Weeks pass after the bathtub conversation. A month, maybe two. I bring up my request again. Eventually, he makes the appointment.
My unhappiness in our marriage first came up more than a decade ago, but after discussing it with J a number of times, nothing changed. I wanted him to acknowledge that our marriage wasn’t ideal, that he held as high a standard as I did when it came to our couplehood. Once we were together on that same page, I thought, we’d come up with a plan to improve things. But my concerns were met with blankness, as though my unhappiness did not pertain to him. Sure, our relationship was not great, but whose was?
So I simply stopped mentioning my despair. What’s the point in harping if a solution is not to be found? Besides, we were busy raising three children and keeping a roof over our heads.
But this time feels different. I am coming to the end of my rope. I may already be there.
• • •
We talk about the things you talk about in couple’s counseling: the need to make time for each other, to go on dates, to partake in activities the other likes. We have both grown so used to doing what we want to do individually, this is a radical shift. He arranges an outing into the city to see a play, and I take his arm as we stroll to the theater. We play Frisbee at the park. I set up a beach day and we pack a picnic for two and bring the dog. I can’t see that he’s enjoying himself any more than I am.
I feel dead inside. I suspect he does as well.
I believe he views me as a wife and mother, not the interesting, creative person I know myself to be. He acknowledges me for the domestic tasks I accomplish, not for the human being I am. Likewise, I believe J has kept himself locked away in a shell of his own making, that he either doesn’t know himself well enough to share that authentic self with me, or he doesn’t care to. It’s hard to love someone who won’t show you himself, and it’s harder still to feel another’s love when you do not believe you’re visible.
We try, but we fail.
Long ago I stopped hoping that the obstacles we faced as a couple might pave a path to greater connection. Though marriage handbooks speak lyrically about how every challenge can be a door to deeper understanding, my experience has been the opposite.
Instead of drawing us closer, moments of deep, frank discussion only push us apart, like the repelling ends of a pair of magnets. We keep digging ourselves in deeper.
The truth is, we’re basically mismatched. I’m a writer who cares beyond reason about the written word. J doesn’t read—not the literature I’m dying to discuss with someone, nor even my own books and essays that are like children to me. I plan ahead and dream big. He prefers to let things unfold and settles for what life provides. I appreciate quiet and a house that’s ordered and simple. He keeps the TV on and favors piles as an organizational strategy. I strive to live within my means. He spends freely with credit cards. All these things might be surmounted, if abiding concern and kindness for the other are at the heart. But kindness and concern seem to have trickled away in recent years.
Still, I try what I’ve been taught in therapy: using “I” statements, recognizing I’m responsible for my own happiness, trying to be the person I’d like to be paired with. The result is an ever-deepening sense of aloneness.
By the time we make it to counseling, I am unable to picture a different outcome. We remain cordial with each other—to a fault. We’re like roommates careful to not piss the other one off. This timbre is in biting contrast to the rest of my life that, in recent years, has become increasingly rich and comfortable and nourishing. I am enjoying the first full-time job I’ve had in decades, teaching at a university, working with creative writing students. I love spending time with our teenage children and the activities we pursue together: backpacking, hiking, music, discussing books and philosophy, running. I savor the group of friends who surround me, people alert to and interested in the larger world, and who are interesting to me. I feel amazingly blessed to be accepted and loved by so many.
But when I come home and chat with J, I feel empty. We talk about the house, or the dog, or the kids. If there is no domestic issue to discuss, we tell each other about the little stories we read online that day. Our crayon box of conversation topics holds only a few basic colors. The rest of my life is kaleidoscopic.
And while I realize this is truly a “first-world problem,” I’m not alone with it. Turns out, this experience of dissatisfaction at midlife has a long history for men and women alike and often shows up in marital discord. In some ways, I’m right on schedule. How many movies have we seen in which a balding middle-aged man suddenly buys a sports car or begins an affair with his younger, blonde secretary? I’m not sure what the tropes are for women: Either we become the nagging housewife or the power-driven corporate woman. Or maybe we have a torrid affair.
What does a real women struggling with these issues in midlife look like?
“Women tend to use their associations and relationships with others to gain identity and self-esteem,” I learn from Christiane Northrup, MD, author of The Wisdom of Menopause. Home and hearth often matter the most to us, even those among us with high-powered jobs or who have chosen not to marry. Men, on the other hand, derive their identity and self-esteem from the outside world during their prime years: from their job, their income, their accomplishments and accolades. But nothing stays stagnant.
“For both genders, this pattern often changes at midlife,” Northrup writes.
In an ironic role reversal, women at midlife begin to direct their energies toward the world outside the home and family, perhaps for the first time. Men, meanwhile, are often tired of fighting the daily grind and want to draw their energies in, looking forward to retiring, caving up, staying home. Men begin to look for more satisfaction from their domestic relationships at the very moment women are biologically primed to start exploring the larger world. When the relationship is healthy and flexible, this shifting pattern can be easily absorbed. The man may cut back on working hours or retire and take up cooking and other domestic chores while supporting his partner’s new outside interests, like starting a business or returning to school.
