191: Are You Just Having a Midlife Crisis?

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  When you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, there are two ways we can work together.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to the services page of my website – mariemurphyphd.com/services.

Okay.  It might not surprise you at all to hear that some of my clients ask me, “How do I know if I’m just having a midlife crisis?”  And what they mean – usually – is, how do I know if my infidelity situation is just a manifestation or a symptom of a midlife crisis. 

You may have asked yourself this very question, too.

So today we’re going to take a look at this question, “How do I know if my infidelity situation is just a function of a midlife crisis?”  And to do that, we’re going to start off by asking, what exactly is a midlife crisis?

In order to properly deal with that question, we ought to also consider the question of, what exactly is mid-life, or when is someone within the middle of their lives?  And although I realize that many people have explored these questions and answered them in different ways, I want to suggest that we don’t actually know when we’re in mid-life, because we don’t know how long we’re going to live.  Or at least, a lot of us don’t know how long we’re going to live.  Maybe some of us do, but a lot of us don’t.  I think we tend to think of mid-life as something that happens in our forties, or even our fifties, but statistically speaking, the latter half of our forties is pushing the notion of being in mid-life, for some of us, and most of us has passed mid-life by the time we hit our fifties.  So this very notion that mid-life is a thing that can be pinned down, or is a definite phase of our lives associated with being in a certain age bracket is kind of questionable. 

I’m not saying all of this to be overly pedantic.  Rather, I’m saying all of this in the interest of destabilizing some of our ideas about what a midlife crisis is, or what it means to have one, or what we should do if we think we are having one.  And for reasons which I will attempt to make clear as I continue, I think that destabilizing the idea that mid-life necessarily pertains to certain ages or age ranges is important, and I think it’s really important to remember that we may not have any way of knowing when we ourselves at in the middle of our lives. 

So, back to the question of what exactly a midlife crisis is.  I know darn well that there are people who have attempted to DEFINE what exactly a midlife crisis is.  And with all due respect for people who have made conceptualizing midlife crises their life’s work, I have to say that a lot of the discussions of midlife crises that I’ve encountered have been full of holes.  So rather than tell you how a bunch of experts or so-called experts have defined a midlife crisis, I’m going to tell you what I’ve observed people think a midlife crisis is.

My observation is that the way that some people think about a midlife crisis is that it’s a thing that happens when someone who has lived for a few decades or maybe several decades is no longer satisfied with their life as it is, and demonstrates this dissatisfaction by doing things that are very different from what they’ve been doing.  And my observation is that sometimes – not always, but often enough - people assume that that’s a problem.  My observation is that some people think that it’s unreasonable for someone to wake up one morning and decide that they’re dissatisfied with our lives – especially if that life seems “good” by conventional understandings of what a good life should look like.  Furthermore, my observation is that if someone who has a seemingly “good life” by conventional standards, that person’s dissatisfaction with their life should be considered a passing phase, or a temporary episode.  The thinking goes that if someone who has a “good life” is freaking out because they’re dissatisfied with their life, they’ll eventually come to their senses and see that actually, their life is pretty great, and the crisis will be resolved by the person having the crisis going back to business as usual.

I’m willing to bet that you recognize this kind of thinking.  What I’ve just described may not be the ONLY way people think about midlife crises, but it’s not an uncommon way of thinking about them.

Now, there are a number of problems with this way of thinking about what we might call a midlife crisis.

The first is that it dismisses the legitimacy of the crisis, or it dismisses the legitimacy of the dissatisfaction underlying the crisis.

A lot of us tend to think that if our life looks a certain way, or if our life contains certain things, we have no right to be dissatisfied and want something different.  Or we may think this of other people.  We may think that if other people’s lives have certain features or attributes, THEY have no right to be dissatisfied with their lives, and have no right to want to live differently.  Plenty of clients have come to me and said something very close to, “I don’t feel like I have any right to be cheating.  I’m married, and my spouse is a great person, great parent, great provider.  We have a really good life together.  We have money, we have a nice home, we do fun stuff together, we have good relationships with our friends and family, we have great kids, we have everything anyone could ever want.  But I’m still totally unsatisfied and I don’t think it’s okay for me to be unsatisfied with what I have.”

