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How will a woman react when her husband starts grappling with the turbulent changes of the mid-life crisis? Usually, she will feel confused and threatened and angry. Only dimly aware, at first, that real changes are taking place, she often complains that she has lost contact with him. He may still be doing all the “right” things—coming home at the same hours, observing the same family rituals—but he doesn’t really seem to be there. Moody, irritable, or detached, he may seem strangely reticent to talk. Or he may be excessively impatient with the children and no longer willing to bother with their problems. Or he may suddenly evaporate behind a cloud of supposedly urgent business matters.

The woman who instantly concludes that this puzzling behavior is a personal rejection of her will be in trouble. Her first response will be to become clinging and demanding, a real nag. If, however, she is able to stand back a bit and see this as something he is going through—and probably having difficulty coping with—she will be in a much stronger position, not only to survive herself, but also to help her husband maneuver through a painful transitional period.

When, as often happens, a man is absolutely unable to voice any of his feelings of unsettlement, the challenge facing his wife will be compounded. For her own sake she must recognize that even her best efforts to persuade him to communicate with her may fail. If she can avoid taking the signs of his discontent personally, that will help, and so will her having outside activities to occupy herself with. During this difficult period her husband will have to work through some of his problems alone, and the more she can be absorbed elsewhere, the better.

To appreciate still further how a woman can deal constructively with her husband’s mid-life changes, and how it feels for her to share his plight, let’s consider a specific case. Donna and Fred M. were both thirty-nine, and had been married eighteen years, when new issues suddenly disrupted their placid existence.

A lawyer from Chicago, Fred began to do some serious stock-taking, which not only threatened his marriage but also led, eventually, to his altering his life in dramatic ways. Three years later, with the dust just settling, Donna tells how she reacted:

All of a sudden this whole holocaust invades your household, and you feel a tremendous amount of insecurity.

The most important change was Fred’s indecisiveness. Before there weren’t a lot of gray areas in his decisionmaking. Then all of a sudden he comes up with these crazy alternatives that I just wasn’t used to. New choices about what he wanted to do, how he wanted to live— things that were sort of inconsistent with how he would normally have behaved.

There were a lot of fantasy ideas that seemed farfetched for a man who had been on a straight road to “success” and had a pretty clear vision of what that meant to him from age twenty on. Now, all the things he had never questioned, he began to question. It made me feel very insecure because I didn’t know what was going to happen, and some of it was threatening to me, certainly. He was questioning the marriage, questioning his sense of responsibility.

How did I handle it? Ignored it! That was my immediate reaction. What do you do when you’re frightened by something? You sweep it under the carpet and hope it’s going to go away! Then I began to take it very personally—which was how things erupted and we started talking about it. But that wasn’t for six months. It took me six months to realize there were definite changes going on in Fred.

During the next year Fred made a major move: He gave up a high-salaried partnership in a law firm to strike out on his own. Having been through a similar struggle for independence six years earlier, when she became a free-lance photographer, Donna could be supportive. But things became more difficult for her when, soon after the job change, Fred announced that he now wanted to be “emotionally irresponsible” too. Though he didn’t feel their marital separation would be a permanent break, he insisted that he needed some “thinking time”—and some freedom. Donna tells how she reacted:

The idea was totally unexpected. But for several months this horrible thing he was feeling about responsibility had been coming through to me—so I wasn’t bowled over by it. What saved me was that because of my own awareness I didn’t feci he was doing it to me. I felt he was doing it for him. And I think that’s the whole big ballgame. That’s really where it’s at. Once you can see that, you can decide—if there’s love and kindness and caring on both parts—how best to handle the situation so everybody’s going to come out all right.

There was no question of loving, but there was a question for him of re-evaluating. We were sixteen when we fell in love, and twenty-one when we got married, and I think he was asking whether that sixteen-year-old boy had the right to determine where he would be for the rest of his life—without his ever really having investigated his feelings about it.

The sexual thing was a big issue, and we did talk about that. He wanted freedom to investigate his sexual needs and his involvement needs. Not just have a breezy affair, but could he be involved with another woman?—which he claims he had never really been. And he needed the freedom to explore that without feeling guilty.

