The mid-life crisis is a time of metamorphosis. It is a time when the American male crosses the boundary line that separates the boy/man from the man. But as we have seen, this critical turning point not only offers new opportunities, it also poses new dangers. To resolve the crisis a man must first appreciate what the crossing really signifies.
“Beyond question I found myself at mid-life in a radical crisis,” writes Sam Keen, author, editor, and teacher, in an autobiographical memoir. “My emotional capital seemed exhausted. My past looked infinitely richer than any future I might create. Depression lurked and easily invaded any empty moment. I had either to surrender to despair or mourn the death of my old life and find some way to begin again
“For many months I was a victim of bitter confusion. And then gradually my struggle to create or discover a new life began to take form. I came to the realization that I was living out a myth that gave my pain, conflict and dislocation a meaning. With a sense of relief I now understood the central message of the Christian myth: You must die in order to be reborn.
“I had been living the story of the hero who must descend through the dim winter light into the underworld of chaos and pain before he can spring up into the miraculous light of the ordinary. Through discovering that the myth which informs my life with meaning involves the belief that all life is a process of beginnings without end, I found the terrors of the mid-life identity crisis becoming transformed into an adventure.” So too for other men in their middle years: Surmounting this crisis demands a transformation of beliefs and a change in attitudes. This in itself is a monumental undertaking that requires a man to revise his definitions of what it means to be a male, an adult, and a human being. There is a profound connection between what we expect and what we get in life; and our expectations include what we believe about human nature and about ourselves.
Mid-life is a time for transformation. It is the time for a man to change what he believes about himself from negative and self-denying to positive and self-affirming. It is the time for him to redefine the facts of life and enlarge his sense of possibilities.
One of the major challenges facing this generation of midlife men is to break out of the masculine mystique. Macho values that require a man to be tough, competitive, and always in control turn out to be boyish virtues. After forty they fail to sustain.
It is hard work to be manly in the traditional way, and it is too confining. Men are as capable as women of a broad range of feelings, but the mystique will not allow a man to reveal the depth of his inner experience to himself or to others. Thus he is obliged to hide much of his real self, to repress his real feelings. Fearful of exposing weakness or vulnerability, he must be continually tense, guarded, and armored. Such emotional repression is dangerous and self-destructive. It causes a man to lose contact with his inner self and with reality.
Worse still, because the conventional male role carries with it a chronic burden of stress, it may be a factor related to the American male’s shorter life span. Today it is becoming obvious that many apparently physical illnesses have a psychological and, ultimately, social root. Heart disease is an illness that belongs in this category, and it is time we recognize that fact. There is strong evidence, as we have seen, that Type A behavior—a composite of our society’s most admired male traits—too often leads to premature death.
To surmount the mid-life crisis, then, a man not only needs a new definition of masculinity but a new definition of health and sickness as well. Masculinity in the old sense is predicated on too narrow a base: the work role. Defining a man primarily as a producer and an achiever leads to a sickening way of life. Ironically, though, being manly also makes it difficult for a man to recognize when he is sick. Trained to ignore his feelings in order to pursue his goals, he is less sensitive than women to inner signals that tell him that all is not well. Tuning out these inner distress signals until they can no longer be ignored, he is unlikely to heed the signs of his own sickness until the lethal aspects of his manly way of life have brought him to the point of total collapse.
At mid-life when a man is forced to confront his mortality and recognize that his years are limited, it is vital that he learn to take care of himself in wiser ways than the masculine mystique allows. It is time for him to recognize that he is neither a machine nor superhuman. It is time for him to let go of heroic imperatives in favor of more humane values. The life he saves may be his own.
The American male has been conditioned to experience himself in negative ways. He has been conditioned to accept a static view of what it means to be an adult—rigid, inflexible, and in decline. And in accord with most Western religious doctrines, he has been taught that human nature is essentially evil, that man is doomed from the start.
