A funny thing happened to Gail Sheehy as she began to update her 1976 best seller, “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life.” She realized that those predictable crises were meaningless today. She’d wandered into a revolution in life cycles. People were taking longer to grow up and longer to die: 30-year-olds were thinking of themselves as kids, 45-year-olds were just starting families and 70-year-olds were getting degrees and running marathons.
Clearly, “young,” “middle age” and “old” didn’t mean much anymore. A new way to categorize the stages of life was needed, and Sheehy devised one based on statistical analysis of five generations, magazine surveys of professional and working-class men and women, and hundreds of interviews with similar people.
The years from 18 to 30 she labels provisional adulthood. First adulthood stretches from 30 to 45, second adulthood from 45 on. Her findings are in “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time” (Random House).
Q–What was middle age like when you wrote “Passages”?
A–People were settled, children were launched, careers were coasting. Personal relationships were supposed to be about cuddling, not sex. People looked forward to 65 so they could take a couple of great cruises before they toddled off to Never-Never Land.
Q-And now? You don’t even have middle-age on your map of adult life.
A–Because the stereotypes don’t fit today’s Baby Boomers. So I susbstituted middlescence, which is adolescence the second time around.
Q–Is that when men grow ponytails and marry their secretaries?
A–Not so much. It’s more when they move from competing to connecting. They realize they aren’t going to climb to the top of the career ladder and they can’t compete physically the way they once did. They struggle with that for a while. The ones who come through it move from, “I gotta win, I gotta beat this guy,” to, “It’s really fun to talk to my men friends while I’m playing golf.”
Q-And women?
A–They move from pleasing to mastery. They feel: “I’ve pleased everybody for a long time. Now they can take care of themselves and I’m outta here.” There are 2 million American women over 40 in college, twice as many as men . They’re starting businesses, white-water rafting, climbing mountains, saving refugees. All sorts of things they never imagined that they’d be doing.
Q-Are people still having midlife crises?
A–Yes, but now it comes later, in the mid-to-late 40s. For women it becomes complicated by the symptoms of perimenopause. You can no longer define yourself as a sexy young thing or a fertile woman. “What do you mean I’m no longer `the babe’?” We become invisible. The same thing happens to men. They walk down the street, see a beautiful woman, make eyes at her and she looks right through them.
Q–Is there really such a thing as male menopause?
A–Yes and it’s a very complex mind-body syndrome. It combines gradually declining hormone levels, a sense of joylessness and the first losses of desire. A man finds himself not responding the way he used to when the sexy cocktail waitress bends over. That can lead to physical problems which are often ignored because men don’t go to doctors, and when they do, they don’t ask questions. And then, the ultimate organ comes into play, the brain, and the brain says, “You’ve had it buddy.” An 800-pound gorilla appears in the bedroom and no one talks about it. Male menopause is not synonymous with impotence, impotence is just the culmination of the syndrome.
Q–Tell the frog story.
A–A man in his middle years is walking down the street and he sees a frog. The frog says, “Kiss me and I’ll turn into a beautiful woman.” The man picks up the frog and puts it in his pocket. The frog starts yelling and says: “Why don’t you kiss me? I’ll turn into a beautiful woman and you can have me all you want.” And the man says, “I’d rather have a talking frog.”
Q–What is the “meaning crisis” that people experience as they get older?
A–It’s when they start asking themselves: “Why am I doing this? Do I want to keep on doing this? What do I have to prove?” And that turns into: “Now that I know myself better, what is it that has meaning to me? What are my priorities? What new adventures can I try?” One woman I talked to was a guidance counselor at a tough high school. She had put three kids through college. They were still hanging around, begging for money, and one day she said: “OK. I’m 50 years old, I’m celebrating by taking a year’s sabbatical. I’m going to be an unlisted mom.” A lot of times, women are doing what Francesca in “The Bridges of Madison County” didn’t dare to do. They’re getting in their cars and shucking the whole thing. I think we’ll see more and more of that as our authentic selves begin to insist on acknowledgement and we give up the false selves that we’ve packaged and sold through our first adulthood to please teachers and bosses and mates.
Q–Men seem to have a more difficult time adjusting than women.
A–That was one of my biggest surprises. Men used to say about their wives: “She’s nice, she’s a good mom, but I need someone more stimulating. I’ve grown and she hasn’t.” That was their mantra. Now, it’s the women who are saying, “He’s a nice guy and I really like him, but I’ve grown and he hasn’t.” It’s a fascinating reversal. Women have been through so many changes while men are often doing the same thing in their mid-40s that they’ve been doing all their lives. It doesn’t challenge them, but they’ve got a mortgage or a third kid in college and they say they can’t give it up. But, in fact, they can. And if they don’t do some active risk-taking, the insecurity they think they’re avoiding may catch up with them. Active risk-taking is a really important part of second adulthood.
