What Is A Midlife Crisis (part two)
This is part two of my article "What Is A Midlife Crisis’. The original I wrote a while ago. I have now expanded and broken it into three parts.
In part one I discussed some definitions of a midlife crisis and of the ambiguity that can make what seems to be a midlife crisis more complicated. To follow is a list of well-known triggers for a midlife crisis.
Parent’s Death
Parents are usually different to other people in your life when they die. They usually are the people who have always been there in some form or another and so provide some consistency to your life.
The more supportive they have been the more they will be missed. Clearly some parents who have, for example been controlling may create a feeling of freedom within you, which may make you less responsible and reject responsibilities that you have committed to such as children, career and relationships.
I talk about my own feelings of loss, dealth of close relatives and the cycle of life here.
Close Friend Or Sibling’s Death
Someone dying who is close to you will be devastating for sure. But apart from the upset and probably depressing feeling it will cause within you, you may wonder about your own mortality.
It may make you cherish every day as if it is your last. Although this possibly sounds a positive way to deal with such a tragedy, maybe it also means that you never plan anything, and life from day to day with little long-term direction.
This way of living works well for many, but I would worry that 20 years further on for example, you may feel you haven’t achieved much from your life and have lost time that you need to catch up on now.
What Is The Meaning To Your Life?
You’ve achieved pretty much all that you set out to achieve, now what?
Maybe all that you’ve achieved now seems superficial such as the big house and the impressive car. Is all that’s in store for you is aging towards retirement and holidays a couple of times a year? Surely there must be more to life than that?
This is what Maslow would describe as looking for ‘self actualization’. It is the higher point of a pyramid of needs that a human experiences on a day-to-day basis and over the course of their life, but only when the lower levels of the pyramid are achieved. More about Maslow’s hierarchy and fulfilment in midlife here.
Moving on from this thinking maybe you’ve thought, what is the meaning of life at all? What is it all about? What is the POINT of your life? Maybe religion and philosophy will give you some answers you will feel hit the mark, or maybe you are looking for something else?
Nostalgia
Missing past times; school, teen years, 20 something’s. Perhaps a time that was simpler, or when you last felt happy or fulfilled. As life progresses we seem to develop responsibilities that cause us to loose our own identity.
Likewise, when your children leave the household, maybe that is a time when you feel lonely and wanting for past times. I begin to talk a bit about feeling nostalgia for the simple life of a younger me in this article which is the same one as the Maslow article linked just above.
Mortality
Whenever you’ve looked at the path of your life in the past you have seen the majority of your life ahead still. This can make you feel there is still a lot of time to achieve what you want to.
However when you near your middling years its clear that time is moving on and your most youthful years have gone forever, never to be repeated. How much time have you got left anyway?
Who’s to say that you won’t be struck down with a terminal illness within five or ten years? Your own existence is uncertain, how much life do you have left?
I explore my own feelings about death and the cycle of life here.
Missed Opportunities
When you are younger, as much as you would look at the “well dressed old guy’ with the large office and fancy car and think,
"he’s got it made, I look forward to being his age",
the same guy could be looking at you thinking,
“I missed some great opportunities when I was younger like him. I had so many choices and chose to stick myself in an office for 30 years”
You may feel like trying to recreate the same opportunity again, but now you are older. Some opportunities happen when you are young and can’t be re-attempted again such as making it big with your college band. But others at midlife, are perfectly reasonable and perhaps you are now better prepared to succeed in. So, instead of the college band, perhaps managing college bands? I talk about my own experience which is similar to this example in my own midlife crisis here.
Sexual Exploration or Confusion
It may be a time when you are thinking you missed out on really exploring life sexually. So you think, it’s now or never. Perhaps you have been hiding your real sexual desires and wish to now express and explore them. In many cultures a person’s homosexuality and bisexuality is hidden because of fears of humiliation or retribution.
Perhaps at midlife you are now ready to be honest with yourself and genuine. You perhaps either don’t care anymore what people think of you, or you wish to immerse yourself in alternative lifestyle cultures where your true self will not stand out from the crowd.