We are partly creatures of our own images, and these images have practical consequences in terms of how we live and the choices we make at mid-life a man’s beliefs about himself—and about what is still possible for him—tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus if he believes that he is devoid of free will and that nothing he does can alter or improve his life, the odds are that his actions will be futile. Similarly, if he believes that aging is a curse that congeals the self, that life is all downhill after forty, the odds are that for him it will be.
This matter of self-fulfilling prophecies relates not only to how a man views himself in particular, but also to how he views the human potential in the larger sense. To make significant changes at this stage of life he must first believe that change is possible. More fundamentally, he must believe that human beings are sufficiently creative to make meaningful choices throughout their entire life span.
Implicit in the new concept of adulthood proposed by developmental psychologists like the Yale group is a vision of human nature that differs radically from the one we have become accustomed to. This vision comes from many different sources: From Eastern religions, existential philosophers, humanist psychologists, and psychoanalytic thinkers. What is emerging from these combined sources is a more positive view of man’s inner depths than that proposed by Freud. One basic difference is that whereas Freud conceived of the unconscious primarily as a storehouse for repressed memories from the past, theorists like Jung maintain that possibilities for the future—seeds of growth—are also contained in the unconscious. This change in emphasis has resulted in a more optimistic vision of human nature, whereby man is seen as possessing an inherent capacity for growth and change.
This view of man as an evolutionary creature with an instinctual need for purpose and meaning, a creature capable of assuming responsibility for his own life, became the basis for the human potential movement in the 1960s. Today that movement has expanded considerably, in scope and impact, to include a wide variety of disciplines and therapies, both Eastern and Western. Now known as the consciousness revolution, it is unified by the central belief that man can achieve self-transcendence through increased awareness of the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of his existence.
Convinced that we have underestimated our capacity to lead open, evolving, and meaningful lives, a growing number of Americans are joining this revolution to explore new avenues for personal change and renewal. Like some of the men we have heard from in this book, they are proving that an affirmative view of the human potential is valid. They are proving that people can reshape their own future continually, regardless of age. They are proving that growth is a lifelong process, that a person’s capacity for self-development does not diminish through the years. Accepting this vision of what it means to be human is a prerequisite for surmounting the mid-life crisis.
Adult growth is more complex than that of children, obviously, and more painful too. It is a normal process but not an automatic one. When Jung said that human beings strive for wholeness, he emphasized that this striving had two aspects: It is a natural process,, on the one hand, but it is also work— a task to be accomplished. Similarly, Erikson stressed that each developmental crisis could be resolved for better or for worse. Growth is a risky business. More disturbing still, it is disturbing. The process of growth includes stages where a person feels despondent and in despair.
Here again we need to revise our definitions of sickness and health. In the adult, anxiety and depression often accompany inner growth. Those tormenting emotions are in fact in- I herent parts of the process. On the surface such symptoms may look deceptively like illness, but if they are treated like pathology the possibilities for growth will be undercut.
Psychic pain, like physical pain, is a sign that a person’s way of life has lost its meaning or become sickening. At mid-life such pain usually means that it is time to move on, time to discard old beliefs, old habits, and old values that have been outgrown, in order to find new ways to restructure one’s self and one’s life. The challenge is stimulating but scary. It beckons a man into unknown territory, both within himself and without. Moving from the old to the new is not likely to be quickly or easily accomplished. There will be a time of not knowing, a time of conflict and confusion.
This will be agonizing to endure unless a man comprehends what is happening within him. More important than the particulars of this crisis period, the specific issues we have already examined, he must understand the growth process itself—especially its~deafh-and-rebirth aspect. This is a difficult concept to grasp because it is alien to our industrial culture and our scientific way of thinking. By contrast, in many other societies where the metaphors for life and time are taken from the natural world, crossing from one life stage to another is ritualized by rites of passage that symbolize a death-and-rebirth process.
Traditionally the rites of passage had three phases: (1) social disengagement and psychological dying; (2) a time and a place of isolation outside familiar boundaries, which anthropologist Arnold van Gennep called “the neutral zone”; and (3) psychological rebirth and social reintegration.
