Posted on 05/16/2024 4:32:52 PM PDT by Drew68
Check all the boxes, then chuck it all aside at forty to follow your muse. Play by the rules and win, only to decide that you don’t want the prize. Most of the rebellions were minor. The devoted housewife informed her husband that she would not be cooking dinner for the family on Tuesday and Thursday nights, as she was finally taking the art class she had always dreamed of. The cliché for men was the red convertible. But some people set off explosions: quitting jobs, filing for divorce, engaging in affairs.
For Baby Boomers, the midlife crisis was very nearly a rite of passage. John Updike made a career of chronicling the earthquakes that rattled the mannered world of upper-middle-class suburbanites. But that world of well-scrubbed children, stay-at-home wives, and afternoon cocktails seems as remote today as King Arthur’s court. For most millennials, the idea of being a forty-year-old ad executive on a commuter train, oppressed by routine and convention as he returns to his spacious suburban home, wife of eighteen years, and two teenage children, is just a fantasy. For those who haven’t yet found a spouse or bought a house, it might seem not a nightmare but a dream.
Before you can tire of life as a housewife, you need a house and a husband whose income can maintain a family. Before you can embark on an affair, you need to get married. It is hard to buy a sports car at forty if you’re still paying off student loans, or to enjoy a second youth while looking after your first baby. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, only about 6 percent of forty-year-olds had never been married. Today it is true of one in four. A 2021 report found that one in six adults were childless, and that number is likely to increase.
In the 1960s, the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coined the term “midlife crisis.” The term described a confrontation with mortality that occurred in one’s mid-thirties, when “family and occupation have become established . . . and children are at the threshold of adulthood.”
Jaques’s term did not catch on until the 1970s, when Gail Sheehy, a journalist for New York magazine, used it in Passages, her bestselling book. The term became part of the therapeutic patois of the upper middle class in the closing decades of the twentieth century. It was the catch-all explanation for the feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness that afflicted the educated classes when things seemed outwardly auspicious. Why would a man, recently promoted to senior partner at a prestigious law firm, feel restless? Midlife crisis. Why would his wife, a mother of happy and healthy children, feel unfulfilled? Midlife crisis.
Sheehy understood the midlife crisis in broadly feminist terms. As children grew older and the burdens of childcare eased, women could explore new possibilities. Loss of fertility was to be welcomed rather than dreaded: “Once the worries of pregnancy are thrown out along with the tampons and contraceptives, women in good health will often experience a reawakening of sexual desire, as well as great enthusiasm for directing their creativity into new channels.” The family box has been checked; there’s more to life for the college-educated woman.
As the historian Susanne Schmidt has noted, Sheehy’s description of the midlife crisis corresponded to what Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique (1963), had called “the problem that has no name.” After interviewing suburban women in their thirties and forties, Friedan painted a picture of widespread dissatisfaction. As these women endured day after day of tidying the house, shopping for groceries, cooking meals, and ferrying the children before lying joylessly beside their husbands at night, they were afraid to ask themselves, “Is this all?” Friedan suggested that they should cease to think of themselves exclusively as wives and mothers, and instead pursue degrees, careers, and political engagement.
Alongside this feminist understanding of the midlife crisis was a masculinist one. It received more extensive treatment in literature and media, which is why in its popular usage “midlife crisis” was applied primarily to men—their fantasies, foibles, and mishaps. In works like John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the middle-aged man finds himself changed in ways he can hardly understand—at one moment strong and admired, in the next weak and pitied. Facing mortality, Cheever’s protagonist embarks on a surreal journey through all the swimming pools of his prosperous suburban town. Cheever was evoking what psychologists called a man’s “second adolescence”—a natural rite of passage whose manifestations were to be understood, not condemned.
Medical authorities writing on the male midlife crisis presented it as potentially a moment of liberation. The psychiatrist George Vaillant described the professional men undergoing midlife crises in terms that evoked Friedan:
From age twenty-five to thirty-five they tended to work hard, to consolidate their careers, and to devote themselves to the nuclear family. . . . Rather than question whether they had married the right woman, rather than dream of other careers, they changed their babies’ diapers and became lost in conformity.
