What really happens in our aging process? Is there a “midlife crisis” for everyone? How about when we get even older? Below are four books that address such issues.
I. Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife by Barbara Bradley Hagerty (2016)
Hagerty had suspected she was entering a midlife crisis—and she wanted to know how to navigate such an imposing hurdle. Kirkus Reviews: “The experience of middle age, she has discovered, ‘is more mountaintop than valley,’ characterized not by depression but by optimism and renewal, happiness and growth.”
II. The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch (2018)
The “happiness curve” as described by journalist Jonathan Rauch: “a common, U-shaped path from youthful idealism, through middle-aged disappointment, to eventual happiness” (Publishers Weekly) that various studies, including his own, support as a common part of the human life cycle.
Rauch: “Like adolescence, the happiness dip at midlife is developmentally predictable, and can be aggravated by isolation, confusion, and self-defeating thought patterns. Like adolescence, it can lead to crisis, but it is not, in and of itself, a crisis.”
III. Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson (2019)
Louise Aronson is a physician specializing in the care of those of us over 60. The following is an excerpt from Elderhood about aging beyond midlife:
In our current conceptualization of old, physical degradations and lost options are its sine qua non. That’s why, until those things become overwhelming, many people don’t think of themselves as old, even when most younger people would swiftly and definitively put them in that category. When people arrive at the stereotypical version of old, they sometimes no longer feel like themselves, although for most of us the transition to old happens gradually over decades beginning at age twenty. The changes are both positive and negative, though we tend to focus on the latter. Those losses and diminutions are imperceptible at first, then easy to disregard, then possible to work around, and, finally, blatant.
IV. The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together by
money, alcohol and drugs, the stresses of parenthood, sex, extramarital affairs, lovesickness, health, aging, children leaving home, and dealing with elderly parents.”
De Marneffe believes that the “work”for such couples involves recognizing the need for some trade-offs. You can’t have everything in a marriage, just as you can’t have everything in life. The work is also about staying vulnerable with each other.
Belinda Luscombe, Time: “If the only advantage of growing older is greater self-knowledge, then it follows that growing older with another offers a still richer source of feedback and material. (Presented, one hopes, with compassion.) And yet, even self-knowledge is not the point of spending life as a twosome. Marriage’s chief promise is another-knowledge, a decades-long exploration, as de Marneffe says, of ‘a distinct being whose contour and interior you have yet to truly know’.”
Therapist Ian Kerner lists (CNN) the main things de Marneffe prescribes for couples, rough patch or not—among them are good communication and listening skills, self-knowledge, and willingness early on to talk about such sensitive issues as money. He concludes, “‘The Rough Patch’ can be beneficial for both single people and couples. One great way to introduce the topic into your relationship: follow de Marneffe’s suggestion and read the first chapter together with your partner.”