That brings me to the second problem I want to highlight.  What if you don’t have to be satisfied with all the things that “everyone” thinks you should be satisfied with?  What if it’s okay to want something other than what you have?  Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with valuing what you already have.  Of course not.  It’s wonderful to appreciate what you have.  It’s wonderful to recognize the wonderful things in your life.  Having a partner who’s a great person, having money, having great kids, having a great home, having great relationships with family and friends – these are all wonderful things to appreciate and value.  But does that mean you aren’t allowed to want something different? 

A lot of times, we think that it does.  A lot of times, we think that if we have it pretty good, we shouldn’t possibly want anything more, or anything other than what we have.  Sometimes we think it shouldn’t even be POSSIBLE for us to want anything other than what we already have. 

And I think there are a lot of reasons why people buy into the idea that if we have it pretty good, we should be satisfied with what we have.  And although those reasons might make for an interesting discussion another time, the piont that I want to make is that we don’t have to be satisfied with the things that “everyone” thinks we should have.  We don’t have to be satisfied with the things that we thought we were going to be satisfied with.  We don’t have to be eternally satisfied with the things that we were once satisfied with.  It is okay to grow and evolve and change, and want different things over the course of your lifetime.

I know a lot of you listening will quickly want to say, “But no it isn’t!!!” for at least a dozen different reasons.  Let’s park all of the reasons why you think it isn’t okay to want different things over the course of your lifetime for a second.  Let’s just consider the possibility that those reasons might not need any more of your attention right now, and let’s just consider that maybe, just maybe, it might be okay to want different things over the course of your lifetime.

Now, the third problem with the way of thinking about midlife crises that I described is that it presumes that the solution to the so-called problem is to come to your senses, and go back to business as usual.  You have a great life!  How could you possibly legitimately want anything other than what you already have?  OBVIOUSLY the solution to your crisis is to appreciate how good you have it, and get back on the horse. 

What if the solution to the “problem” of having a midlife crisis is NOT to go back to business as usual?  At least, not necessarily? 

What if the solution to having a midlife crisis is to ruthlessly and lovingly evaluate your life, and what you want out of your one wild and precious life – and to make some decisions about how you want to move forward that are not dictated by what “everyone” thinks you should want, or by what you think you should want?

By the way, that wild and precious life line is indeed from a Mary Oliver poem, and it is also a reference to a past episode of this podcast.  If you think that you are having anything along the lines of a midlife crisis, go and listen to episode 144, Your One Wild and Precious Life.  Even if you aren’t having anything along the lines of what could be considered a midlife crisis, you might want to listen to that episode if you haven’t yet.

What if waking up one morning and deciding that you are dissatisfied with all of your life or major aspects of your life is actually a wonderful opportunity to reexamine what you want and what you want to do about what you want?  And what if deciding that you want to make some major changes in your life doesn’t have to be a problem?

Again, this is where a lot of people want to protest.  Especially - but not exclusively - people who are married and have kids.  A lot of folks I work with who have a spouse and kids and who are engaging in infidelity love to say things like, “But if I take a major left turn in MY life, that will DESTROY the lives of people I care about.”

Here's the thing.  It may seem like an absolute truth that if you make any major changes in your life – such, for instance, deciding to leave your marriage or committed relationship – that you will DESTROY other people’s lives in the process.  But that is NOT an absolute truth.  It really isn’t.  Now, how exactly to navigate leaving a committed relationship when there are kids involved is another topic for another time, but for the point for now is that making changes in your life that do impact other people does not mean that you are literally or figuratively going to destroy anyone else’s lives.  I spend a lot of time coaching people on this topic, so if you feel like you’re having a hard time getting your head around this idea, that’s totally okay, and this is something we can talk about and work through with respect to the specifics of your individual situation. 