What seems like sickness or personality disturbance during the mid-life crisis is comparable to the experience in archaic cultures of being in the neutral zone. This meant a vigil in the wilderness, usually a forest or desert, where the person was exposed—utterly alone—to the terrifying powers of the psyche and the universe. This was supposed to be a time of access to visions and voices, a time when life-turning discoveries could be made. But it was also a time of terror and chaos.
Recognizing the perils of this passage from the old to the new, archaic cultures understood that the pull of the unknown future can be frightening. They therefore prepared people for this experience of lostness and dread that is so often felt in the midst of profound change, and helped to ease them through it. In such societies, too, the initiate not only realized that his ciders had survived but also that new opportunities awaited him on the other side of the passage.
In our culture no such preparation and no such promise are offered to those who experience a similar kind of psychological death and rebirth. Lacking such supports, the American male must maneuver the painful mid-life passage on his own. He must recognize that the terror and turmoil that he feels are not signs that he is going crazy. Rather the feeling that everything is falling apart, that the old ways are futile or meaningless, is a prelude to self-renewal—or rebirth. It means that the metamorphosis is under way. New beginnings and new adventures lie ahead.
*66\93\2*
In our society the great paradox of success is that, on the one hand, whether a man succeeds or fails at mid-life matters greatly. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter at all—because he will go through a crisis regardless.
During this period, say the Yale group, most men fix on a key event in their career that will symbolize their affirmation by society. Given an almost magical quality, this event can be a promotion, a new job, or some other form of recognition. The pressure of waiting for the outcome usually stimulates a man to make “the special bet” on himself, increasing his efforts to capitalize on this last big chance. If the outcome is favorable, the assumption is that the future is assured, and that he is all set. But this is not true. Whether affirmed or not, a man will have a crisis. Only the form varies.
The key issue is not whether he succeeds or fails in realizing his goal, or achieving his dream—but the sense of disparity he feels between what he has gained, in an inner sense, and what he still wants. It is not a matter of how many rewards a man has gotten—money, status, power, or fame—but of the goodness of fit between his life structure and his evolving self. A man may do very well in terms of reaching his goals, but find success hollow or bittersweet. The severity of his crisis depends on the extent to which he questions his life structure and feels a strong need to modify or change it.
Ironically, failure can yield unexpected advantages. When a man fails he may be in for a rough time, and have to deal with a narcissistic wound, but he will also be freed to ask what he really wants. For example, Bruce D. discovered that his being fired, at forty-two, from an advertising company was the best thing that ever happened to him:
As soon as I got fired I felt this great weight off me. Then a headhunter called about another job and I thought, well, I’m a responsible father and all that shit so I’d better go for the interview. But when they offered me the job I felt so depressed again I said, “No!” I saw myself killing time for 20 years and getting $100,000 in the profit-sharing plan and then retiring. Just thinking about it was horrifying.
So I made up my mind to freelance and I got some book assignments lined up. Now I won’t have to sit in on client meetings and act as if I’m thinking seriously about whether toilet paper should be sold on the basis of softness or absorbency! I can write and live in the country and do what I want to do—and life will have some meaning. I feel I have a future now!
By contrast, success can sometimes be dangerously inhibiting in terms of future growth. If a man succeeds, his sense of inner turmoil may be reduced and he may be more inclined to stay locked into the same situation, thinking he can go on that way idefinitely. But men who deny the mid-life crisis are likely to lose the vitality they need to continue developing.
Equally ominous, many men who fail to resolve the issues presented around forty will experience a more severe crisis at fifty. This belated reaction can lead to, a suffocating feeling of futility, or trigger bizarre, impulsive changes. The Yale group describe this as an instance where “the chickens come home to roost.”
“It’s a very simple notion,” says Dr. Edward Klein, “which means that if you don’t look at these issues in your gut when you are younger, and you just keep masking them over with Scotch tape, they are going* to break out. They mount up in some critical mass-—God knows, I don’t know how to quantify that—and they build up over time. Then a man breaks out in some sort of inflated act.”