I felt threatened—and I recognized the enormity of the risks. But I must admit I felt some excitement, and I wanted to take advantage of it myself. And this is where I think we succeeded better than most people, because we were able to honestly communicate our feelings, and also achieve a fairness in the arrangement. Some women who go through this become martyrs. They walk around saying, “Poor me!”—and then lock themselves in the house with their kids and lie prostrate on the floor!

They’re not doing anything for themselves, and they become the injured party.

Fred was very giving and understanding in all this. He wanted something for himself, but not at my expense— and that was the very mature part of his personality that was great. He stayed at the house with the kids two nights a week, which allowed me to live on my own at my studio. And so we were both able to get an illusion of freedom.

When I really got chicken was the night he was leaving. I cracked up. I remember that. I had a big emotional scene, and we both cried, and did a whole number. Like we were parting forever. Because we were both mature enough to understand that if we were doing this—and it was so important to him that he had to work it out outside the marriage—then the risks were real.

But I certainly thought my risks in not allowing him to do this were far greater. To me, that meant the risk of having a very ordinary, dull, compromised marriage for the rest of our lives—which I was not willing to settle for.

Despite occasional waves of fear and loneliness, Donna created an active social life for herself that included men, and kept busy with her work. She expected the separation to last about six months, but it was only two months later when Fred decided he had “done his thing”—and that his emotional commitment was to his wife. Both forty-two now, Donna and Fred have reshaped almost every aspect of their existence together, including the values they endorse, the friends they see, and the way they spend their leisure time. Most important, they have established—for the first time in their lives—a genuinely loving relationship, which Donna describes:

What came out of it—our both passing through this holocaust—was the ability to really communicate on deep levels. Before, I communicated but Fred didn’t hear. Now he hears. And there is certainly a great sense of security in our marriage that we never felt before, which makes it easier to live your everyday life!

Now there isn’t anything we wouldn’t express to each other. I used to feel that when I was emotionally down Fred was gone. I mean, go find him! He was busy in the office, and had fourteen appointments that night, and seventeen people coming into town the next day, and would I please go handle my emotional crisis by myself. Quietly. But now when I’m miserable and depressed, he does not run away. He’s willing to sit down and talk about it, and we usually work out some solution.

Or I say I’ve got to get away by myself for a few days, and ask him to take care of the house and kids. And the answer is Yes, unquestionably Yes. Before it would have been one hassle after another. He was threatened. Where was I going? Why did I have to do that? And I was threatened because he washiding in his busy work to get away from what I was feeling, because it was too oppressive for him. But we don’t have that kind of hassle anymore. At all!

And because there’s been so much communication we understand each other’s weaknesses better—and we’ve stopped arguing about those niggling, horrible things that make marriages so stinking. Part of that, I think, is that he’s now accepted me as the person I am because this is where he wants to be. And if I’m his choice—and he’s chosen to recommit himself to the marriage then I’ve got to be superspecial! And so some of my little faults can be overlooked.

Five years ago we didn’t have a marriage. We were two people who lived together because we had chosen to when we were sixteen. We liked each other a lot, and were maybe even best friends, and we lived together very well. But around each other—certainly not with each other the way we do now.

When a man changes gears at mid-life, suffering the pangs of dislocation that usually accompany this shift, his feelings of anguish are bound to affect his marriage—for better or for worse. How well the marriage survives these changes depends on many factors, obviously, but among these a woman’s ability to tolerate her husband’s depression is crucial. Equally important, as Fred and Donna’s story shows, is how much caring and mutual respect existed between two people before.

If there is a basic bond of warm feelings, it is possible for a couple to come together on a deeper more honest basis when the crisis period ends,

t By contrast, the fate of the marriage will probably be less ■ happy when a man’s discontent with himself includes resent-| ment toward his wife; or when he feels terribly disappointed by what he has done with his life, and angered by the part he believes his wife has played in this scenario. In such instances, even though a woman may feel that their marriage is tolerable, if not ideal, she may still be unable to salvage the relationship. Her own feelings of betrayal and abandonment will probably undercut any attempts at reconciliation.

“To the extent that the wife is in the grip of feelings of moral outrage and victimization . . . there is probably nothing she can do to keep the marriage together,” observes Maria Levinson of the Yale group. “And perhaps, if they have been moving apart over a period of years,” the marriage isn’t worth saving. It might be liberating for both, and a relief for the children, if they simply went their separate ways.” For a real reconciliation to occur, significant changes in their relationship have to be made. Rather than being merely sympathetic, she points out, a woman “would have to be prepared to grasp the magnitude of [her husband's] despair, to share it in whatever ways she could . . . and to see their joint plight as containing also the possibility for their further development.”

