“I thought I knew you…”
by Mira and Charles on May 7th, 2010Understanding the so-called “mid-life crisis”
In our book When Good People Have Affairs we talk about the issue of the mid-life crisis. That’s what many people think is to blame for affairs. It’s not so much a way of letting the cheater off the hook—“He wasn’t responsible; he was crazy!; he was having a mid-life crisis!!” It’s more an unwillingness to look at the relationship as the source of much of the difficulty. In fact, it’s only a mid-life crisis affair if distress over aging is the main reason for having an affair a person wouldn’t have had otherwise. And so the mid-life crisis affair is one of the rarer of the 17 different kinds of affairs we talk about in When Good People Have Affairs.
Still, talk about affairs leads people to wonder about the whole issue of the mid-life crisis. And that’s why we got this question from a journalist yesterday.
Q: As a contributing editor of a popular magazine, I’m working on an article about how to survive your partner’s crisis (midlife crisis, quarterlife crisis, or other crisis). You thought everything was fine, but now your partner has doubts about everything in his life, including your relationship. What can you do as a partner? How long should you be supportive and understanding, and when is it time to set clear limits? How can your relationship survive, and how can you stay sane while your partner is losing his/her mind?
My question is: do you have experience with this situation, and what would be your advise?
Mira: First, a distinction. As they move through adulthood, things happen to make people reassess all or part of their lives. You get laid off and suddenly wonder if you’re in the career you want to be in. Your best friend gets cancer and you start thinking maybe you need to reassess your priorities. Probably most adults are reassessing part of their lives right now.
A mid-life crisis happens when who you thought you were and/or what you thought your life would be like comes crashing against the disappointing reality of what you and/or your life are really like. You’re not just reassessing. You’re completely disoriented, like a sleepwalker who suddenly wakes up on the roof of his house.
The most important thing to know about this is that it’s confusing. The old standards are gone. But where do you get new standards from?
Plus, it’s now hard to trust yourself. Just when you thought you’d be reaping a harvest of self-confidence at this time of your life, you realize that the structure that you’ve built doesn’t work. So how can you trust yourself anymore? You’ve built a house you can’t live in any more.
And this crisis is painful. You’re scared thinking about the future, angry at yourself and others, and sad at the hopeful future you’ve lost, all at once, with nothing, you think, to replace it.
So what you need is to sort things out and to find relief from the pain.
Unfortunately, and this is where things get hairy, many people are in so much pain that finding relief from the pain becomes more important than figuring out how to sort things out. And when people are in this kind of life pain, they will do anything to get relief. That means having affairs, buying an expensive boat, running away, starting to drink…a whole list of actions that are unproductive at best and destructive at worst.
If your partner is going through this, you need to understand all this. And the best way you can help is to become the go-to person for talking all this out. You need to wear the best-friend hat, not the spouse hat. You need to become the person your partner can feel he can tell ANYTHING to. The less judgmental you can be, the more you become a welcome person in his life. That means listening and ALWAYS sympathizing with your partner’s impulses, even if you can’t say OK to his actions.
Yes, everything is scary for you, the partner, now. Everything you thought you could take for granted is now in play. Everything could change.
But the reassuring truth is that most of the time, even though everything feels up in the air, people only want to make one small, strategic change in their lives. It’s like getting the flu: every part of you hurts, but there is only one bug causing all that pain. So the fact that your partner is reassessing his whole life doesn’t usually mean he will change his whole live. One small change can make a big difference in how a whole life feels. So it makes sense not to panic. Talk about changing everything usually doesn’t lead to people actually changing everything.
You also need to be clear about your own bottom line. What is it that, if your partner did it, would mean you could no longer find your way back to being in a relationship with him? Get clear about all your bottom lines and let your partner know. Clarity is very healing at a confusing time like this. If you are not clear, it will just make things worse.
You need to ask yourself if you want to be in a relationship with your partner. The question you need to ask yourself is, Is this person who is so lost and confused the person you wanted and still want to be with, or has a mask come off revealing someone you don’t actually want to be with?
Just remember: your partner isn’t losing his mind. He’s reassessing his life. This is a scary journey. You need to ask yourself if you like the person who is going on this journey and if you want to go on it with him.
The good news is that these radical reassessments are normal and healthy, and usually the person finds a way to change his life without blowing it out of the water.
You might be surprised to learn that one of the very best books for figuring out how to reassess your life is Everything Happen for a Reason. That book will connect what prompted the crisis to what it actually means for you. And that’s worth everything.