Another paradox of “making it,” says Levinson, is that “just at the time when a man seems to have accomplished all he set out to accomplish in his twenties, the meaning of it changes somehow.” The reason for this is that he himself has changed and so have his values. In young adulthood a man was trying to make it in society’s terms. By mid-life, however, after these contests have either been won or lost, he begins trying to make it in personal terms. Having arrived at the place where he was so intently heading, he begins to ask himself: Is this what I really wanted? Was it worth all I had to give up? And do I want to continue doing this for the rest of my life?
As an example of the dissonance likely to develop, Dr. Braxton McKcc explains that somewhere along the career ladder, most often in his late thirties, a man usually takes an important step toward “making it” that involves deciding he must do things in his own way—and act with more authority. The minute he does that, however, he starts becoming more aware of what he wants for himself, and possibly more aware of how this differs from what the organization wants from him.
The result: “Just as becoming more responsible and autonomous helps him to reach his goals and to ‘make it’ within the original structure,” says McKee, “it also puts him in touch with parts of himself that lead him away from it.”
And that is the ultimate paradox of success: “Making it” leads to breaking it—and then breaking out. When a man gets there, when the dream comes true, he suddenly becomes conscious of all the ways in which reality differs from fantasy. This, in turn, causes him to search for new and different challenges that will satisfy a more mature, discriminating, and diversified self.
*52\93\2*
Mid-life is the time when marriages frequently quake or break, the time when husbands behave strangely and wives need more than epithets to survive. “You start itching from a rash of sameness,” complained one restless husband. “I guess anytime your life gets too predictable there’s something like death about it.”
In recent years the divorce rate in America has been rising steadily, and even long-term marriages are no longer immune. Today, in fact, the middle years are being identified as a major crisis point for marriage: One quarter of the marriages that have lasted fifteen years or more now end in divorce.
The men most likely to be immune from marital traumas in their forties are those who married late in life, including those recently remarried for a second or third attempt; and those who have first marriages that are still thriving—either because the two people have remained warmly in touch with one another, or because they have worked out a coolly pragmatic arrangement to which both partners subscribe. (Men who have never married or remained single after a divorce have other problems during this period, as do homosexuals, who face their own sort of mid-life loneliness and desperation.)
In general, no simple formulas exist to predict what turn a marriage will take at this stage of life. Adultery is certainly no predictor since, given the ubiquity of philandering in our society, the man who has been monogamous until now is probably the exception, not the rule. Moreover, extramarital affairs have strangely varying consequences: Some couples wind up divorcing because of infidelity, either the husband’s or the wife’s, while others transform their relationship into a close and truthful one for the first time after an affair.
At mid-life, however, men and women change, and so do the dynamics of their relationship. Suddenly the old and familiar, the tried and tested, are no longer enough. Both sexes want something different, something more—a desire that dramatically increases the likelihood of an affair’s becoming more emotionally consuming, and therefore more disruptive, than it might have earlier.
Adultery aside, when a marriage of long duration falls apart, the most common cause of conflict is different rates of growth. In time some people outgrow each other, or grow in opposite directions. Each needs more room to experiment and stretch. The third person in the triangle is not another man or woman, but an evolving self, which now feels suffocated within the confines of traditional marriage.
“Existential divorce” is the phrase used to describe the break-up caused by one, or both, partner’s concluding their marriage no longer has meaning. This sort of rupture is usually devoid of dramatic clashes: no violent fights, no intrusive lovers, no major differences in background. Rather, the choice made at twenty just doesn’t seem valid, or rewarding, at forty.
In the classic situation it is the man who starts to chafe and stomp. After years of dedicating himself to working hard and getting ahead, he has tasted power, won recognition, and changed in the process. Suddenly he takes his eyes off the brass ring and spies a stranger in his bed: his wife. She’s somwhat frayed now; cranky too, perhaps. And why not? Enlisted as an adjunct to his career, she has been confined to cooking, cleaning, and raising the kids—preoccupations that rarely promote growth or glamour. But that, of course, was the bargain they made in the 1950s, when marriages were based on conventional roles: The little woman was meant to stay at home, while the big man conquered the world.