To be sure, such understanding is a great deal to expect from any woman, especially at a stage of life when she is probably making some changes of her own and suffering from doubts and insecurities too. In need of reassurance herself, she may feel that it is grossly unfair for her to have to bolster her husband while her own needs go unmet. And she may be right: It is unfair. But faced with the fact that her husband is in crisis and therefore unable, at least temporarily, to meet her emotional needs, a wife must try—if she believes her marriage is worth saving—to look at her situation objectively.

This does not mean that the woman who has decided to stand by her husband during this trying time should become a martyr or bear the burden alone. To the contrary, she should seek out nurturing friends with whom she can safely ventilate her anxieties and anger, enlarge her sphere of interests to whatever extent possible, and—this above all—never forget that her own survival is of primary importance. Describing what she learned from personal experience, Donna counsels as follows:

What would I advise other women? Well, the big thing for me was that I had lots of people helping me recognize that Fred’s changes weren’t a personal affront to me. And I think any woman who’s having trouble coping during this period should get as much support as she can from anyone she trusts—family, friends, or a therapist.

I also think it’s very important for a woman to care about something else. Nobody should be totally committed to one thing—marriage. You must have some sort of outside commitment. And if you don’t have it before you start feeling some of these changes in your husband, quickly, quickly run out and find something! Start looking, start dabbling, start opening up. Because if you get desperately threatened nobody has a chance. But if you . open yourself up to other things—to the world, people, anything—you will begin to feel your own security within yourself.

At a certain point when this starts happening you must take yourself out of it. Detach—I guess that’s the right word. You must sort of detach from it and put it in perspective.

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In our innocence, we Americans have long cherished the illusion that success and happiness are the same, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the American Dream, once attained, often fails to bring contentment and peace of mind. But the social upheavals of recent years, the Vietnam War and Watergate, have sobered us all, forcing us to embark on a national orgy of self-scrutiny and criticism. We celebrated our two hundredth birthday painfully aware of our own limitations, willing to admit our failings along with our accomplishments, willing even to examine our simplistic devotion to the ethic of achievement and competition.

It was in this spirit of self-reflection that a CBS television documentary entitled But What if the Dream Comes True? dramatized our national malaise several years ago. An engrossing portrayal of the paradoxes of success, this documentary featured Sam Greenawalt, age forty-one, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose dedication to hard work and getting ahead had won him the senior vice presidency of a Detroit bank.

A former football player and an ex-Marine, Greenawalt commutes to work from the affluent suburb of Birmingham, Michigan. Most of the men who live there, we are told, have climbed the corporate ladder and are fighting to stay there. Automobile and advertising executives, engineers and bankers, they are all American success stories.

Greenawalt also started at the bottom of the ladder, trusted in the system, and climbed to the top. “But when you listen to him you detect the first faint shudder of discontent,” says the documentary’s narrator. Shown racing through the door to his office, where he works ten to twelve hours a day, Greenawalt says: “I was trained to be extremely competitive. . . . You want to get the best you can out of yourself, and you have to push in order to get it and you have to hurt yourself to get it.

His sumptuous lifestyle bristles with contradiction. Greenawalt moved to Birmingham seeking safety for his family, but the problems of the outside world—crime, drugs, and dropouts—are pushing into the suburb, increasing the possibility that his children will reject what he worked so hard to achieve. And his wife, having discovered that “she cannot share her husband’s world,” is trying to make her own by attending sensitivity sessions.

The family rushes to escape the “hassle” of their regular routine by driving four hours every weekend to their second home, an isolated retreat called “the cottage.” And we learn at the documentary’s end that the Grecnawalts are moving to the still more opulent suburb of Bloom field Hills, where all the executives are at the very top. “It’s like the camel driver going to the next oasis,” says Sam.0

The documentary concludes by suggesting that the dream is destructive: “The American dream grants you your wishes, and then cuts you into pieces. You struggle to reach Birmingham, but once there, you find life fragmented, family life threatened, the pressures as high as the taxes. So you look for something better, and that, in the American tradition, means an even bigger house in an even better neighborhood. . . . The new house is the new dream.”7

This judgment is too harsh. Though this documentary quite rightly questions our middle-class values, it fails to acknowledge the ability of middle-class, middle-aged men to re-evaluate or change them.