Q–In “Passages,” you write about the death of the second parent as a universal crisis for people. You don’t write about that in this book.
A–Because parents aren’t dying! People in their mid-40s aren’t saying, “I feel my mortality because my parents died.” They’re saying, “My God! My father’s 82 and he just called and said he’s marrying his high school sweetheart.” The director of the Milwaukee Jewish Home told me, “20 years ago I’d see 40-year-olds bringing in their 60-year-old parents. Now 70-year-olds are bringing in their 90-year-old parents!”
Q–Do you think things will continue in the same direction?
A–I think they’ll accelerate. I just heard about a conference on aging in the 21st Century. They said a girl baby born today has a 1 in 3 chance of living to 100. A boy’s chance is one in 10. Scientists are saying there may not be a finite limit to the human life cycle. We’re just beginning to think about the idea of planning for a second adulthood, but there may be a third. Bioengineers told me we’ll be able to go to a hospital and regenerate organs. We’ll be able to reverse aging. We already know that if you introduce very active intellectual stimulation to older people they sprout neural connectors. They grow brain.
Q–You cite the statistic that a woman who reaches 50 today, free of cancer and heart disease, can expect to live to 92. How do people respond to that?
A–Always the same. First they say, “Ahhh!” Then they say, “Uhhhhh.” What do you do with all that time? The secret is to find your passion. I wrote about a man who had cancer and goes to a psychiatrist because he can’t find anything that excites him about life and he’s depressed. The doctor says: “You have to start thinking, every day, about what will give your life meaning. You have to worry it like a dog with a bone. Talk about it, dream about it, and the very process of making that primal in your life will give you hope and support your immune system until you have the answer.”
Q–Some of the trends you write about seem downright unnatural: People remaining dependent for an extended time, with over a third of unmarried men between 25 and 34 living at home; women trying to get pregnant when they’re close to menopause; men in their 60s fathering children.
A–We’re pushing the envelope. There are no more age norms, which is why people feel so dislocated. It’s like we’ve entered another country in second adulthood. We have no maps; we don’t know the language. But some of the things that seem quite unnatural now will become more natural. More and more men may choose to become start-over dads in their 50s or 60s.
Q–The women who are first-time moms in their 40s, who are they?
A–They’re the point women of the Baby Boom generation, the first across the battlefield. They strapped on male values and had this endless conflict: career versus family. They got to be 38 or 40 and started trying to have a baby, which isn’t easy if you haven’t been pregnant. Then it becomes an obsession. If they do have babies, they’re exhausted, but it’s better, perhaps, than missing the experience of motherhood. I sat next to a woman in yoga class who’s 45 and she said, “I’m so glad I finished breast feeding in time for menopause.” The good part of this is that women in their 30s today are saying, “Maybe I’d better get around to motherhood a little bit sooner.” Maybe you can have an egg-donor baby when you’re 65, but do you want to?
Q–You’re 57. How does it feel to be 57?
A–It feels wonderful. It feels a hell of a lot better than 47. That was the beginning of perimenopause. It was a very confusing, very upsetting time. I was very ignorant. I couldn’t get rid of the weight around my middle. I went from having high energy to feeling like I had a 50-pound weight on my back. I’d crawl home to take a nap, hoping I wouldn’t have to go out at night. I felt blue a lot of the time, wondering, “Is this what the rest of my life is going to be like?” But, when I finally got a handle on it and figured out what combination of changes worked for me, then I began to feel like I had really mastered something. But it was a pain going through it.
Q–What kind of passage are you and your husband, Clay Felker, going through?
A–We’re shaping a new life. He loved being a magazine editor, but he’s in his mid-60s and he’s not going to be named “the editor” anymore, so he had to really figure out what was his passion. It took him two years. We talked about it endlessly. He finally figured out what he loves to do is identify and shape young talent. There is another forum in which he can do that. It’s called teaching. Maybe it seems obvious, but it isn’t so obvious until you really work on it. So he’s going to start a center for magazine journalism at Berkeley. We’re going to establish a beachhead in California, and I’ll be bicoastal and go back to my little office in New York to work when I need to.
Q–What do you want people to get from the book?
A–I want it to be a wakeup call. I hope it helps people to see themselves as they are now and celebrate that we have a second adulthood and get about planning for it and living it and enjoying it.