Ironically, this bargain often backfires at mid-life when a~ man dumps his wife for precisely the reason he first desired her: because she subjugated herself to him. Earlier he adored her being docile and devoted, but now he finds her merely dull. He has grown and she hasn’t. Suddenly he wants a different kind of woman—someone less dependent, say, someone with more pizzazz. A playmate, peer, or partner—but certainly not a Mom.
How does a man in this situation feel about the marriage he used as a bridge between childhood and maturity? And how does he account for its collapse? Consider the case of Michael B., the president of an industrial conglomerate who divorced his wife after fifteen years. These are his reflections:
When Shirley and I got married we were just too young. She was nineteen and I was twenty-one—and we hadn’t really been formed as people. What happened is that we grew up after we were married and moved in totally different directions. On the surface, the whole relationship was terribly simple. Underneath is what’s complicated.
Shirley’s drives were all centered about me. .She had some solid creative drives, but she put them down because she felt exercising her own life ambitions would be taking away from what we had together. She became a nonperson, essentially. And so it became an enormously selfish way of life for me. Whatever T wanted was okay. Whatever I determined was the way it was, and there was never any resistance.
And what happened over the years as we grew up was that we had no communication whatsoever. I became lazy. I never communicated anything about my own thoughts or about business—unless I chose to. I didn’t share anything in that sense. And my work was my life because I loved it.
Actually T remember almost all the years as being content. Till the day T walked out we never fought—because we didn’t communicate. After about eight years I started to have an occasional affair. None of them were that important, but they were all with bright, intelligent ‘ working girls. They were people T could talk to and there was an honesty in the relationships.
So I was living a life which some men would think is the best of all possible lives: a happy home life, two lovely children, and being able to manipulate with the least amount of guilt. Shirley may well have suspected, but she would never have acknowledged my affairs.
But I slowly became aware that I wasn’t going to be able to keep this up, that I wasn’t really happy. It was guilt, I guess, and a feeling it wasn’t fair to her or to the children. And the pressures had built up. She would want to come on trips and I resisted her. Things like that. And we weren’t talking much. She knew something was wrong. .
I don’t really know what led up to it, but finally there was just so nothing to talk about at home that I told her I had tried, and it wasn’t working, and that I was leaving. I said we had no common interest except her interest in our home—and my being happy. But we shared nothing. It was very difficult when I told her, and it came as a shock. We talked it out, but I have never really been able to satisfy her as to why. I didn’t dislike her, and I don’t to this day. But she simply turned out to be a person I couldn’t open up with. I couldn’t share. There was no intimacy whatsoever. None. And that’s hard to explain to someone.
Because of the children I stayed for another three months, and we got some advice on how to handle them. It was very depressing for a while, and there was a lot of upset with the kids, but we finally got the divorce about six months later.
Now when I look back on my marriage, I feel regret mostly—regret that I wasted my life like that. Coldly. Those were fifteen years of growing and learning which should have been shared. I just didn’t have the right person to share them with. And what I really did was run away from my life to my business, which fulfilled all the appetites I had to have filled.
Except it left me less than a whole person.
*38\93\2*
This new criticism of old taboos is not only healthy but vital: The fact is that no man can withstand the major mid-life stresses unless he can dislodge and disgorge his feelings.
This is so because the mid-life crisis is, first and foremost, a period of mourning.7 Marked by discontinuity and depression, it is a time of change and challenge—but also a time of loss. And to weather the storm successfully, a man must be able to ventilate the painful feelings of anger and disappointment that accompany all loss experiences.
He must, in other words, learn how to mourn.
Some of the losses which occur at this stage of life are undeniably devastating: the loss of youth and youthful dreams; the loss of an illusion of immortality; and the loss of physical and sexual energies—to mention only the most obvious.
But there are many other changes that take place during this period, and all of them, even changes for the better, involve an clement of loss: the loss of familiar supports and old sources of gratification. Combined with the pressure of new demands, this sense of loss is what makes all change stressful: When the new displaces the old, we experience this change on the psychological level as a loss; and the experience is accompanied by feelings of abandonment and helplessness and sorrow.