Interviewed five months later, Sam Greehawalt insisted, “There is a large measure of discontent, but they didn’t show the balance.” They didn’t show the things in his life that he found stimulating and satisfying. Even more important, they didn’t show that he himself was asking the same questions that the documentary raised. Sam Greenawalt is too smart to confuse something better with a new house. Asked to describe his feelings about what he has achieved, and what he still wants, he said:

When the film was being made I was still struggling—still scratching. Frightened every minute. Just putting out as hard as I could every day. You have to do that. This is a real, real competitive existence. Everybody depends on you. You have to produce. Every minute!

AH I wanted then was to be a darned good banker. And I wanted to produce for the good of the organization. But I didn’t want the organization to have that pervading influence on everything I do in my life. And I fight that all the time.

I was raised in a quite structured family. My father was very much the boss of the family, and he wanted things done just so. And he expected a great deal from us as youngsters, and thank God we produced for him. He was a stockbroker, and I worked with him for three years. I didn’t like the brokerage business, and T saw what his life was like. Rigid and boring. He’s always been the corporate man, but he doesn’t know any different. Because of him I’m more sensitive, probably more introspective—more desirous of breaking a pattern.

I feel trapped right at the moment, you know? I can’t go anywhere. Shoot … I get phone calls on my vacation. I went off to Sun Valley and I had three or four phone calls out there before I even hit there. And as it goes on, I can see the trap getting bigger and bigger and bigger—and all the more consuming. You sec, what I am now is a paid gun. And I’d better shoot straight, and fast, and often.

I think to myself that now I’m doing this for a reason.

I’m doing it because I want to give substance to my children’s existence. I want them to be proud of the fact that I am producing, and I would like to see them get at their goals in life. At the moment I’m a banker, but in eight or nine years I might not be.

I know where I am now, and I know that I’m looking for something other than what I’m doning. I’ve made a good deal of money in the last two years, and damnit, if I want to retire now, I could. But I know that’s not right for me. I don’t want to continue on being the corporate man forever, and then they release me at sixty-Ove and I’m all burned out. Then what do I do? You sit down and wonder what happened to your life.

Okay. So where do I want to be? I want to be in a position where I’m the owner of a company, where I can skim off if I want to, or take a salary out of it. And I figure if I can inject the money with some of the skills that I have, and put it together with a group of guys, we might be successful.

I’ll tell you, the second half of my life might be entirely different from the first half. I want to have more time to myself when 1 want it. To have more time to enjoy my wife, you know, and my family. But I have to do it for myself.

Contrary to the documentary’s suggestion that the new house is the “new dream,” Sam Greenawalt is concerned with more complex issues. Struggling to redefine success, he is trying to disentangle himself from the corporate web. And, having lived out the American Dream in a conventional sense, he is now trying to structure a personal, more mature, dream for himself—one that will enable him to work on his own terms. And become his own man.

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Whereas Kinsey enlightened us about the wide range of variations in sexual behavior, social scientists today have begun to emphasize the wide range of meanings that such behavior has. And in contrast to Freud, who said all human actions were shaped by sexual needs, they now suggest the opposite: that sexual activity is often motivated by other needs. Nonsexual needs.

Thus a careful observation of the erotic adventures of men in their middle years reveals that their penis angst is usually related to larger mid-life anxieties, and is best understood as one aspect of a shifting sense of self.

In response to wrenching changes, a man at this stage of life is struggling to revise his own self-image and find dignity in the face of undeniable limitations. More than ever, he needs the confirmation of being seen as a powerful and desirable man—a need that the nubile girl is uniquely suited to satisfy. Our culture’s most obvious symbol of hot-blooded sexuality, she can meet the aging male’s intensified need for reassurance both in public and in private. Even when appearances are deceptive, she still has something special to offer, as one connoisseur testifies:

I’ve known a lot of young women, and I find that they’re full of sexual problems and fuck-ups. My experience is that they always have to be taught and initiated. It’s labor, not paradise! It’s not some marvelous, highly sexed, steamed-up, ready-to-go honey that you’re getting! It’s more than likely somebody who’s insecure and frigid and inept.

