Midlife Crisis Queen: The Weblog

I have recently discovered a goldmine of information about women in midlife. Sue Shellenbarger’s book The Breaking Point shows how much research has already been done in this area, and is well worth reading! It also normalizes the experiences we are all having right now.

Sue is the well-known author of the “Work and Family” column at the Wall Street Journal. A few years ago she happened to write a column about her own struggles at midlife. Reader response was overwhelming! “The column drew one of the biggest reader responses I had received in twelve years as a columnist.” So Sue decided to do her own research into the apparently controversial idea of midlife crisis in women in America.

First she found that a number of national studies had already been done, most notable the creation of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Midlife in the United States” database. Elaine Wethington, a Cornell researcher, analyzed some of this data with the expressed purpose of laying to rest the “myth” of midlife crisis as a predictable psychological life stage that besets American men around age 40.

Instead she found a startlingly higher number of Americans have experienced what they consider to be a midlife crisis, broadly defined as a stressful or turbulent psychological transition that occurs most often in the late forties or early fifties.

Even more surprising were the number of women reporting midlife crises. The data showed that by age 50, even more women than men reported a turbulent midlife transition, a full 36 percent, compared with 34 percent of men.

Applying these findings to the 42 million women who are nearing or in midlife, more than 15 million women will have or are already having what they regard as a midlife crisis! Interesting myth, huh?

Most surprising to me is the apparent cultural bias against accepting that American women think and feel deeply enough to question their choices in midlife and make some major changes.

According to Sue’s book, “The idea of midlife crisis has taken deep root in American culture since is was set forth in scholarly research in the 1960s and 1970s and in Gail Sheehy’s popular 1976 book Passages.” But these crises were all for men, and seen as foolish self-indulgences (sports car, trophy wife) driven by a fear of death. Women were thought to develop differently and were relegated to “supporting roles as victims or temptresses to their leading men.”

Thankfully, we have come a long way baby! Women stopped listening to the “experts” years ago and instead began acknowledging their own spontaneous midlife epiphanies. These life transitions have catapulted them into whole new ways of looking at meaning and purpose in midlife.

I’ll talk next time about the most common triggers for a woman’s midlife crisis, and the various long-term effects of midlife transitions.  I’ll also talk about how men and women experience midlife differently.