“Some [couples] are so energized by their newfound freedom and passion that they fall in love all over again,” Northrup writes.
Some, however, do not.
• • •
Waiting to see our counselor the next week, a copy of The Wall Street Journal in the waiting room catches my eye. “The Gray Divorcés,” the headline reads. I try to show scant interest, but I’m dying to read it. Divorce is not a word J and I have ever used, not a possibility I’ve allowed in my thinking. I can’t even say the word aloud. Marriage is for life. That’s what those vows meant. But now the word is hovering in my consciousness in a disturbingly frequent way.
I Google the article when I get home and learn that mine is the first generation more interested in finding personal happiness than in fulfilling marital roles, according to sociologist Susan Brown of Bowling Green State University, the lead author on a study about divorce among middle-aged and older adults. Among people fifty and older, the divorce rate has doubled over the past two decades, her study found. In 1990, only one in ten people who got divorced were aged fifty or older; by 2009 the number was roughly one in four. And get this: “cheating doesn’t appear to be the driving force in gray divorce.” Infidelity was cited among the top three reasons only 27 percent of the time in Brown’s study of older divorcés. So much for any ideas of a bodice-ripper affair.
“Marriages that in previous generations would have ended in death now end in divorce,” the article quotes Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies marriage and divorce.
“In the past, people didn’t live long enough to reach the forty-year itch. ‘You can’t divorce if you’re dead,’” says Ms. Stevenson. The fact that many more women work outside the home and might be able to support themselves financially is also part of th
e equation, giving women options that previous generations might not have had.
The drive to find happiness before it’s too late, though, seems to be a primary reason. Many of these divorcés may have twenty-five to thirty-five years of productive life ahead of them when they begin questioning if they want to spend that time with their current mate. And it is women, interestingly, who are the ones mostly initiating these breakups. Among divorces by people ages forty to sixty-nine, women reported seeking the split 66 percent of the time, according to an AARP study.
I am shocked to read there are so many women like me going through upheavals like this. I live in a bedroom community where most of the couples are intact, where my friends and I volunteer on the school council, run book fairs, oversee Halloween carnivals. The few divorces I’m aware of happened long ago and most of the partners have since remarried and now show up, four parents to a child, for school functions.
Do I even want to consider divorce?
An unprecedented 48.5 million women are now in midlife in the United States, reports Northrup. “This group is no longer invisible and silent, but a force to be reckoned with—educated, vocal, sophisticated in our knowledge of medical science, and determined to take control of our own health.” The doctor/author herself went through a divorce at midlife after a twenty-four-year marriage. Her sentiments echo those from The Wall Street Journal article. “With most couples for most of human history, ‘till death do us part’ was twenty-five years,” she says. But life expectancy in 1900 was forty-seven. “You saw your first grandchild being born and then you died. So we have really created this whole other stage [in life]. And quite frankly, if we do not step out of our comfort zone now,” then when will we?
I ponder these things. I am forty-nine, married nearly twenty-five years. How many years do I have left? How do I wish to spend them?
Some of this dissatisfaction women experience at midlife has to do with biology. It’s no secret that relationship crises are usually attributed to the crazy-making effect of hormonal shifts that occur at this time in life. These hormone-driven changes affect the brain, giving women sharper eyes for inequity and injustice, and voices that insist on speaking up about what they see.
“As the vision-obscuring veil created by the hormones of reproduction begins to lift, a woman’s youthful fire and spirit are often rekindled, together with long-sublimated desires and creative drives. Midlife fuels those drives with a volcanic energy that demands an outlet,” writes Northrup.
The brain chemicals that turned women into wonderful nurturers and doting caregivers during the childbearing years drop off in midlife, leaving us with the same basic hormonal makeup we had at about age eleven.
In other words, when those hormones start to wane, watch out, because “the bitch is back.” That’s according to writer and humorist Sandra Tsing Loh, who tells of her own struggle with hormonal changes in The Atlantic. “If, in an eighty-year life span, a female is fertile for about twenty-five years (let’s call it ages fifteen to forty), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal ‘disturbance’ is actually fertility. Fertility is The Change,” she writes.
“It is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm.”
I spent my young adult life striving for what’s been called the American dream. A nice house, a responsible spouse, the 2.3 children who do well in school and have possibilities of eclipsing their parents’ lives. Those nurturing hormones helped in that pursuit, but they also excised the flinty dopamine, thrill-seeking drive right out of me, replacing it with a thick, soft blanket of estrogen. By my late thirties, I had morphed into the head room parent for my kids’ grade school, a woman who cooked homemade play-dough and wore Winnie-the-Pooh jumpers paired with sensible shoes. I was Estrogen Woman with a large E emblazoned on my chest. Any kind of risk-taking impulses went underground. I fed that sensation-seeking part of me by attending graduate school, writing books, learning to play the cello, discovering subtle ways to experience risk. Which makes complete sense: To be a good mother, those other drives needed to take a backseat.