One thing that’s true, though, I think you can get a younger woman to respond to you very strongly. She’s going to be less appraising than an older woman. She’s had less experience. There are fewer men in her life to which she can compare you. You can dominate her more, sort of impose your myth on her. And you can feel you’re initiating her into all sorts of things and blowing her mind and enslaving her—or whatever the hell it is that you want to do with a woman.

The younger woman has a virginal imagination. After all, what was the whole appeal of the virgin ultimately? That you could mold her and shape her and do this trick with her—that’s why men wanted to marry virgins. They didn’t want any comparisons with any other men. So I think that is a great emotional kick.

During the mid-life period men of this generation often have difficulty separating the two intertwined elements that define their sense of manhood: work and sexuality. It is common, therefore, for a man to suffer first from a feeling of impotence at work, and to then seek compensation through sexual conquest. This is especially true when he despairs of having failed to meet his own standards.

In The War Between the Tales? Alison Lurie describes this situation perfectly. Previously disdainful of colleagues who dallied with students, Brian Tate is a college professor who sees himself as “a just, honorable, and responsible person.” At forty-six, however, he painfully recognizes that he will never become what he had always aspired to: a great man.

His dream demolished, he derives no comfort from knowing that others consider him successful, or that he is blessed with a beautiful wife and two intelligent children. And so he gradually succumbs to the persistent advances of his young student, Wendy Gahaghan—a move that puzzles him. Perhaps, he speculates, his descent into adultery was caused by

“the realization that all this solemn self-regulation had been for nothing.”

Despite Brian’s confusion, it is obvious that Wendy provides a powerful antidote for his feelings of failure. To her Brian is a hero and a great man. Basking in the nourishing warmth of her admiration, he feels increasingly exploited at home by rebellious adolescents and a scolding wife. Why shoud he continue living in “a hostile camp,” he wonders, when Wendy—who “never judges him, withholds nothing, cares for him more than for herself”—offers unconditional love?

Thus Brian separates from his wife to frolic with Wendy, until the frenzied chaos of her life exhausts him and he finally returns to his familiar domestic comforts. But something significant has happened in the meantime: Having retreated to a hospitable harbor during a stormy period, he returns with his self-esteem restored.

Surprising though it may seem, this same magical act of restoration and reassurance is often performed just as skillfully by a call girl as by a college girl. That at least is the finding of a study entitled Lovers, Friends, Slaves by Martha Stein, a Manhattan social worker. Based on the direct observation of sex acts involving 1,242 men, this study shows that for men in their middle years even sexual liaisons involving cash are not motivated by simple sexual desire, but by a special constellation of factors related to the mid-life crisis.

The majority of these men came to the call girl to seek relief from overwhelming performance pressures, says Stein, who concluded that most of them were having difficulty working through the problems related to their stage of life. (Described as top-level businessmen and professionals, 42 per cent of these men were in their forties, with the rest roughly divided between the thirties and the fifties.) Generally they regarded the call girl’s apartment as a haven where they could escape their worries. And more than half imposed on her a therapeutic role—for ego support, sexual counseling, airing their troubles, and reducing anxiety. Some men confided fears or feelings that they had never shared with anyone else—including their wife, or even their psychiatrist. Others increased their visits during times of crisis, when the tension at work or at home became acute. Better than tranquilizers, they said their visits helped them unwind physically and also provided much-needed emotional comfort.

Ambitious and self-denying, these men often described themselves as feeling harassed, overworked, and lonely. Over and over again they spoke about having no one to talk to. They complained about physical health problems; ambivalence about their chosen lifestyle and the value of monetary success; and feelings of estrangement from their wives and children. In turn, these tensions were expressed through excessive drinking, which was very common; depression; stress-related illnesses such as heart conditions, ulcers, and high blood pressure; and a high incidence (25 per cent) of sexual dysfunction.

Equally revealing, in this setting where a man was under no obligation to satisfy his partner or to conform to social standards, half these men chose to abandon their prescribed role as an “aggressive” male. Sexually passive, they wanted to relax and let the call girl direct the love play, rather than “perform.” They also preferred the female-superior position to any other, and frequently requested fellatio.

Thus, says Stein, the call girls provided therapeutic benefits—which a man could accept without seeing himself as maladjusted—by fulfilling emotional needs that were not being met in his marriage or dealt with by the helping professions. That is, in addition to sex these men used their sessions primarily to bolster their own self-image—by choosing roles that brought praise or reassurance.

