This expression — «midlife crisis» — is now on everyone’s lips. Someone is afraid of him, someone justifies his extravagant deeds with him. And very few of us understand that if we can recognize it, new joys of life can open up to us. Especially if that «we» means «women».
“I’m tired of everything,” admits 43-year-old Irina. — At home, everything is on me: cooking, cleaning, repairs in the country. Although my daughter has grown up and no longer needs me. I don’t have enough energy for some hobbies. Sometimes it seems to me that all this time I have not lived my own life: I have been working, taking care of my family…” “I know that I am getting old: my body is changing, time is running out,” says 47-year-old Svetlana sadly. — I’m scared: is this really my whole life? And there will be nothing else … ”The midlife crisis is a time when it is difficult for us to feel safe, when we regret a lot and begin to feel the finiteness of life more clearly than before. By the middle of life, we tend to think that we have already developed ideals and principles of behavior, the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, believed. And here a contradiction arises: we know how to live, but life does not look at all the way we would like it to. “In previous generations, the midlife crisis affected men more strongly: it was they who more actively realized themselves in professional and social life,” explains Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky. “Today, women are absolutely independent, self-sufficient, they work no less than men, they expect a lot from life — and as a result, at the age of about forty, they experience the same difficulties as men.” Or is this resemblance deceptive?
The first results: in men, the crisis is more often manifested by dissatisfaction with work, a feeling of a «ceiling» in a career, lack of air. In women, the incentive to reassess values is more likely to be changes in their personal lives: divorce, loss of faith in love, or a nest that has become empty after the departure of children. “For men, the crisis often comes as a surprise: they have heard more than once that this happens, but they have not applied this knowledge to themselves,” commented Stanislav Raevsky. “It is easier for women to express their feelings, to discuss their emotional experiences, mood or well-being with loved ones, and therefore they are better prepared for such a new experience.” “In the first half of our lives, we strive to realize the tasks of youth, but we often live in captivity of schemes inherited from the family, or standards adopted in our environment,” continues Stanislav Raevsky. – In youth, we live actively, plunging into our affairs, as if in a veil of fog, and then, when a considerable part of them have already been redone, we suddenly “wake up” and find that our ideas about life and about ourselves are collapsing, we seem to lose ourselves. Many try to evade this challenge: go headlong into work, get a divorce or go into all serious trouble, remarry and start life anew, finally, go somewhere in the village or even further away — to Goa. But all this can only delay and exacerbate the midlife crisis.” This fear is quite understandable: it is terrible to lose the image of yourself — young, full of life plans, on the threshold of a wonderful future. “When I turned 42, more changes happened in my life than in the previous twenty years,” says 46-year-old Olga. — My marriage fell apart, my son began to live separately, interest in work disappeared. Then I began to remember what I lived before, what once gave me joy. And unexpectedly I saw: how much was postponed for later! Olga received her second education and opened her own legal clinic. Today she has a job that brings her real satisfaction, and a relationship that she never even dared to dream about before.
Many women have experienced such changes. “Men more often endure a crisis passively: they fall into apathy, try to drown out their longing with alcohol or change something outside: change jobs, get a mistress,” explains Stanislav Raevsky. “Women tend to act more constructively, many are starting to try what they have been giving up for so long.”
The strength of the weaker sex. Yes, hormonal changes are more difficult for them, it is more difficult for them to survive growing up and leaving the parental home of children, but it is in the middle of life that many women for the first time truly feel like a separate person. Having fulfilled the life program learned from childhood (marriage, profession, children), they can move away from family scenarios and finally remember their own dreams and interests. Moreover, when they finally decide to do something for themselves, their main need is … to take care of others. So, in the course of the study by Hewlett-Packard*, four out of five surveyed women over 50 admitted that it is important for them to have a job that gives them the opportunity to help other people. Progress allows us to live longer and better, but for this we need to be ready to change. The “old woman of 50 years old” from the Russian classics is being replaced by today’s “girls”, who have a good chance of living to be a hundred years old. And the second half of this long life may be richer than the first.
* Time, May 08, 2005.