Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  “The thoughts that race around my head the most are about growing old alone. I don’t regret my divorce, but I would like a life partner. It’s hard having to re-create yourself in your forties. You have days that you feel great and days where you feel like the wind has been knocked out of you. In a relationship there’s an illusion that you’re not alone. After a separation or a divorce, that illusion isn’t there anymore.”

  “I’ve fantasized about divorce,” Julie, a woman I know in New York, told me a couple of years ago. “Two of my friends are getting divorced and I’ve been watching one very closely. She feels that a burden has been lifted.” Divorce may be contagious. In a 2009 study analyzing thirty years of marriage data, participants were 75 percent more likely to get divorced if a friend was divorced.⁴

  Julie said there’s no abuse in her marriage but that she and her husband have been bickering since they had kids: “From day one!” she says. “Bringing the baby home, my husband couldn’t believe how much I had to breastfeed. He said, ‘There must be a more efficient way to do this.’ We had a terrible fight in couples’ therapy last week and I almost walked out. At some point, who cares who’s right or wrong? I don’t care who wins.”

  Two years later, I went back to Julie to see how things had gone. “My husband and I are currently separated. Actually, it’s been great,” she said. “It was the shock he needed to make some profound changes. And for the first time in a long time, I feel a deep love for him again. The separation is only a couple of months old, and already he seems markedly different. Lately, I’ve been feeling we could reconcile. Interesting—the journeys marriages go on sometimes. Also, over the summer, I had a romance, as a newly single middle-aged person, and got my heart broken as if I was twenty-five all over again. I’m fifty-three. I can’t decide if this was something precious to re-experience at my age or something to be avoided.”

  In unmarried heterosexual relationships, according to a study by Stanford psychologist Michael J. Rosenfeld, men and women are equally likely to ask for a breakup. But that changes in marriage: roughly two-thirds of divorces in the US are initiated by women. We expect more from marriage than our ancestors did, and women expect even more from it than men do.⁵

  In middle age, especially, it can become hard not to blame a partner for what we can’t do in life. One way to escape the trap is to tell the story in another way. “Being able to narrate our inner experience is one of the most powerful ways we can change how we feel,” writes the psychologist Daphne de Marneffe in her book The Rough Patch.⁶ She sees so many women in her practice blaming their partners for what they themselves have failed to accomplish. “It’s not just that marriage makes you give things up,” she told me.⁷ “Life makes you give things up.” It’s sort of depressing and sort of consoling: Everything is a trade-off, not just marriage.

  William Doherty, professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and the author of Take Back Your Marriage, says Generation X women are facing some new as well as old challenges of marriage.

  “This was a generation of women who could take for granted the gains of feminism. My wife had to fight for insurance in her job because she was told that she had a husband, why would she need insurance? And you say that to a Gen X woman and they would think that you’re from another century or another planet.”⁸

  The Gen X woman has higher expectations of marriage, too. She wants her partner to be: “her best friend, her soul mate, and the sex should always be great,” says Doherty, “which of course doesn’t happen. And then the inevitable disappointments come.

  “A lot of times women who are considering divorce are not able to or don’t let themselves look around the bend after the divorce,” says Doherty. “They see their unhappiness and they see a fix for that in getting out of the marriage. They don’t realize the ways in which life is going to get much more complicated.”

  How many divorced friends do I have, I think, who had a glorious six months after their split, full of sex with people they met online and new haircuts and hobbies and so much time to themselves to do all the things they’d always wanted to do, with no one to hold them back?

  “Why is divorce so expensive?” goes the classic joke.

  “Because it’s worth it.”