Breaking free of conformity often meant shattering the marital bond. After all, the right woman at twenty-five might be the wrong woman at forty. The psychologist Daniel Levinson drew out the implications of the second adolescence: The same wifely virtues that once had helped a man build a comfortable life and successful career—her thriftiness and prudent concern, her way of looking after a man as well as his children—could in later years become smothering. Like the adolescent boy who needs to establish an identity apart from his mother, the married man may need freedom from his wife, who now seems “overly controlling.” Naturally enough, he finds it in the arms of a different woman, one who is “more understanding, sharing, and sensually evocative.” In those decades of conformist middle-class culture, men nurtured fantasies of living like James Bond.
The midlife crisis was a problem of the privileged—a recognition that something was wrong in a life in which everything seemed right. The crisis endures, but the conditions have been reversed. Baby Boomers were raised to expect happiness in domestic life. A man’s career and a woman’s wifely duties served the household gods. My generation received very different instructions. It’s not as though Sex and the City was urged as a guide to life. But we were told to find ourselves and establish ourselves professionally before settling down.
As a result, a new anxiety arrives at midlife. “The problem that has no name” has been replaced by the “biological clock.” Upper-middle-class women still experience a moment of recognition, often in their mid-thirties. They still confront the fact that the dominant image of success hasn’t delivered everything they want their lives to include. But it is a husband and children they are now likely to miss, not a career, travel, and nightlife.
Works of popular art have begun to document the new crisis. Barbie, the 2023 blockbuster directed by Greta Gerwig, is a modern Pinocchio story. Initially, Barbie is a deathless, sexless being—unconcerned with men or children, immune to thoughts of mortality. No mere doll, she is the model career woman. “She has her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career. Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” She is living Betty Friedan’s dream. But when Barbie becomes human, she must come to terms with biological realities. The film ends with her visit to an ob-gyn. In real life, the visits are to IVF clinics.
Men have much more time on their clocks, a fact that allows millennial males now entering middle age to defer any deliberation about what they want out of life. Instead of a second adolescence, they seem determined to enjoy perpetual adolescence. (Is it any wonder that female millennial professionals are desperate when they wake up at age thirty-five and realize they want a husband?) But how long can men defer the reckoning? The Worst Person in the World, a 2021 film by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, offers an answer. It features a man who suddenly learns he has cancer. He is the paragon of creative-class success, an underground comic-book artist whose most famous creation has been turned into a movie. But he never managed to have the children he wanted. He lost the woman he loved. All he has left are his collections of comic books and records.
Baby Boomers got married, owned homes, and had kids. The price was conformity. No doubt it could be stultifying. But for most people, the crisis was mild. You could waste money on a sports car and still have grandchildren someday. That was true even if your affairs led to a messy divorce. What of my generation? Our plan of life has been to put off the old patterns of adulthood. There will be plenty of time for that, we’ve been told. For now there’s a vacation, a concert, a promotion to think about. But something is missing in a life made up of only these things. As one unmarried friend told me before she left New York, “I like my lifestyle, but not my life.”
The midlife for today's Millennial (and younger) generations are likely to be much different, absent many of these markers that the previous generations had.
“”””For Baby Boomers, the midlife crisis was very nearly a rite of passage. John Updike made a career of chronicling the earthquakes that rattled the mannered world of upper-middle-class suburbanites. But that world of well-scrubbed children, stay-at-home wives, and afternoon cocktails seems as remote today as King Arthur’s court.””””
That seems confusing, boomers were hitting their 40s and 50s well into the 2000s, in fact up until the last 10 years, not the 60s and 70s.
Depends on their upbringing. Can't argue with much of the article, as we lived the boomer life, getting married young and building a life together. Now that my grown children are in mid-life (over 40), they aren't much different. For me, it was a green T-top convertible sports car, though going to office work with a briefcase on a subway train. My wife got more use out of the car than me, getting stopped by cops while picking up the kids from high school.
