There Are No Grown-ups Read online

  Some of those who report having a midlife crisis are “crisis prone” or highly neurotic, Lachman says. They have crises throughout their lives, not just in midlife. And about half the people who have midlife crises say it’s related to a life event like a health problem, a job loss or a divorce, not to aging per se.

  Just 10 to 20 percent of Americans have an experience that qualifies as a midlife crisis, according to MIDUS and other data.

  As this data rolled in, most scientists abandoned the idea that the midlife crisis is caused by biological changes. They regarded it mostly as a cultural construct. The same mass media that had once heralded the midlife crisis began trying to debunk it, in dozens of news stories with variations on the headline “Myth of the Midlife Crisis.”

  But the idea was too delicious to be debunked. It had become part of the Western middle-class narrative, offering a fresh, self-actualizing story about how life is supposed to go.

  Another reason for the idea’s success, Margie Lachman says, is that people like attaching names to life stages, such as the “terrible twos” for toddlers. In fact, she says, “Most people I know say their two-year-olds are delightful.” The midlife crisis persists, in part, because it has a very catchy name.

  * * *

  —

  Elliott Jaques watched with amazement the avalanche that his paper caused. Requests for reprints of “Death and the Midlife Crisis” came in from around the world.

  Jaques had long since moved on to other topics. He became a specialist in workplace relations, and devised a way to measure workers according to the amount of time they’re given to complete tasks. He consulted for the US Army and the Church of England about their organizational structures, and wrote more than twenty books. He never wrote about the midlife crisis again.

  Jaques died in 2003. His second wife, Kathryn Cason, who cofounded an organization dedicated to propagating Jaques’s ideas about the workplace, told me that the midlife crisis was “a tiny little early piece of work that he did” and something Jaques “didn’t want to talk about after twenty or thirty years.” She urged me to read his later writings.

  I have to admit that I never did. Jaques had lots of big ideas, but the whole world was mostly interested in his small one. The headline of his obituary in the New York Times read “Elliott Jaques, 86, Scientist Who Coined ‘Midlife Crisis.’”

  You know you’re in your midforties when . . .

  Your feet have mysteriously grown a size.

  People you consider to be old now treat you like a peer. They say things like “For us it doesn’t matter anymore; but for our children it does.”

  You know several people who are going through menopause.

  You still don’t know what “perimenopause” is, and you’d rather not know.

  You tell younger friends who are angsty about turning forty that “Forty is for amateurs.”

  People pretend to be surprised that you have three kids.

  11

  how to be jung

  WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE FORTIES, I’m often reminded of the movie Gravity, in which Sandra Bullock plays a nervous astronaut on her first mission. She’s a highly trained scientist and NASA has presumably decided that she’s ready to be in space. But she’s petrified. She gladly takes orders from George Clooney, the brash, experienced commander who’s been in space many times before. They’re literally connected by a cord.

  But then there’s an accident, in which their spaceship is hit by debris. To give Bullock a chance to survive, Clooney unhooks himself from her and floats away. She’s lost radio contact, too. She’s left dangling in space, alone, with no one to give her orders or rescue her. If she wants to return safely to Earth, she’ll have to figure out how to get there all by herself.

  I feel like Simon has unhooked himself from me. He’s had enough of being my designated grown-up. It’s an imperfect analogy. Simon can’t even drive a car. We’re still a couple, and he doesn’t make a grand pronouncement about what he’s doing. But gradually, I realize that he’s no longer willing to consult on the wording of my work emails, or spend an hour helping me decide whether to take a two-day business trip. (“Just go if you want to go,” he huffs.) He won’t spend the evening helping me decode what someone meant when she called me “complicated,” or nurse my ego after I’ve received an especially churlish tweet.

  I’m sympathetic to Simon’s new stance. After all, I’m a fully trained grown-up. I’m constantly doling out advice and instructions to my kids. Slightly older friends have started sending their children to me for career guidance. Apparently, several mothers in Mongolia consider me their personal guru. (I like to think of them in a yurt, teaching their toddlers to say “merci.”)

  My own guru, Simon, has his own problems. He can’t sleep properly anymore, and he barely has time to finish his work. Plus he’s been traveling back and forth to see his mother, who’s living in a care home in London and getting worse.

  And he’s grown tired of being lionized and infantilized by me, all at once. I hang on his judgments about politics and people, but gripe about his lack of practical skill. “If I ever divorce you, it will be for someone who can hang curtains,” I say one night, as I’m standing on a ladder in our living room.

  And I’ve realized that, quite often these days, I don’t agree with Simon or follow his advice. I still find him immensely perceptive, but he now seems less like someone with a direct line to Platonic truth and more like an intelligent person with a particular point of view.