It isn’t easy for individuals to be honest with their partners about their true hidden sexual desires if they fear a negative response and so it is very common for those determined to express themselves to do this away from the family home and live another life for however long they can get away with it.
As much as it is the hardest thing to do, to be honest about this, it is also a huge challenge for people to accept the news that actually there is a significant part of your partner that you didn’t know about, and now you do, you are not sure if you can deal with.
For example, discovering a partner with pornography maybe quite a shock since it questions your own self in that relationship. But it needs to be seen as a sign that something is wrong and worth talking about openly. It will be hard for both to do. If there are ways to talk openly about it, perhaps there will be a mutual understanding that can be achieved.
Denying who you own feelings is about denying your true genuine identity.
Another example of a person I am aware of has struggled with his own femininity. He wanted as a child to dress in female clothes yet his parents punished him for it. So he had to hide his real feelings.
The man explored his bisexual side whilst in his forties but still looks to deny that side of him for fear of rejection. This rejection that has controlled him all his life.
I recall years ago one of my daughter’s friends (a boy of around 4 years old at the time ) coming around and always dressing in girls clothes. He was fortunate that we didnt stop him, he could be his real self, as was the case, I understand, with his own parents.
Quite simply, you arent as young anymore and how you deal with this is key to your own well being.
Empty Nest Syndrome
When your children finally (!!) grow up and leave the family home life can paradoxically become very quiet. Not only this, but actually it can be a time when you review your purpose in life.
Women can become a little lost in their direction since for so long they have been mothers to children and growing adults that always need some sort of emotional or practical support. Depending on how motherly a woman is will depend on how much this affects them. Additionally, the menopause can have a significant impact on a woman’s identity and will question their being.
For a man it can be very similar. Normally seen as the head of the family, now they have to exert their leadership over a number of houses or look to other ways to focus themselves whilst also dealing with the introduction of new family members who may question or challenge their decisions and authority. Not exclusive to the male gendre, women may feel their role have changed with new individuals making and influencing decisions for their own children.
An Interrupted Life
Somewhere along your life’s progress you may feel that you didn’t fully complete or fulfil a certain part of your life’s progress. It could be as simple as regretting not going to university or not taking a year out to travel, both of which you could still do later in life. But some that are about the progress of growing up and learning and experiencing life in the right order can affect someone quite hard.
For example, being raped at a young age would devastate anyone but consider how this interrupts the innocence of child development and provides damaging experiences about sex and (probably) the opposite sex.
More subtle than the above take the example of a 15 year old girl who was given a house. Three years later she had to manage tenants the same age or older than her. All this at a time when all she really wanted to do was party.
She suddenly had to grow up pretty quickly, leaving her with additional responsibilities at an age when she should have been focusing more on herself, her education & her personality development. In her late 30’s when her parents died and she was finally released from needing to keep their approval for the way she lived her life, she regressed to act like a 15 year old and rejected her children and husband to live with a man that would act in the same manor.
When we hit midlife, irrespective of a trigger as discuss above it is a time when many of the choices that worked for us before may simply not work anymore. In my third and last part I discuss how relationship break-ups and infidelity have a significant part to play in many midlife crisis experiences, and I also talk about what can be done to minimise the impact of a midlife crisis.
In part three I touch on what can you do about a midlife crisis and also about the most common issue going on behind a midlife crisis that will change your life as a person with midlife crisis, and that of a partner to a person with a midlife crisis. Infidelity.
What are your midlife crisis experiences? Tell me about them below.
Guy.
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Filed under: Mid-Life Crisis
[...] sohas wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThis is part two of my article “What Is A Midlife Crisis’. The original I wrote a while ago. I have now expanded and broken it into three parts. In part one I discussed some definitions of a midlife crisis and of the ambiguity that can … [...]
[...] In the previous article I listed and discussed some well known triggers for a midlife crisis which have a significant impact on people in their mid years. This maybe as early as thirty or can happen much later in their fifties or even sixties. [...]
[...] In the next article of three that discusses a midlife crisis I list some of the most common triggers… [...]