According to their preferences, they fell into nine categories. The “Lovers,” for example, approached sex in a highly poetic way and often fantasized romantic scenarios of escape, which might include vacationing with the call girl. Anxious to be considered special, the “Lovers” also demanded much flattery. The “Friends” wanted, above all, to ventilate their problems and anxieties. They complained about the stressful aspects of their work or home life, and needed to be listened to in a supportive, sympathetic manner. The “Guardians,” on the other hand, rarely talked about their own problems because they wanted to appear strong, wise, and protective. Concerned about impotence, they preferred very young girls who giggled, got confused, and needed their help. Another group, the “Adventurers,” were interested in becoming liberated swingers and in experimenting with different techniques and postures. Attracted by the counterculture’s notion of playful sex, they wanted to combine sex with drugs and rock music, or arrange scenes with several girls.

Adept at responding to the particular role chosen by each man, the call girl became the fantasy woman who was paid not merely to provide sex, but also to be totally devoted to his needs and wishes. Eager to please, utterly accommodating, she was a welcome relief for men who felt both over-pressured and underappreciated.

And so it is for other men: Seeking refuge from the harsh assaults of this mid-life period and release from the heightened anxieties that haunt and perplex them, they confirm their manhood through the worshipful gaze of a nubile girl—who mirrors back an image of their most potent self. Contrary to popular wisdom, men in their middle years are generally drawn to younger women not because they want to recapture their youth, but because they need to reconfirm their maturity. One man explains: A lot of people have said they see me as someone who is interested in young women because this contradicts my own age or makes me feel young, or something of that sort. I don’t really believe that at all. I don’t think I have any particular prejudice in favor of youth, but I do feel that after a certain age—and it isn’t a very advanced age, maybe something like twenty-eight—women become very difficult to deal with because they have been through the mill. They’re like a damaged, fractured vase, and if they get one more knock they’ll fall apart. Or else they’re sort of a shrewd appraiser of male horseflesh and they just want a good deal. It’s either defensiveness or cannincss, but it certainly makes a big problem for men.

Another thing: As you grow older you more and more prize the quality of sweetness in a woman, and I find the word “sweet” a very important word in the middle-aged male’s vocabulary. “Isn’t she sweet?” “Such a sweet girl!” It’s part of the escape theme—away from harshness, away from reality, away from contests of ego strength with mature women. You want that sweetness, that sense of—I don’t know—tenderness, affection. It’s almost a childlike quality as balm, as relief, as comfort, as escape from this endless power struggle that you always live in.

Earlier in my life I don’t think that quality would have been recognizable to me. I wouldn’t even have articulated it. Women were either good-looking or intelligent or very stylish or sexy. Today I’ll look at a woman and I’ll say, “Well, she’s attractive and bright, but she’s just not a sweet person, so what good is it?” That’s really the master quality, I find, at this stage of my life. It’s a quality of innocence, or yieldingness, of no hostility, no combat, and no rivalry.

I think younger women are more romantic and more tender, and sort of sweeter. Older women tend to be maternal and sympathetic and understanding, but it’s all turning into your mother—which is not what you’re after! A mature woman is in the same situation you’re in. She wants her pleasure, and you’re going to contribute to it. She’s not going to be your slave, and she’s not going to be your adorer, and she’s not going to fall down and collapse in front of you!

The young woman can enhance your ego by reflecting back on you the image you want to have reflected. You want to be taken for a big man or a generous man or a sexy rogue or a great fuck—whatever image you’re trying to promote, you can get it back from her a lot easier than you can from an older woman.

So I don’t think it’s trying to recapture your youth, or trying to be young. It’s just the opposite. It’s an attempt to assert your true maturity, your true masculinity, your true power. I think the young woman provides the measure of ourselves that we think we’ve earned, and which mature women withhold from us. They won’t give us the respect, and they won’t give us the surrender, and they won’t give us the ego-flattering imagery we crave. That’s it, man, they won’t give it to you!

This, then, is the single most seductive reason for the appeal of the nubile girl: A yielding innocent on whom a man can project whatever fantasy he craves, she makes him feel not merely potent, but also omnipotent. A soothing balm indeed. Where else, after all, can the aging male find a sexual partner who will offer applause and adulation without demanding reciprocal attentions? Who will satisfy his emotional needs without requiring him to cater to hers? Only the young can afford to be so selfless.