Anyway, the big problem that we want to be aware of here is that sometimes we are SO SURE that if we make a big change in our lives, we will “destroy” the lives of people we care about.  And when we are sure that this is true, we usually freak out, because we don’t WANT to destroy the lives of people we care about.  Which is reasonable enough!  But when it seems to us like something we might do could literally destroy people’s lives, what we often do is tell ourselves we can’t possibly even CONSIDER wanting the changes we think we might want.  We tell ourselves that we HAVE to keep things the way they are.

And this is where a lot of folks dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.  If we pile thought error on top of thought error, we box ourselves into a pretty tight corner, and we end up feeling TERRIBLE.  And when we feel terrible, we may end up doing things that make our whole situation worse. 

It’s important to remember that giving yourself the opportunity to be radically honest with yourself about what you want in relation to your infidelity situation – or in relation to any area of your life – is something that you can do privately.  And being radically honest with yourself about what you want is not going to have any direct impact on anyone.  You being honest with yourself about what you want is something that you can do within the privacy of your own mind, and nobody else has to even know what’s happening.  And then, after having given yourself the chance to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you want, you can decide what you want to do about what you want.  And if taking action in the service of what you want does have an impact on other people, you can deal with that, one step at a time.

Sometimes we are terrified to give ourselves the opportunity to consider what we really want because we’re afraid that if we do, the floodgates of change will happen immediately, and it will be sheer hell, and our world will literally or figuratively come to an end.  But that usually isn’t how it works.

So, please consider that the solution to your midlife crisis, or your possible midlife crisis type thing, is NOT to attempt to convince yourself that because you have such a good life, there’s something wrong with you for being dissatisfied with it, and you’d better solve the problem by convincing yourself to get back on board with business as usual.  That may not work AT ALL.  Moreover, attempting to do this may backfire rather spectacularly. 

Now, I do want to mention that SOMETIMES people decide that they are very dissatisfied with some aspect of their life, or all aspects of their lives, and they take a close look at this dissatisfaction, and they ultimately come to the conclusion that the dissatisfaction either wasn’t about exactly what they thought it was about, or, that they could resolve their dissatisfaction without making huge changes in their external life.

That might sound very abstract or vague, so let me see if I can make it a little more concrete.  Sometimes people find themselves very dissatisfied in their lives and in their marriages, and they have an affair, and they for a while, think that the solution to their problems is to leave their marriage and start a completely new kind of life, and to do that with their affair partner.  Now, sometimes people do this and it works out great.  AND, sometimes, upon thinking things though very systematically and deliberately, people come to the conclusion that it isn’t really their marriage that they’re dissatisfied with.  Or, they come to the conclusion that they are dissatisfied with some aspects of their marriage, but they genuinely want to stay married to their spouse, and make changes in their marriage.  That can work out great, too.

The reason why I say this is to make it clear that CONSIDERING your dissatisfaction in your life or in your marriage or both does not necessarily mean that you will ultimately choose to leave your marriage, or make any other big changes in your life.  It might lead to that, but it might not.  And you simply won’t know until you give yourself the chance to slow down and be radically honest with yourself about what you want and don’t want at THIS stage of your life.  I know how very scary it can be to be radically honest with yourself about what you want at this stage of your life, but, being truthful with yourself will solve a lot of problems.  We tend to think that if we’re honest with ourselves about what we want, bad things will happen.  But when we’re honest with ourselves about what we want, we can consciously decide what we want to do about what we want.  That gives us a lot more power than we have when we aren’t honest with ourselves about what we want.  After all, if we decide that we want something, we can always decide that we aren’t going to pursue it.  That’s always an option.  Exercising that option is a lot more powerful than not allowing ourselves to acknowledge what we want in the first place.

