If the mid-life crisis was a road movie, it would be like Mondello with two exits - transform yourself and win, or crash and burn. So how can you best deal with it?
After 45 years on this planet, Liam has lost the plot. His friends say so, and he'll admit it himself. Eighteen months ago he had a successful career, three thriving children, a comfortable home with two cars in the drive and a second home in the country. His marriage was stable, yet he felt almost too secure - flat, stale, bored and angry without knowing why. Today he is living with the woman he left it all for, the country house has been sold, the Mercedes has been given up for the DART, the children and former wife are in therapy and the golf club membership has become unaffordable.
All this sacrifice for an affair that was passionate at first and made Liam feel that he had finally found fulfilment. But the relationship has become dull and boring now that Liam's lover is expecting a baby and having her own crisis at work. This new set of problems terrifies Liam, who can hardly afford to support the three children he already has. He has broken the heart of his wife of 15 years, who is struggling to keep a roof over her own head, and his ageing mother had a stroke when he admitted to her what he had done.
Within months, his mother was dead. Liam, who believed that by falling in love at mid-life he had triumphantly escaped the vice of marital ennui, is now more trapped than he ever thought possible.
"Mid-life crisis", his friends murmur knowingly. Not that this gains Liam much sympathy - quite the opposite, in fact. In Irish parlance, "mid-life crisis" actually means "thick eejit" and "selfish bitch/bastard", with a strong unspoken undercurrent of "there but for the grace of God . . ." It's one thing when you see a mid-life crash-landing from a distance, when Martin Amis throws it all away or when Harrison Ford turns his back on his wife of 20 years and then ends up with Calista Flockhart, who dealt with her own mid-life crisis by adopting a baby, or when you see Annette Bening trimming the roses in Sam Mendes's American Beauty and realise the film is speaking to your soul. It's quite another thing when your very own mid-life Molotov is exploding in your Charlie Dimmock-inspired garden, the very place you thought you were safe.
People in the throes of the mid-life maelstrom feel panicked, irritable, frightened, erotically charged to a confusing degree and, most of all, alienated. Their friends are generally suspicious and hostile to see someone who was playing the game throw it all away and challenge social values. In other words, Liam has found himself struck off the dinner party lists of his former life.
"People going through a mid-life crisis are likely to find themselves (like toddlers and teenagers, those other self-indulgent and unstable pariahs of society) given a wide berth by others," writes psychotherapist Jane Polden in the best non-fiction book on mid-life ever written, Regeneration: Journey through the Mid-Life Crisis.
Mid-life is adolescence all over again, except this time the stakes are higher because you haven't got what you had at 17: all of your life ahead of you. You are on the brow of the hill, looking down the other side to that long, slow, inevitable slide that brings ageing and ultimately death. As Joseph Campbell wrote in Hero of a Thousand Faces, the hopeless goal is not to grow old, but to remain young. In a youth-oriented society, we may truly believe that we can turn back the clock, with the help of a younger lover, another marriage, a new baby or a plastic surgeon.
Geena Davis (45) got all four in one when she married - for the fourth time - a 30-year-old Iranian- American surgeon, Reeza Jarrahy, and quickly had a baby, thus extending her youthful years well into her 50s - but the crisis will get her in the end like it gets us all. Prince Charles is typical of middle-aged men in the way he reclaimed the sexuality of his youth by reclaiming his first love with Camilla Parker Bowles. Others, like John Kennedy Jr and Princess Diana, crash and burn, avoiding the mid-life crisis all together.
It's all to play for. "Mid-life crisis, when it looms, cannot be avoided - or can only be avoided by the sort of defensive behaviour which leads ineluctably to a stagnant, embattled or embittered middle age. But if we respond to it by developing forms of insight and understanding which are able to penetrate beneath its surface, and fresh resolve to face its challenges, then the crisis can lead through to renewal, regeneration and, ultimately, fulfilment," writes Polden.
The mid-life crisis is a symptom of success, which is one reason it makes so many of us feel indignant. People who are struggling to survive without food to eat, under threat of attack, who are unloved and abandoned, do not have the luxury of mid-life crises; their lives are in constant crisis. It is the well-fed who feel the hunger generated by a way of life based entirely on material values.
