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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.

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