleazy politicians.” I mean he wasn’t totally wrong but in hindsight, it really wasn’t his call to make. But I let him. I let him make all the calls. I morphed into what I thought he wanted me to be. An adoring, nonconfrontational doormat. The pretty wife sitting in the stands cheering on her superstar husband. Maybe in his mind, that should have been enough for me. I don’t know what he expected me to be because we never talked about it. Oh we fought and I rebelled on occasion but you rebel against your parents, not your spouse. 

Needless to say, we didn’t have healthy communication skills or expectations of marriage, to begin with. We ended up in therapy after yet another road girlfriend decided she wasn’t content being the side piece, but we never really did the work. I was so determined to “never get divorced like my parents did”, that I just kept morphing until I didn’t even recognize or even really like myself anymore. But we all finally reach the end of our rope and a change comes. For some, it looks like having an affair because your spouse isn’t listening to you say for the hundredth time that you aren’t happy and you want more from the relationship. For some, it looks like losing 40 pounds and quitting your job but keeping your husband because you do, in fact, still really like him. For me, it looked like finally articulating to Mike how I expected to be treated when he came crawling back for the last time and when he blatantly disrespected me, calling an attorney.  I just couldn’t do it anymore and I needed to change. Is that what a midlife crisis looks like? 

I do think couples with children get so focused on raising them that they often float along in life and ignore problems or conflicts that rise up and can’t easily be resolved. They build up over the years and finally the damn breaks when the kids leave the house and husband and wife are left staring at each other with disdain or indifference. The public facade of the perfect family comes crumbling down when the gambling addiction comes to light. The perfect children go off the rails in college and end up in a hotel in Mexico with a drug-dealing boyfriend on mom and dad’s Amex. Shit goes wrong and marriages blow up. Does midlife crisis only happen to couples in a relationship? 

You don’t often hear of singles losing their shit and running off with the pool boy. I guess most singles have built a life they are content with and don’t feel a need to run away from because they see no other viable option for change. Is a midlife crisis as subtle as acknowledging you haven’t found a life partner but you really want to have children so you adopt or find an alternative path to parenthood? Is it deciding that living in a studio apartment the rest of your days isn’t fulfilling anymore, even with a stunning view of the Hudson River, so you buy a little house in the suburbs? Can it be just the whisper of “my life looks and feels great in all the right ways” and yet something just feels off?

It makes sense that most people who feel a sense of happiness in their life choices don’t feel compelled to make major life changes and upend the apple cart. I wish that more people would take stock along the way and course-correct as they go, sometimes making hard decisions before they become atomic bombs. Unfortunately, not all of us were taught to learn to love ourselves first, to figure out what we think and feel and want in life for ourselves, not to check some boxes that we are told will make us happy like marriage and children and a high paying job. There is a big wide world out there to explore and experiences that will broaden your perspective and make you a more well-rounded, full human being who doesn’t need anyone to “complete them.” Shut up, Jerry Maguire. Have a life crisis at 25 and 30 and 35 and then maybe by 40 you’ll have run out of crises and you can just learn and grow and change as a natural part of your life.