Grown kids in their 40's each have a home and their own kids and doing well, without mid-life crisis moments like getting a sports car. Instill good values and you won't have to worry.
Bkmk
True. 1946 through 1964 is the generally accepted boomer range, so plus 40 would be 1986 and later.
I suppose if you're a Millennial, everyone older than you is a Boomer.
It's actually mostly Gen-X who are hitting their midlives today and I think the "red sports car/affair/tennis lessons" midlife crisis was personified by the people who hit their midlives in the 60s-70s, the generation that mostly predated Baby Boomers.
Still, the points made are valid. You can't have a midlife crisis if you've never really had a life.
For me, it was a full 100 watt, all tube, British-made Marshall stack (electric guitar amplifier the size of a refrigerator and as loud as a bomb).
"Why?" my wife shook her head.
Because I always wanted one when I was a kid and now I can afford it. Never mind I'll never be a rockstar and it's entirely too loud for my quiet subdivision.
Oh well, beats having an affair with the secretary, I suppose.
Um. John Updike was not a Baby Boomer.
"In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits...
“Middle Age Crazy” starring Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret.
A married man is turning forty and that’s when the midlife crisis hits him. He becomes obsessed with young women and fast cars.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081157/
Going by post 10, a lot of us hit our mid-life crisis at about age 16.
I know that story well.
Clue #1
A close friend of ours had a problem with her husband, buying fancy electric guitars and amps and playing in rock bands. My wife and I joked about a man being in his 40s going into his 50s wanting to be a rocker. Well, he had a hidden affair with a young woman who gave birth to his child. Wife didn't find out until ten years later he asked the wife to take in the pre-teen. She took in the pre-teen, and kicked out her husband. My wife said she wouldn't have taken in the girl, wife's friend is too generous.
We were at a baptism a couple weeks ago for my wife's friend's granddaughter, and the old guy ex-husband was there. Broke, but still playing with a rock band while in his 70s.
That sums it up for some people I know.
Guess I must have missed that “mid life crises” thing.
Got married in 1978, still married to the same wonderful wife.
Have 2 kids (one boy-one girl) both college graduates and doing well in their careers.
Outright own 2 homes; one in Northern California—one in Southern California.
Plus 32 acres in Colorado and another 20 acres in Washington state, real estate people keep contacting me to buy them, I just tell them when they get closer to MY price we will talk in person.
Never was interested in fast sports cars, got my dream vehicle just 4 years ago, a Dodge 4 wheel drive RAM 2500 pickup truck.
As to other women, my wife says a lot of the women she knew and a lot of strangers would hit on me when we were out, never noticed it and couldn’t care less.
When you married the BEST, why would you want LESS?
“… John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”
As an aside, Burt Lancaster is great as the disturbed swimmer in the 1968 film.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063663/
I think the “midlife crisis” was mostly a Hollywood and media creation. They spent a lot of ink and film trying to convince the happy suburbanites that they were supposed to be unhappy and act out.
Just like now, convincing Zoomers that life is awful and the planet destroyed.
Yet we live in the richest country in the richest era of all human history.
My kids think they grew up poor in a two bath home. Ridiculous.
Oh, I don't know. I think the divorce rate during the 70s-80s speaks volumes.
As a Gen-Xer who was a teen throughout most of the 80s, divorce was rampant. While my parents stuck together, so many of my friend's families split it. And it often happened when one parent engaged in an affair. I recall the active suburban social lives my parents used to have. Lots of parties. Lots of get-togethers. Bowling leagues, bridge clubs, softball teams, block parties.
Of course, parents back then were much younger. Wasn't unusual at all for 16-year-olds to have parents who hadn't even hit 40 yet. A lot of these parents had social lives of their own and found other parents to hook up with and leave their current spouse for. Saw this on several occasions.
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