THE 40s are the decade when everything a person has done and experienced comes together for good or ill and, as Margaret Chambers of Accord, puts it "You have to learn to live with who you are".
As a marriage counsellor, Ms Chambers has seen many couples in crisis at this time and describes the middle years as being as emotionally dicey as adolescence.
Like adolescence, mid life is a time of transition which feels like "crossing a kind of psychological rope bridge", she says. Negotiating the crossing is a shaky experience and you are always in fear of losing your moorings but if or when you get to the other side, you will find yourself transformed.
But the crossing can be painful no matter how enlightened you may be. Ed McHale, a psychologist with the Clanwilliam Institute Marriage and Family Counselling Service, says that he gets depressed just thinking about the subject of mid life. Having recently entered his 50, he feels filled with disappointment that he has not done with his life everything that he wanted to do.
This pervading sense of anxiety at facing the final stage of life is one of the major stresses of this time. The key to dealing with it successfully, both in terms of personal health and keeping marriages together is to "own who you are", believes Dr Bartley Sheehan, a GP in Dun Laoghaire of many years experience.
He sees mid life patients coming in with marriage problems, work related stress and what he calls "somatic expressions" of emotional anxiety. These may be stress related irritable bowel syndrome or "other mysterious symptoms which are often evidence of a sense of insecurity, of not feeling in control".
Becoming preoccupied with disquieting symptoms which could mean cancer or heart disease is entirely understandable, he believes, considering that people at mid life often have dependent children and others relying on them.
Dr Sheehan has observed that everybody has from childhood certain vulnerabilities which can be unmasked during any stage of life. During mid life, however, he sees many people having to come to terms with one particular vulnerability the fact that their early childhood experiences of their own parents' marriage failed to provide them with a good role model for handling the "long, hard grind" of 15 year old marriage which has lost its bloom.
The chickens can quite literally come home to roost in the 40s, when psycho logical vulnerabilities which have been with people all their lives suddenly come to fruition as the result of some life crisis, such as a problem with marriage or child rearing.
Likewise, bad habits like smoking and alcohol abuse start causing cancers and heart disease around the age of 45. By the mid 50s, serious illnesses are killing many in the prime of life and people in that age group see it happening all around them, which only adds to their despair.
Added to this, is a feeling of life draining away, of "constantly running on empty" as one busy working mother described it. Ms Chambers says that people in their 40s who have teenage children start to realise that while their children are blossoming with life, they themselves are losing their energy. Caught between fulfilling their teenage children's demands and letting them go, many couples face a major crisis as it sinks in that they will not be alive forever.
The other critical realisation which they face is that when the children leave they will be stuck together. As Cora Lambert, counsellor with the Marriage Counselling Services, puts it. "The crisis point is often when the couple has to negotiate being a couple again. That can be the point where you realise that you are seeing a stranger across the breakfast table."
BUT HOW is it that a couple who married for love, sex, nest building and companionship can so easily become strangers to one another at mid life. Irish sex therapist Jill Stevens says that sexuality can be a key factor as a couple's sexual appetites dramatically divide. Women reach their sexual peak at 39 years of age and are often more responsive sexually during their 40s and 50s than ever before. Men, on the other hand, reach their sexual peak at about 19 and in their late 30s and 40s tend to wane. Midlife husbands suffering from impotence in the face of their wives sexual demands are a common sight in marriage counsellors' offices although fortunately therapy can help both partners understand each others' needs and revive their sexual relationship.
These two themes of divergence of interests and of lack of intimacy arise again and again in midlife marriages. Along with sexual problems, hidden resentments build up which kill off intimacy and sow the seeds of total breakdown when the children leave home.
The break up of the typical Irish marriage is depressingly predictable no fewer than half a dozen psychologists all described the same scenario.
As Dr Bernadette O'Sullivan of Vico Consultation Centre, Dun Laoghaire, described it after a couple's children are born, the woman finds herself focusing inwardly on home, whether or not she is also working in a career in the workplace. The man, who is likely to be in a crucial stage of career building, focuses outwardly on his work and their paths diverge.
As the woman's resentment at being forced to carry the main burden of nurturing and domestic chores builds, the man continues to fail to nurture her as his work responsibilities dominate his consciousness. Throughout the 40s, she knows that career and family have to be balanced for a satisfying life and without her husband's full support she manages to survive somehow for the sake of the children. By the time they have grown up, however, she has emotionally abandoned the marriage.