"The pursuit of material success and status to the detriment of all else has its own cost, to which we may be peculiarly blind - until it becomes too great to ignore at a personal level," writes Polden.
She sees the mid-life crisis as an initial cycle of seemingly irresolvable conflicts around work and sex, which, if unresolved, start feeding stagnation, then leading to alienation and more conflicts - then around the track again. If mid-life crisis was a road movie, it would be like Mondello with two exits - transform yourself and win, or crash and burn. The only way out, bar death, is to negotiate the transition through the crisis. At the transition point you have two choices: regeneration or passing the point of no return - the Thelma and Louise crash and burn scenario.
Stagnation results essentially from disillusionment and cynicism and the realisation that achieving the material success you wanted hasn't made you happy.
If you want to maintain the status quo of your life, you may cop out, play safe and go into denial, which often leads to "gin, Prozac and shopping", as Polden describes it. Or, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, you can throw yourself on the cold mercy of the seas and face your conflicts. These inevitably involve work, sex and "leaving home".
"The mid-life transition forces us to look honestly at the state of our working lives, and to engage more actively with our personal priorities. The result may be the creation of a working life that is more satisfying, more flexible and more congruent with our own internal values." If, like many people, you have a huge mortgage to pay and/or children to fund, options at work may be a pipe-dream, unless employers are willing to make their own transition and realise that they'll get more out of their staff if they allow them to have rounded lives. Unless you're rich, you're stuck in your job - which is why mid-life is prime-time for fantasising about winning the Lotto.
And let's face it, it's not always work, but just as often sex that throws lives into disarray at mid-life. The mid-life affair has sufferers drifting, like Odysseus, from island to island, from lover to lover. The alternative is to realise that "after a certain age . . . genital friction alone won't bring the erotic into being, and mid-life also brings a sad realisation that the persistent ideal of the happy-ever-after couple may be attainable only partially at best, within our own lives. Yet at the same time, the draining of concrete sexual and reproductive need and the maturing of our internal resources yield their own rewards. The cultivation of courage, patience, humour and kindness begin to augur better for a more satisfying sexual relationship than we might have expected. And creative aliveness and fulfilment - which once seemed within the gift of the erotic union alone - may, after all, be within our own gift, more securely realisable within ourselves than we could have known," Polden says. It's all part of growing up. And with the commitment-phobia of adolescence now extending into the 20s and even - for a few diehards - into the 30s, some people at mid-life find themselves "leaving home" for the first time. They're not leaving home in the physical sense, but in the sense of values.
In the past, a solid social system of authority and values gave people leaving adolescence a place to go. Now that the gods of our fathers are collapsing, we're all dressed up with nowhere to go.
So we all try to stay young, since the achievement of maturity offers no prestige to compensate for the losses of youth. We're left devising projects to recover our own lost youths - like Lester's planned seduction of the teenage Angela in American Beauty.
Polden believes that we need to construct a new model of adulthood worth aspiring to. If Liam had moved within his marriage to transform it, he wouldn't have recreated the problems of his marriage with another woman. If he had experienced his crisis fully and transformed the parts of himself that couldn't deal with being married to the same woman for 15 years, rather than avoiding this issue through sex, he might have saved himself and his family a lot of pain.
Liam chose the other route. And it's initially attractive, because if you're too fast to live, too young to die, like John Kennedy Jr or Diana, Princess of Wales, your problem is solved. Otherwise, you have a harder job, coming to terms with death slowly, learning to accept death and thus ripen and live fully - not easy in a society that celebrates youth. At mid-life we need to take time off and find a safe inner space away from social messages to stay young, Polden advises. That's not easy when living fast and dying young is celebrated, when overwork is the norm and when being willing to surrender and become one with nature, as she suggests, is seen as rather daft.
So how are we to find mature adulthood, to feel what Sophocles's Oedipus felt as he drew towards death?
"Despite many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well," he declared. To allow ourselves this state of mind may be a "revolutionary" act, believes Polden, "capable of bringing happiness in this world within our grasp as we move onwards through our 40s and 50s and beyond".
- Regeneration: Journey through the Mid-Life Crisis by Jane Polden.