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As he grows older, the macho male finds himself increasingly isolated—cut off from his inner being, incapable of intimacy, and dangerously ill-equipped to handle the inevitable assaults of aging.

Brooding strong and silent behind his invincible mask, he may try to disguise his pain by appearing perpetually cheerful or by translating psychic suffering into sardonic jest, a time-honored masculine defense. But now the jokes are etched in acid, the laughter laced with bile, and a man discovers that comic detachment and cold-blooded denial are feeble weapons to use at this critical stage of life. After forty impacted feelings take their toll.

During this turbulent period women have an important advantage over men: They are allowed to admit their dissatisfactions without censure and seek comfort when they feel troubled, confused, or ill. Our society not only encourages women to express their feelings openly but also supports them in doing so.

By contrast, since male superiority requires forfeiting the right to be merely human—human enough to admit weakness—men are sternly prohibited from confiding their troubles, confessing fears, or seeking help.2 And that is why, some researchers suggest, women have less difficulty aging than men, less difficulty surmounting major life crises.

The masculine mystique dictates that a “real” man be self-sufficient. A male in our society is therefore trained from childhood to follow the cult of toughness. Little boys don’t cry or complain, he is told. They take it on the chin. Little boys are supposed to be brave and bold, strong and sturdy, fearless at all times. Sentimental outbursts, he soon discovers, are for women only.

Because of this conditioning, a man learns early to suppress or deny these forbidden feelings. He learns to conceal his pain, bury his anger, and clamp the lid on all emotions. In time he gradually becomes dulled to his own inner responses, detached from his feelings, and finally in some cases incapable of feeling.

This schizoid separation occurs because traditional sex roles pit male against female by defining masculinity and femininity as polar oppositcs. Thus, the man who fails to conform to the masculine mystique—who fails to obey the commandment that he be in charge of his emotions—goes so at great peril: He is automatically accused of being like a woman—soft, weak, and foolish.

Feelings are dangerous, according to this polarized logic, because if you rely on feelings rather than facts, you lose control. And if you lose control, people take advantage of you, and then you get screwed. Which means being passive, feminine and manipulated.

But this masculine ideal of keeping cool is based on a monumental fallacy: The assumption that emotions can really be “controlled” by pushing them aside. There is now much medical evidence which suggests that buried emotions backfire, either physically or psychologically. Thus the more a man tries to control his emotions, the more they actually control him.

The reason for this paradox is that suppressed emotions don’t go away. If concealed or denied, they smolder underground until they finally find some devious route for release. Contrary to the masculine ideal, then, repressed emotions are more dangerous than those that are openly expressed.

A good illustration of this is seen in the man who regularly suppresses his anger. His rage builds up gradually until he finally explodes. “I don’t know how to express my feelings aggressively without being violent about it,” confessed one mild-mannered man whose life experiences all seemed strangely muted. “When it comes to dealing with anger I can’t stop the escalation. If I start to scream and yell I’m likely to throw things, bang walls, even smash you in the face. Of course, it takes a lot of provocation to bring this out, so mostly I just clam up.”

His experience is typical. Many men who pride themselves on rarely losing their cool oscillate between these two extremes: Their emotions either remain buried—or else break out and go berserk.

Such violent outbursts are frightening, of course, because the man who blows up after overly long periods of repressing anger is indeed “out of control.” Moreover, such explosions often have devastating consequences: A man gets fired; he loses a good friend; or his wife walks out on him. Surveying the mess he’s made, he resolves to exercise even tighter controls in the future.

The result? The next time he turns his anger against himself, infecting or inflaming the body. He gets sick, stricken by ulcers or colitis or hypertension or migraine headaches, to name but a few among the many diseases that authorities now agree are caused by stifled emotions, anger especially.

It is the body that finally pays, because if emotions are not expressed in words or actions they must find release through physical illness. This is the basic explanation for what are now called psychosomatic diseases. And in our society men who take pride in keeping all their problems to themselves are especially prone to this psychosomatic response.

But at mid-life the stoic injunctions of the masculine mystique cause psychic pain, too. Emotionally armored to do battle against the world, men who have been taught to deny anger and pain have also closed off other, more positive feelings. With age they become increasingly unable to express or respond to affection, tenderness, or warmth. Rigid and out of touch with others, they have learned to substitute guarded, mechanical responses for spontaneous, felt action.