  Then these divorced friends made it around the bend in the road. A few of these women stayed happy and carefree. But many, even if they didn’t regret the choice to divorce, hit a wall a few months later. Some discovered on dating apps that fifty-year-old men who still wear Star Wars T-shirts were hunting for twenty-eight-year-old women. ⁹ It’s not all in our heads, either: A 2018 study found that on one online dating site, a woman’s desirability peaks at eighteen and falls from there. A man’s peak? Fifty.¹⁰

  Soon after her divorce, one friend of mine had a heavy flirtation going with a colleague. When he came to pick her up for a date, his two young kids’ car seats were in the back. The sight of them depressed her. They were a symbol of the stakes involved and proof that even if things went well, nothing would ever be simple.

  Once remarriage is on the table, new difficulties arise.

  “If [divorced women] aspire to having another mate,” Doherty continued, “then they are looking at a stepfamily, which is the most complex family system we have. The children are not going to welcome this new person with the same enthusiasm.”

  Or they will welcome your ex’s new partner with so much enthusiasm that it will make you jealous. My heart bleeds for friends of mine who look at Instagram and see pictures of their children smiling with an ex’s new partner, or learning to ride a bike without them, or frolicking at the beach with people who used to be their friends, too.

  Divorce, says Doherty, means “surrendering one set of problems for another set of problems. Now obviously sometimes it’s the necessary solution. But there are a lot of unnecessary divorces. Many of these marriages could be salvaged and made better. Too many women make the mistake of not engaging their husband by saying they are despairing. You don’t need to say, ‘I’m thinking of divorcing you.’ You can say, ‘I’m finding my commitment shaken. I’m scared we won’t be together in five years or ten years.’ You can say it in a vulnerable way, but get his attention.”

  He says women may instead conduct the whole conversation in their own minds, grappling with whether to stay or go, while their men are unaware that there are even problems. “Sometimes she has actually given up. She’s nicer to him because she’s not trying to change him.” But she hasn’t become more accepting. She seems less miserable and less critical “because she’s plotting her exit. And then she springs it on him and he is completely beside himself. A lot of times the guy then kicks into gear, but she has already exited in her mind and her heart. At the very time when her husband would sign up for change, she’s out.”

  Troubles with sex are a significant cause of divorce. And sex is another thing that gets more complicated for women in midlife. Stacy Tessler Lindau, director of the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine (PRISM) at the University of Chicago, told me that men’s libido goes down around this age, and those of us with male partners might react to a lack of perceived desire with a lack of desire ourselves. ¹¹ “There’s not a lot of science,” Dr. Lindau said, “around the morning erection,” which is not a sentence I had heard spoken before. But she believes that the morning erection is important to a couple’s sex life and it stops occurring for many men in middle age. “It’s a subconscious reminder of his sexuality,” she said. “Without that regular stimulus, a woman might lose that morning stimulation that gets the libido going.”

  Then there are the hormonal and physical changes. Between the ages of twenty and forty-five, women’s levels of testosterone, the hormone most linked to libido, go down by about half. Changes in estrogen levels can cause the vagina to become dry; diminished blood flow can make arousal much slower; the risk of urinary incontinence increases.¹² Even without that, the emotional and mental pressures of midlife (not to mention
the associated sleep deprivation) could be enough to kill a woman’s sex drive. If you are exhausted, mad, or resentful, sex can become one more annoying item on your to-do list.

  A Colorado woman who excelled in the military but has found marriage far more difficult said: “I don’t really like my husband very much. Seeing other women’s situations, I don’t really have it ‘that bad’ with him. But my body is not all that eager for sex. With anyone. I guess now that I’ve got my kids, maybe I don’t feel as much of a need for it? Or maybe my hormones are all shot to hell?”

  More than one unhappily married woman I spoke with said a variation on: “I do it all. What is he even here for?”

  One married woman told me that her husband had come to her after their second child was born and said, “I’m unsatisfied. I want more sex. I’m not going to masturbate anymore. I’m not going to watch porn anymore. I don’t want to fantasize about or be aroused by anything other than you. And you need to help me with this.”

