Are you aged between 40-60 years?
Are you coming to terms with your mortality and witnessing a decline or upsurge in your natural prowess, virility and acumen?
Are you struggling with your self confidence and identity, do you have unexplained mood swings, weight loss or gain, feel a declining satisfaction with your life, its purpose and meaning?
Are you regularly attacked by bouts of self doubt, frustrated with changing life roles and responsibilities?
Do you feel an urgent need to prove your virility or the ability to be sexually attractive to the opposite sex, make drastic changes in your appearance and self care e.g sharing clothes with your children, sudden obsession with fitness and exercise?
Do you feel the compulsion to go away from all your responsibilities and live life in ways you have only imagined ?
If you’ve answered yes to any of the aforementioned questions, you may be experiencing the phenomenon named Midlife crisis or syndrome, a psychological stage which is defined as a period of transition in life when someone struggles with their identity and self confidence. Midlife crisis hits both men and women albeit differently.
For most men, because the midlife crisis comes at an age when they are faced with more responsibilities at work being at the middle or top management level and increased financial pressure to cater for their growing family, there is the tendency to either isolate and withdraw or become reckless. For those who become introverted, the proclivity towards depression and suicide is a great possibility, whereas for those who decide to throw everything to fate and chance, it’s a time to indulge in things that may have caught their fancy but which they had no opportunity to experiment with- things such as drugs, alcohol and sexual or emotional affairs all in the bid to assure themselves that they are still young at heart even if their bodies and responsibilities are saying otherwise.
For most women, mid-life crisis is more of an awakening, a shifting of purpose and a realization that we exist as a person and not the titles we wear. It is also a race against time’s ravages on our youthfulness and that’s why there is a multi billion dollar skin care and body enhancement industry dedicated to make women feel and look young.
No one wants to grow old which is ironic considering that when we were much younger, our hearts desire was to grow up as quickly as possible so we could live our lives without interference from our parents and other adults. In my opinion, the midlife crisis can be likened to puberty -the coming of age process that we faced in adolescence. Though puberty is more physiological, both phases are an evolution stage, are unsettling and unstable and can make or mar our futures if not well handled
Because we tend to marry people within our age group, partners in the relationship may experience midlife crises at the same time. When that happens, the relationship can be at stake because parties tend to see their marriages and families limiting them from achieving their goals or being who they want to be and everyone begins to think of themselves and not what is good for the relationship .
When the man is in the throes of midlife crisis, women go straight into management mode, either by trying to fix him by pushing him into action especially if he has become introverted and depressed, and shame him if he is behaving reckless by spending lavishly or having affairs. The men in order to deflect their guilt in turn accuse their women of being the cause of the way they are feeling by comparing her to other women and pointing out her inadequacies which in turn causes her to feel guilty of not being enough for him and exacerbating her own midlife crisis.
When the woman is in midlife crisis, most times her man doesn’t even know until she becomes manifestedly independent and that’s because she isolates herself from him as she comes into her own
I have often discovered that the best way to handle whatever one is going through is to realise what one is up against. There is no point pretending that our situation doesn’t exist or that we are immune to them. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not even aware of what is happening to them because of the culture of silence we have about personal things. Our parents or elder ones did not open up to us about what they faced emotionally so we have nothing to benchmark our experiences with and nothing to console ourselves with and the knowledge that this too will pass.
However, the experts say that the first thing to know is that we can’t change people and that the best thing to do is try to detach ourselves from the situation and stay calm. They say that the best thing to do is to give the man space, not try to fix him and not criticize him. The same goes for men too, unfortunately they are more bewildered than the women folk when their partners go through midlife crisis as the women tend to shut them out and pursue their lives. Because men want to be needed by the women in their lives, the tendency for them is to want to exercise more control over their women but that often backfires.
For all genders, communication is key. Listening to and offering validation of who the person is and our belief in them helps greatly in reassuring them that in spite of the physical and psychological changes they are going through, they are still the same person underneath and seek and deserve love and acceptance .
I cannot overemphasise the importance of patience in this journey, patience with oneself and with their partner. Mistakes will be made , offences will come as the person rediscovers themselves but empathy and patience will help us to put the person and their actions into perspective even if we may not understand their actions and decisions .
Focus on you by taking care of yourself, stop the blame game after all we are all individually responsible for our actions, midlife crisis or not, become more independent because most of the actions of the other partners such as financial recklessness, emotional or physical infidelity, isolation of oneself will affect you adversely.
I must say though that midlife crisis is not a bad thing in itself because it can bring about purposefulness where there was none, a desire to accomplish or leave a legacy where there was a lacklustre existence. It is however also not an excuse for bad behavior or for making terrible decisions. There are many people who have successfully scaled through it and one thing that is prevalent in most of them is the presence of values , emotional maturity , character and strong beliefs.
Midlife crisis will happen to us all, it is nothing to be feared and no matter how tough the journey is , one day we will find ourselves at the end whether for the good or bad depending on how well we weathered it but all in all it will do us well to understand the season, know what it asks of us and learn how to keep our heads while others around us are losing theirs.