The husband, on the other hand arrives at the age of 50 like a sleep walker, suddenly feeling his mortality and developing a new, appreciation of his family as his emotional life suddenly refuses to be ignored any longer. He has realised that his career no matter how successful has not provided him with the fulfilment which he was counting on. Turning inward towards his feelings he also reaches out to embrace his family and discovers that his children have flown the coop and his wife is no longer interested in him.
Such men are extremely sad to see," says Dr O'Sullivan, who has seen this happen many times.
But this is an old story the man ignoring his family and coming back to them only when it is too late. Why do younger men "new men" supposedly keep acting out the same tragic scenario as their fathers did before them?
Dr Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology, sees two things happening. One is that the 1990s marriage is not just a marriage of two people it's often a marriage of two sets of ambitions as well. Many women are no longer in jobs they are in careers. Even when she puts her goals on hold to nurture the children for a while, the sub text that she too will need personal career fulfilment runs like a high tension wire through the relationship.
Some couples are finding themselves in a constant state of negotiation over who should compromise their career for the sake of the family and vice versa. Competition between partners can now be a feat tire of modern marriage.
Dr Cooper describes these arguments as the "my meeting is more important than your meeting" routine. More men are feeling threatened as their female partner are insisting that their own meetings are more important, and as they begin to ask their male partners to spend more time focusing on the domestic arena, he believes.
Dr Cooper is concerned that over the next few years we're going to see a worsening of the conflict associated with who should do what in the domestic domain.
Men are feeling threatened at work, they are feeling threatened at home where it is no longer good enough for them to be mere breadwinners and they are feeling threatened by the fact that women are after their jobs in the public domain, where Dr Cooper points out women are often better able to do jobs involving flexible contract working.
THE TRUTH is that while women have spent 20 years in the vanguard transforming themselves into being able to cope both with careers and domestic duties, their male partners have remained stymied by the changes and are continuing to refuse steadfastly to change their values.
Dr Cooper believes that "we have moved into an era where we say the public domain is open to women, but women are struggling to deal with the question of how do I remain part of the public domain as well as the private?" Men are beginning to realise that they are being excluded from decision making in the private domain and want to be more involved. But they also realise that if they are to become important in the private domain they will have to put their public activities at risk."
With the growing trends to yards contract working and job insecurity, men have never felt more vulnerable at work and there has never been a worse time for them to consider withdrawing in favour of family life. At the same time, "men feel innately insecure about going into the home environment because they know that society would not value them in that role. Their attractiveness in society is in their achievements and the world of work. They have a tear of the domestic arena.
In Europe, where two out of three families have two working partners, this fear of domestic involvement is precisely what is breaking up families, in Dr Cooper's analysis. When, at the age of 45 or 50, two married partners realise that they have married strangers they actually have because two very different sets of priorities have been in action for such a long time.
So what happens then? Women, who have been preparing themselves for a decade for their new independence may take on new careers if they are not working outside the home already. They may even take on lovers, which is happening more and more among working women who have their own incomes.
As Dr O'Sullivan describes it, "the woman of the 1990s has five balls in the air her children, her marriage her career, her own parents and family and her need for personal fulfilment. If she is giving, giving, giving all the time that personal fulfilment might express itself in her taking a lover who will nurture her and her alone."
One is tempted to say, who'd blame her? Women, in their 50s, are rediscovering their energy and with in dependent incomes they no longer need to stay with the stranger across the breakfast table. The make or break middle years, it would seem, are ultimately far more damaging for men than for women for it is the men who are avoiding dealing with their emotional lives until it is too late.
BUT WHILE we can pity the man who wakes up at SO to discover that his family has abandoned him and that he has a bad heart, the hard truth is that it's really men's problem now. Women have accommodated all they can to the economic and social changes in our culture, bending over backwards to take on careers while looking after their families and often seeking help as though they were the ones with the problem.
Dr O'Sullivan feels that it is to changes in the workplace that we should be looking As a society we believe that the generations which went before us and come after us are important, but were waiting for the 21st century and technical means before we change the workplace to enable us to care for those older and younger than while also having careers. That's just not good enough.