As a result, many men are indescribably lonely as they enter their middle years. They complain that life has lost its meaning. They feel bored and restless. Nothing excites them or gives them joy.

The emotional juices that provide pleasure, that give life meaning, that inspire action, have dried up. Their lifelong habit of discipline and self-control has taken its toll, sapping their energies, muting their emotions, and leaving them cruelly isolated. They have become detached from other people and their authentic self, a self so long concealed behind a cool cover, a false macho mask, that it has been stripped of all passion, stripped bare. A self sacrificed in the name of masculinity: outwardly strong, inwardly sterile.

Such a man feels hollow, empty, dead inside. He laments like the character in That Championship Season:

I’m so bored half the time it’s killing me. Watching the same old faces get old, same bullshit, day in and day out. Bored. Sometimes I get on the turnpike and just drive until I feel like getting off. Alone … What’s left? Hit a few bars, some music, drink, play old basketball games over in my head. Pick up some strange pussy now and then, here and there, you know. Always need something young and juicy sitting beside me. Mostly sit and replay the good games in my head, believe that? . . .

Sometimes I think that’s the only thing I can still feel, you know, still feel in my gut . . . that championship season.5

This lament comes from a man who has made his million but lost the capacity to feel anything except the ancient thrill of a high school basketball game. Like many mid-life men, he complains he is dying of boredom, but he is really suffering from a terminal case of impacted feelings.

*20\93\2*

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It was a drizzly night in San Francisco, and Enrico’s Coffeehouse was virtually deserted. A look of desolation hung over the marble-topped tables as Enrico Banducci sat rapping at the bar with two old friends, relating tales of bygone days. The former owner of the Hungry i nightclub, he is a man of immense vitality. And even when the topic turns to how he feels about aging, his responses are direct and forceful.

Looking in the mirror distresses him, Enrico says. “If you’re pale you think about health. You think, ‘What’s happening to my body?’”

“You start reading the obits,” remarks one of his companions, “and anybody dying at eighty makes you feel better!”

“But the worst thing,” says the other fellow, “is the subtle onset of hypochondria. I remember running up the stairs not long ago and saying to myself, ‘This is heart-attack gulch 1′ I was suddenly conscious of it.”

Enrico nods in agreement, recalling the night he was just about to leave the nightclub when the phone rang. He raced for it, taking the stairs two at a time as usual, and crumpled and fell on the last step.

“From that day on,” he says ruefully, “I knew what my father meant when he said, ‘Your legs go after thirty-five.’
When you’re young you can take the steps four at a time, and if you fall you just bounce. But when you fall at forty-four you get hurt.”

The next shock came when he was forty-seven and about to close the Hungry i. His secretary asked him what he planned to do next and commented with concern, “You know, you’re kind of old to start a new venture.”

“Oh, my God, it really set me back,” Enrico recalls. “I said, ‘Old? Are you kidding?’ My age thoughts had never hit me before.

“J think it’s other people who bring you down, more than yourself. I hadn’t even noticed I had gray hair before that. What she said really set me to thinking, and I started to count the years I had left. Up to that moment I wasn’t counting. But then I started relating it, and I thought, ‘Gee, twenty years ago I just opened this place, and that was like yesterday. Now twenty years are all I’ve got left. Tomorrow I’m dead!’ You start giving yourself a sentence.”

His first impulse was to jump into something new immediately to prove he could repeat his former success. Eventually, ; however, he decided he had enough money to get along on and no need to prove anything. Now he spends his days at the coffeehouse, a business he had already owned, but he thinks differently about the time he has left:

“Every single day is important, whereas before it wasn’t. I told my son, ‘Gregory, life is like a clock. We’re born at six o’clock in the morning, and at six o’clock in the evening we die. So I’ve had breakfast, I’ve had lunch, and I’m at about two-fifteen on the clock of life. I’ve got one great big dinner left to order. That’s it! When it becomes six o’clock I lower my head with the sun and I’m gone.’

” ‘Whew,’ my son said, ‘the way you put it, Pop!’ ”

Pausing reflectively, Enrico added, “It’s a strange thing when you start counting the years. I don’t know if anyone else does that… or if it’s just me alone.”

*7\93\2*

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