“All change is a loss experience,” explains psychologist Harry Levinson, a management consultant who heads the Levinson Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Whether you change jobs, or change families, or change relationships, something is ripped up. Something is taken away from you. And if one is going to adapt to change—personal change or organizational change—there has to be some opportunity for disgorging the feelings of loss, the negative feelings, and doing the mourning.”
In our society loss experiences tend to be denied, especially by men. At mid-life, however, such denial is dangerous and disabling. It causes depression and also increases a man’s susceptibility to illness.
The only effective way to counter loss experience is to openly express the feelings of pain, anger, and sorrow. The process is similar to the mourning done for the death of a loved one. By talking about the person, and expressing feelings of grief, a survivor gradually relieves his burden and heals his wounds, thereby recovering the strength and vigor to go beyond the loss and begin life anew.
“When feelings are put into words, they can be dissipated or acted on with conscious intent,” explains Levinson. “If they cannot be verbalized, there is no release from anguish and people are compelled to act on impulses which they only dimly perceive.”8
Alien though it may seem to men who have developed a long-standing disdain for expressing emotions, this prescription to ventilate painful feelings—to mourn—is a vital imperative at mid-life.
*22\93\2*
For this generation of men, the normal depression provoked by a confrontation with mortality is compounded by another disturbing fact: Their peers are dropping all around them. No wonder a man approaching middle age experiences a poignant new sense of physical vulnerability: The American male knows damned well that he is likely to die prematurely—earlier than the American female, certainly, and earlier than men in many other countries.
Today the average life expectancy for the white American male is 68.9 years, whereas for the female it is 76.7 years— nearly 8 years longer. And the United States now ranks only twenty-fourth in the world in life expectancy for men, compared to ninth for women.
Such statistics don’t surprise us. That women outlive men in this country is a fact most of us now take for granted. We know, for example, that the male is considered the weaker sex biologically. Studies show that although many more males are conceived, they are more fragile than females before and directly after birth. (About 12 per cent more male than female fetuses die before delivery, and during the first week of life the death rate for males is 32 per cent greater than for females.)
We also know that the male’s greater susceptibility to trauma and illness continues later in life. Key indexes reveal that heart disease strikes twice as many men as women; that three men die of cancer for every two women; that four times more men than women die of respiratory diseases, and twice as many of cirrhosis of the liver. In addition, men are three times more vulnerable to death from accidents, suicides, and murder.
To explain this disparity between the sexes, some authorities note that men are historically more prone to violent behavior than women, more likely to be killed during wartime. Others point out that excessive male mortality is common to many species—and thus a “law of nature.” They therefore blame biology as the primary, if not the only, cause for the American male’s dying younger than the female.
Such explanations will not do, however. They ignore the fact that this gap in the life span between American men and women is only a recent phenomenon. At the turn of the century, when infectious diseases were more common causes of childhood fatalities, the average life expectancy was only fifty—but it was the same for both sexes. And among people over sixty-five the male was dominant: There were one hundred older men for every ninety-eight women.
Now, however, women outnumber men in this country at every age level over twenty, despite the fact that more boys are born than girls. There are now one hundred women to every ninety-five men in the population at large; and among people over sixty-five, there are one hundred women to every seventy-two men.
The alarming fact is that this gap is continuing to widen: By 1990 it is expected that there will be only sixty-seven men over sixty-five for every one hundred women.
Thus there has been a steady reversal in the life expectancy
trends for men, as compared to women. Further, this reversal
has been occuring in the United States—but not in other
countries.
If the life span of both sexes was the same at the turn of the century, why has the ratio of male to female deaths chanced? And why does the American male now die an average of eight years earlier than the female? These key questions cannot be answered by indicting the more fragile biology of the male unless we are prepared to argue that the fundamental biolocy of the sexes has chanced during this period, and that this chance has occurred only in the United Statf-s—a preposterous theory.
Clearly the untimely death of the American male must be the result of social factors, not natural ones. Just what are these factors?
*9\93\2*
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