So, if you have been going along with business as usual, whatever that means in your life, and you’re starting to think that business as usual just isn’t going to work all that well for you anymore, here’s what I want you to know.  You are allowed to want different things from what you have wanted in the past.  You are allowed to want different things in your life even if your life, by your own estimation, is quite good.  You are allowed to make changes in the service of what you want.  The solution to your crisis is NOT to try and convince yourself that you should just stick to the status quo and be happy because what you have should be good enough for you.  Rather, the way out of your dissatisfaction and whatever crises may accompany that dissatisfaction, is to rigorously examine what you want right now.  THEN you can decide what you want to do about what you want.

Personally, I think it’s great to have a so-called midlife crisis.  I think it’s GREAT to wake up one morning and say, “Do I really want to keep doing this?”  Sometimes we need a major moment of reckoning with our lives as a whole, or any particular aspect of our lives, in order to live authentically.  And sometimes, we need to start living more authentically, or else we’re going to run into some serious trouble.

What do I mean by serious trouble?  Well, I mean that when we aren’t living authentically enough, we tend to do things that can have consequences that we really don’t like.  If we’re miserable living in our nice big house and driving our nice fancy car and staying married to our lovely spouse who really is a wonderful person, we may slowly drink ourselves to death.  Or we may become abjectly depressed and unable to function.  Or we may develop a habit of killing kittens in back alleys.  Or we may get a little reckless behind the wheel.  Or we may handle our infidelity situation in a very careless way, and occasion a lot of suffering for everyone involved.  Or we may sink into such bitterness that we’re deeply unpleasant to be around.  And what good does that do anyone?

I know that some folks out there consider living authentically to be a frivolous thing, or a luxury, or at the very least, a lower priority than all of the other important things in life.  And I can understand why people think that, to an extent.  But what I want to suggest is that living authentically and fulfilling your responsibilities in life do not have to be mutually exclusive.  And I want to suggest that there’s only a certain extent to which you can compromise your desire to live in a particular way before you start to compromise your ability to fulfill your responsibilities.

Okay.  I want to start to speak a little more specifically to the relationship between midlife crises and infidelity now.  As I’ve talked about in other episodes, there’s a common belief that marriage should last a lifetime, and a lot of us have REALLY bought into the idea that if marriage doesn’t last a lifetime, something has gone seriously wrong.

In addition to that, many people – not everyone, of course – but many people experience marriage to be kind of a slog.  Some people start off their marriages with great enthusiasm, but not everyone does.  Some people get married because it’s expected of them, or because they think it’s expected of them, or because it seems like the reasonable thing to do at that stage of their lives.  And for some people, there isn’t a whole lot of joy even at the outset of the marriage.  But whether there is or isn’t, a lot of folks find themselves sliding into a marital relationship that is focused on getting things done, like having the kids, and getting the jobs, and paying the bills, or buying the house, or buying the bigger house, or taking care of the aging parents, or buying the yacht, or whatever.  We all have different goals and challenges, and whatever our goals and challenges are, a lot of people find that the primary focus of their marriage is just getting the things done.  And some people manage to find quite a lot of joy in that, but a lot of people don’t!

But a lot of people find ways of convincing themselves that life is just fine, even if it isn’t exactly all that fine.  And we do this for all sorts of perfectly human, perfectly understandable reasons.  For one thing, there’s so much social pressure to stay married if you’ve gotten married!  And if your life looks pretty good by conventional standards, or so-called conventional standards, people tend to think that you should be happy with what you have – so you yourself may think that you should be happy with what you have.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for soul-searching.  Furthermore, many of us have a lot to do everyday!  There are meals to cook and shoes to tie and butts to wipe and messes to clean up and work to do and money to be made and just getting all of the basic life stuff done can take up a pretty good amount of time.  You may not have much ENERGY for soul-searching, even if you theoretically want to give yourself room for soul-searching.  On top of all of that, the idea of acknowledging to yourself that you aren’t fine can be terrifying.  So many of us go for many years telling ourselves that we’re fine, everything’s fine, because that seems like the best option we’ve got.

