THE MALE CRISIS: A SHARED PLIGHT

March 2009
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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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