  They decided they would have sex every other night at least. And they’ve kept this plan going for a few months now. Her husband has been thrilled by the arrangement, but she’s begun to feel oppressed by what she calls the schedule:

  “If there’s one night when we’re supposed to and I’m like, ‘I just want to go to sleep,’ then there is no getting out of the next night. There are some times when if I’m leaving town or if he’s leaving town he’ll say, ‘We need to have sex every night this week since we’re not going to have any sex next week.’

  “I’ll say, ‘That is so unattractive. Really killing the whole mood.’ But he says, ‘If I don’t say anything, we won’t do it at all.’ And it’s true. There are maybe three or four nights a month where I really do want to put the effort in, and that’s my authentic libido right there. The rest of the time, it’s a job.”

  A few years ago, a study by the Kinsey Institute found that heterosexual women and men appeared to be cheating at the same rate.¹³ A number of married women confessed to me that they’d had affairs or at least had vivid fantasies about going to bars and randomly hooking up with people. “I’d never do it, of course,” said one mother of two. “But I do think about it. A lot.”

  One reason you hear cited most often for the rise in married women cheating is opportunity—with more women in the workplace and with phones in their pockets. Thanks to social media, we know more than we used to how much we’re missing by staying home.

  “One of the things we see in the last five years is couples struggling with extra options,” said psychotherapist Kelly Roberts.¹⁴ “In the privacy of your cell phone, you have other worlds to explore. When you have these other worlds, you start kicking in the fantasies of what you don’t have versus what you do. All of a sudden that plays into the what-ifs that couples didn’t necessarily use to have at their disposal. The electronic idealizations spill out into unrealistic expectations of relationships they’ve had for ten or fifteen years. When you’re flooded with something for so long, that can’t help affecting the marriage.”

  Perhaps because of the negative examples we witnessed as children, Gen X seems focused on healthy divorcing, as advised in Constance Ahrons’s book The Good Divorce or Wendy Paris’s Splitopia, and our generation does seem to be doing it better than our parents did, with far more involvement from divorced fathers. But there is also, among many women of this generation, a huge sense of shame associated with divorce. That was supposed to be something our parents did. We waited to get married until we were sure, and we did all the sober vow writing. How could we have failed?

  One woman who felt she had done everything right only to see it crumble anyway is a forty-five-year-old Vassar grad. A few years ago, she was living in the Northwest with her three kids, ranging from age four to fifteen, and working part-time. She thought everything was great, but then her breadwinner husband had what she describes as “a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown.”

  Like so many women, she’d run the household money day to day but left all the savings and investments up to him. One thing experts have told me is especially valuable for Gen X women is to make sure you have an updated will; know where your money is; and maintain life, health, renter’s, home, car, and whatever other insurance you can afford.

  “He lost his job,” she says. “And unbeknownst to me, he had siphoned off my retirement account.” She came home to locked doors because the house had been reclaimed by the bank. “We talked to some financial planners, and it was so far gone, they were like, ‘Really, the only way to solve this is to do bankruptcy and foreclosure.’”¹⁵

  The divorce, though perhaps inevitable by that point, was a nightmare both emotionally and financially, but she is much happier these days, and the kids seem to have adjusted.

  When I saw my housewarming-party friend Hannah again recently, she, too, was doing well. She had a new haircut and was wearing a flattering red dress. She’d been meditating and doing yoga. It had helped her stay calm at work and made traveling less stressful. The kids were thriving. She had some good dating prospects. She was decorating the new apartment. And the kittens, now cats?

  “You know what?” she said. “They are surprisingly good company.”

  9

  Perimenopause

  “It was pouring out of me. I couldn’t control it. I looked down at my sundress and I was drenched.”

  “You are infantilizing women!” I heard my mother yell one day when I was a teenager. Alarmed, I went into the kitchen to find her slamming the phone receiver down on its wall cradle.

  “What was that about?” I said.

  “Have you seen this?” she said, holding up a roll of paper towels. Rather than the usual white, this roll had colorful images of teddy bears and blocks.