The awakening I’m now experiencing is abrupt and disconcerting. No wonder it looks to others like a midlife crisis. But I’m not acting out. In a very real way, I’m coming out as who I really am.
In Loh’s 2014 book, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, she becomes embroiled in an unexpected affair with her longtime manager. Together they leave their respective marriages, both of which included young children. They start a new life together and live, thus far, happily ever after. I love the romance of that plot. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some handsome stranger would show up right about now? I know it’s not that simple. I helped build this dying marriage. Who’s to say I wouldn’t do the same thing yet again?
But I know one other thing for sure: I’d love for a man to look at me in that way. As if I matter. As if what I have to say is important. As if I’m attractive.
In my early twenties, when I married, I saw myself as unattractive and, frankly, damaged goods. The late teens and early twenties is a time when female self-esteem is at its nadir. I had been neither cute nor popular in high school. The young women in glossy magazines not only didn’t look like me, but also hadn’t experienced what I had. Thus, I was sure, I was not attractive. Which was fine as long as I was paired with someone who made me feel secure and safe.
I had faced difficulties in childhood that had bewildered and challenged me: I tended my siblings in the absence of a healthy mother, particularly caring for my youngest brother, who had mental health issues and ended up in juvenile hall, foster care, and then California Youth Authority before joining the ranks of the homeless. I had been the one to call for help when our mother became psychotic, suicidal, or otherwise dangerous and our father was away on business. In high school, when I first thought I had found someone who would stay by my side through these kinds of difficulties, I became pregnant and was quickly abandoned by that young man. I carried the child to term and relinquished him for adoption. Returning to high school after a stint in the Teen Mother program, I’d faced ostracism on campus. I had navigated these challenges alone and feared the rest of my life would be equally hard and lonely.
When I met J, I believed I’d found the Golden Ticket, someone who would stay by my side when the next round of challenges appeared. I would never again have to be as afraid and alone as I’d felt in childhood. Someone would always stand by my side.
Not the best reasons to wed, I agree, but that’s what drove me.
But I’m not that person anymore. I know my worth, or at least, I have a better sense of it. That I am intelligent I learned when I attended graduate school some years back. That I am ambitious and hardworking I learned when I became a freelance writer to stay at home with my kids. I managed to write and sell three books while juggling enough freelance gigs to pay the kids’ school tuition bills. That I’m a good mother and role model for my children I learned as they developed and began to look up to me.
The one thing I never learned, though, is that I might be desirable, someone to be wanted for more than her skills in the kitchen.
Built more like a teen boy than Marilyn Monroe, I do not have a va-va-va-voom figure. Living in Los Angeles, where breast enhancement surgery is close to the norm, I have often felt inadequate with my lean, athletic build. No cleavage to parade in a low-cut blouse, no filling out tight sweaters in a specifically female way. Recently, I brought this up with J. Though I don’t remember what we were discussing, I do remember his response: “Yeah, for years I had hoped you’d get a boob job, but then I just got used to things as they are.”
Since I married young and experienced scant dating, I had (and still have) no idea what my value might be on the dating market.
So now I’m lef
t wondering about such things. Am I attractive, even as I approach fifty? And if I am, what does that mean in the divorce consideration? I know women who would divorce only if they knew there’s someone better waiting for them. That’s not for me. If I strike out on my own, it’s going to have to be for reasons other than another man’s bed. I need to do this for me.
• • •
A few days later, an insurance adjuster issues a check for the lost Izzy and I think about buying another motorcycle. Rebecca has been suggesting a larger bike that would be more comfortable, but I’m not sure. I scan the bike inventory at her shop and pick a day to test-ride a few. Quentin meets me. I trust him; he sold me Izzy. That had been the first time I’d ever ridden a bike larger than the bantam Buell Blasts from my introductory weekend.
That day months ago, Quentin had trusted me to ride safely on the large, loud motorcycle I’d soon adopt. He’d let me take her on my own. I felt heartened by his faith. However, he came searching for me when I didn’t immediately return to the dealership. By the time I pulled up, Quentin was circling back on his own bike. He set his kickstand next to me.
“I was worried maybe something happened,” he said. He hadn’t even taken the time to put on a helmet.
That night, a tiny spark of a crush started to develop for this man who was completely unlike me. A Delta blues singer and guitarist with long, sand-colored slicked-back hair and tattoos covering most exposed flesh, he is the polar opposite of J. Perhaps that explains it. J believes me so capable and self-sufficient that the thought I might need help never enters the equation. I was touched by Quentin’s concern. Over the months that have passed since then, we’ve engaged in a mild flirtation. He seems to perk up whenever I stop by the shop. He makes me blush.
Harley and Me Page 6