  I’m not alone in giving up my designated grown-up in the forties. It’s a hallmark of the decade. This is partly because our parents—our primordial grown-ups—are getting old. Most conversations with them now involve health care. In a 2013 study of Americans ages thirty-seven to forty-eight, nearly a third had lost one parent, and about one in ten had lost both. One in five regularly cared for an older parent or relative. These days, I hear about a friend’s parent dying at the rate of about one every few months. “How are your parents?” has suddenly become a question that my contemporaries ask each other, not as a social nicety but out of real concern.

  We dangling astronauts need to cope on our own, but how? In Gravity, Sandra Bullock first gives up in despair, then realizes she has the training to operate a spaceship by herself. She eventually makes it back to Earth—though not before looking sexy in zero gravity in a pair of boy shorts.

  How do people in real life make the passage to adulthood? To find out, I begin to read about Carl Jung. Jung makes it clear, both in his writings and his life, that going out on your own isn’t just biologically inevitable. It’s what a person has to do in order to grow up.

  Jung, the son of a pastor, was born in Switzerland in 1875. As a promising young psychiatrist working at a mental hospital in Zurich in the early 1900s, he discovered the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who was just beginning to gain prominence. The two men struck up a correspondence and were soon building the nascent field of psychoanalysis together, Freud as its inventor, and Jung—nineteen years younger—as his heir apparent. (Freud was apparently pleased to have found a non-Jewish disciple.) By 1910, Jung was the editor of the main psychoanalytic journal and president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He described his relationship with Freud as one of “father and son.”

  In 1912, Jung was thirty-seven, with a thriving private practice and a teaching post at the University of Zurich. He was married to Emma, the daughter of a Swiss watch titan. The couple lived with their children in a five-thousand-square-foot house overlooking Lake Zurich that Jung had designed himself.

  But Jung’s differences with Freud were becoming harder to reconcile. Freud was secular and rational, and wanted psychoanalysis to be considered a science. Jung, the pastor’s son, had a mystical, artistic side, and he was increasingly drawn to ancient myths and the occult. Beliefs that he had suppressed in ord
er to become a doctor and a disciple of Freud were resurfacing as he approached age forty.

  Their father-son relationship frayed. “I realized how different I am from you. This realization will be enough to effect a radical change in my whole attitude,” Jung wrote to Freud in November of 1912.

  “I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely,” Freud replied from Vienna six weeks later.

  When he broke with Freud, Jung was effectively shunned by many in the psychoanalytic movement, and he resigned as president of the psychoanalytical association. Jung was the astronaut cut loose who needed to strike out on his own. But he had only a vague inkling of what “his own” was.

  At that point, it helped that Jung was married to an heiress. He resigned from his teaching job and scaled back his private practice. He decided that he would search for universal truths by investigating the inner workings of his own mind.

  For roughly six years, starting when he was about thirty-eight, Jung plunged into an inner journey in which he summoned waking visions, listened to voices and wrote down what he experienced. Sometimes he feared that he was going crazy. When World War I broke out in 1914, he believed that some of his violent visions had been premonitions. He also acquired a mistress, a former patient in her twenties whom he insisted on bringing home for Sunday dinners.

  Jung finally had a breakthrough: a recurring vision of an old man named Philemon. Jung would speak to Philemon while strolling in the garden. He gradually decided that the old man represented his own inner authority. Jung had given up Freud and found a new mentor within himself. (This self-guidance was imperfect; Jung was later accused of having anti-Semitic views.)

  Jung spent the rest of his life trying to understand what had happened to him during that feverish six-year period. “It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distill within the vessel of my scientific work the things I experienced and wrote down at that time,” he wrote in 1961, shortly before he died. “I hit upon this stream of lava, and the fires of it reshaped my life.”

  Jung essentially came up with a theory of how people become grown-ups. He decided that from puberty until about age thirty-five, we’re ruled by our egos. This is a volatile part of ourselves that seeks social status and approval from others. During this phase we observe conventions and build our families and careers.

  But something changes around age thirty-five or forty. Like Jung did, people at this age begin to confront a part of themselves that they’ve kept hidden and that they’re ashamed of. They may have organized their lives around trying to hide it. Jung called this hidden aspect of the personality der Schatten—“the shadow.” The shadow, he wrote, is “the thing a person has no wish to be.”

  I realize that I’ve seen people around me confronting their shadows. A friend who’d been claiming for a decade that she was writing a novel finally admitted that she would henceforth pursue her actual talent: jewelry design.

  Another woman I know, who was married with two kids, admitted to both her husband and herself that she had never been attracted to men.

  Facing your shadow can be chastening, and not everyone succeeds. A brainy friend who’d shown great intellectual promise when she was younger tells me, over dinner, that she now knows that she lacks the attention span to do sustained hard work. “I’m forty-seven years old and I haven’t done any of the things that people told me I would do when I was twenty-five,” she says.

  But facing your shadow can be energizing, too. At a talk by a forty-year-old author, someone in the audience asks him why he decided to write a detective novel. “Because I realized I’m never going to write a novel of ideas,” he replies.