  I stared at her for a second.

  “Mom,” I said. “Did you just call the Bounty paper-towel company to complain about these teddy bears?”

  “Yes,” she said, eyes flashing. “They should be ashamed.”

  In retrospect, I think that my then middle-aged mother—dealing with a grouchy teenage daughter, dying parents, marriage problems, and an acting career ending because she was no longer young—might have been finding a way to express her feelings without bothering anyone except a supervisor at that paper-towel company.

  She wasn’t going to throw me out of the house, or deny my grandparents the care they needed, or get divorced, or tell the entertainment industry to go to hell. And so, instead, she focused her rage on a paper-towel motif.

  Twenty-five years later, struggling with a career that felt over, facing various physical problems, and trying to get my son into a good public middle school, I found myself paying a lot of attention to my son’s pet turtle.

  “Jenny looks bored,” I said, gazing into the tank as she swam or sat on her dock. “I think Jenny needs more space. When was the last time Jenny had some fun?”

  “She’s a turtle,” my husband said. “Turtles don’t have hobbies. They swim and eat and bask.”

  “Maybe they want more!” I snapped.

  And that was the moment I realized that Jenny the turtle had become my very own paper-towel teddy bear.

  Menopause, defined as a full year with no period, still hits around age fifty-one, as it did when the last word on the subject was Gail Sheehy’s 1992 book The Silent Passage. Our mothers and grandmothers weathered the same symptoms. But the years before that cessation—also called premenopause or perimenopause—can be more emotionally and physically fraught than we anticipate.¹

  We change a lot during these years. And, as we may remember from puberty, transitions can be awkward. Our bodies and our moods frequently betray us.

  “The first time [I had a hot flash], I didn’t know,” one woman told me. “I just thought, ‘I’m in Jamaica. It’s warm, there’s humidity. I’m just really sweating a lot.’ But it was just profusely coming out of me. Pretend you have a balloon with water and somebody took a couple of stick pins. It was pouring out. I couldn’t control i
t. I just felt like I was on fire. My sister knew what it was. She said, ‘You’re having a flash.’”

  A friend in corporate America tells me about the first time she saw a woman executive have a hot flash in the boardroom: “She just started dripping sweat. It looked as if she’d just stepped out of a pool. And she was trying to keep giving her presentation as if nothing was happening. But something was happening!”

  At the time, my friend, then in her thirties, was startled by the sight. Now that she’s in her late forties, she has hot flashes of her own. “I have been sweating through my clothes at night,” she said. “Every night. Sweating, especially right before my period. My knees even sweat. Seriously, my entire body, head to toe, is completely soaked. And that’s the most gross and uncomfortable thing. And no one tells you that it’s coming. I thought I was dying.’”

  She’s embarrassed in retrospect by her failure to reach out to that other woman, to turn up the A/C or at least to hand her a box of tissues. But how could she have known? One of the worst parts of menopause is that no one talks about it.

  I’d never even heard the term “perimenopause” before this year, though now I seem to hear it every day.² (A transgender man I know who’s been experiencing hot flashes jokes that he’s going to take Perry Menopause as his DJ name. And then I suppose I’ll take the stripper name Party Menopause, which is how someone at my transcription service heard the word.)

  Perimenopause and menopause are as dramatic as puberty but far less discussed, to the point of being taboo. It’s something we go through at a stage in life when we aren’t the kids being driven to swim class but the one whose job it is to get them there.

  If you’re on the outside of menopause, too, it can seem very strange. Partners might perceive the women in their lives undergoing Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations or oddly manifesting anxiety. Recently I stocked the house with food before leaving town on a work trip. I maybe got a little carried away—a lasagna, a casserole, chili, tuna salad. My husband and son are only two people and it was just a few days and they are both capable of making or ordering their own food. My husband took one look in the fridge and texted me: “I love you girl but you gotta calm down.”