  A friend who works in finance had been pursuing handsome, tall men for decades, in vain. In her forties, still single, she bought several vials of a handsome, tall man’s sperm and used it to get pregnant.

  Jung believed that once you acknowledge your shadow and bring it into the open, it loses some of its power. Your ego recedes, and another part of your personality can emerge: the self. Unlike the ego, the self is unchanging. It’s a fixed, core part of a person. He calls this process “individuation.”

  Not everyone manages to individuate, but I’ve seen it happen, with good results. My friend’s jewelry design business is booming. The lesbian mom divorced her husband and now has a wife. My single friend is the mother of two enormous children.

  None of these people had a Jungian-style six-year crisis. It was more that, around age forty, they reckoned with the gap between their aspirational and their actual selves. They asked questions like “What is possible?” “What am I truly good at?” and “What do I actually like?” They dropped the pretense of doing what they thought they were supposed to do. And as a result, more than anything, they seem relieved.

  I haven’t individuated, but I’ve at least started to admit my shortcomings. I tell a new friend, over lunch, that I may not actually have a personality, or any fixed qualities at all. I feel that’s something she should know about me before our friendship advances any further.

  I brace for rejection, but instead she disagrees.

  “You have qualities,” she says kindly.

  For now, I’ll take it.

  * * *

  —

  In my new status as a local author, I’m invited to a cocktail party for a library in Paris. I arrive to an unusual sight: apart from the waitstaff, I’m one of the youngest people in the room. (Most of the other guests are retirees who’ve donated to the library.)

  I drink my first glass of champagne while listening to a speech about the Marquis de Lafayette. I’m standing near the bar nursing my second glass when I strike up a conversation with a handsome British man in his seventies. He’s a local author, too.

  I know exactly who he is. I read one of his books in college. When he was in his forties, and at the peak of his swagger and success, I suspect that he would have barely noticed me.

  But age and the fact that I’m fizzy from the champagne have papered over the fact that he’s a seventysomething “nine” and I’m a fortysomething “six.” He laughs at my jokes and inquires about my writing. His attention makes me feel young and desirable, a feeling I realize that I haven’t had in years.

  I tell him that I’m researching the forties, but that it’s a hard decade to pin down. Usually people draw a blank when I say this, but the writer’s eyes light up as if he’s suddenly channeling Jung.

  “The forties are when you become who you are,” he says. Then he leans in and adds, in a stage whisper, “And if you don’t know by your forties, you never will.”

  We stand at the bar, smiling at each other, as gray-haired couples stroll past in evening wear. At that moment, I realize that the forties are something else, too: they’re the decade when, in order to feel like the belle of the ball, you have to flirt with elderly men.

  You know you’re in your forties when . . .

  You’ve become more realistic about what things will be like. You watch videos of Burning Man, but you know that you will never actually attend Burning Man.

  You realize you’re never going to be someone who sees a bowl of apples and decides to “whip up” an apple crumble.

  You’ve stopped pretending that you’re the sort of person who meets people for drinks. You just meet them for dinner.

  You’ve decided that eight hours of continuous, unmedicated sleep is one of life’s great pleasures. Actually, scratch “unmedicated.”

  12

  how to get dressed

  I MAY HAVE STARTED TO ACCESS my inner authority, but soon I have another problem: I no longer know what to wear. I’ve gained back the weight I lost during chemotherapy, but that’s not the issue. It’s that my body has reorganized itself. Nothing looks right on me anymore. Tight dresses look lumpier. Thin shirts look skimpier. My arms, once an asset, feel like they’ve been swapped with those of an ag
ing aunt.

  For the first time in my life, the wrong clothes can age me dangerously. A certain type of patterned jacket makes me look like I’m on a canasta team.

  And I can no longer wear anything ironically. The printed T-shirts and a-toddler-could-wear-them-too sandals that I’ve sported for years now look childish beneath my midforties face. Yet innocuous basics, like a plain black dress, suddenly seem too basic. Anything flimsy or very cheap looks like I just fished it out of a discount bin. Most mornings, I end up standing half-naked next to a pile of discarded clothes.

  I’m not alone. Friends report that more and more of their body parts need to be covered. “I have old lady legs,” my friend Lucy whispers into the phone, from work, when we make a date to shop for pants.

  Men my age are at a fashion crossroads, too. “Every day I pull out nine shirts with these awesome patterns, but they’re all a little too tight in the gut,” a forty-year-old Philadelphian tells me. (He’s been jogging and keeps hoping that one day they’ll fit.)

  These are new problems, and we’re unsure how to tackle them. Have we aged out of our own closets? Aren’t we still too young to have to “dress our age”? And what would that mean if we wanted to do it? What exactly are we fortysomethings supposed to wear?

  * * *

  —

  I live in one of the world’s great fashion capitals. So I start looking for clues in the women my age whom I pass in the supermarket or notice at school drop-offs.