But then, something happens, and telling ourselves that we’re fine without actually giving ourselves the chance to be honest with ourselves about how we’re doing just does not work anymore. 

And of course, sometimes the thing that happens is we find ourselves having an affair, or otherwise engaging in infidelity.  And we may equate this with having a midlife crisis, or others may tell us that this is an indication that we are having a midlife crisis. 

Now here’s the thing.  Some people will tell you that if this kind of thing has happened for you, if you’ve been in a marriage that has been primarily oriented to working with your spouse to get the basic things in life taken care of, and you’ve been living this way for a while, and you are having an affair, the obvious solution is to try and work on your marriage.  Some folks go even further and tell you that the ONLY solution is to work on your marriage.

Other folks will acknowledge that sometimes when we’ve been focused on the daily grind for years or decades, we’ve probably gotten into the habit of neglecting ourselves as individuals.  We may have successfully fulfilled our responsibilities as a parent, or a provider, or a partner, or a worker, or a family member, or all of those things and then some, but what’s gotten lost along the way is your individuality.  Therefore, some folks will tell you, the solution to your problem is to get a new hobby.  Or to start taking more time for yourself.  Or to find something that you are really excited about, and do more of that.

Here's the thing.  It might indeed be the case that your marriage has been neglected, and your sense of yourself as an individual has been pretty neglected for a long time, too.  And it may be the case that the neglect of your marriage and yourself as an individual has been hard for you to recognize and do anything about.  And it IS certainly POSSIBLE that if you start engaging in your marriage in a different way, and start nurturing your relationship with yourself in a different way, you’ll be able to find great satisfaction within your life as a whole, and within your marriage more specifically.  And it IS possible that this will provide a satisfying resolution to your midlife crisis/infidelity situation.

BUT the problem I have with this sort of prescription – meaning, the whole, reinvest in your marriage and get yourself a hobby and everything will be fine way of thinking – is that it delegitimizes the possibility that you really don’t like the way things are in your life or in your marriage.  Is it POSSIBLE that your dissatisfaction could be resolved by reinvesting in your marriage and getting yourself a hobby or carving out a bit more time for you to be an individual?  Sure, of course it’s possible.  But what I really want to stress is that this does not have to be the solution.  The solution to your dissatisfaction might be to make some bigger changes.  You might want to leave your marriage, and make some other big changes in your life.  And that’s legitimate, but so often we’re told that it isn’t. 

On a similar note, there’s an idea out there that infidelity happens when we’ve been stuck in a rut for a long time, and we want to break out of that rut and become a different version of ourselves, or explore different parts of ourselves, or have different kinds of experiences in life.  And this may indeed be part of what’s going on within your infidelity situation.  But again, so often the proposed solution to this version of the problem is to explore different parts of yourself WITHIN YOUR MARRIAGE.  Or to create different experiences WITHIN YOUR MARRIAGE.  And again, this MIGHT work out really well for you.  This COULD provide a very satisfying resolution to your challenges.

But it also might not, and it definitely does not have to!  You might want to become a different version of yourself within the context of your marriage, but you also might want to become a different version of yourself outside of the context of your marriage.  And that’s a fair thing to want!  Some of the louder voices within the conversations about infidelity suggest that if you’re engaging in infidelity, it’s just an indication that you need to do a better job of relating to your spouse, or your committed partner.  Although I think that can be a fair characterization of SOME people’s experiences, I do not think that this is a fair characterization of everyone’s experiences, and for that reason, I think that pushing this perspective does a lot of people a great disservice.

Many people - including a lot of relationship expert type people - operate from the premise that if someone thinks they don’t want to stay in a relationship they committed to, they must be confused, or must be experiencing a temporary crisis.  And there’s definitely an idea out there that if you’re engaging in infidelity, and you’re thinking you might want to leave your committed relationship, then you’re definitely having a midlife crisis, and the obvious solution is to come back to your senses and recognize that really, the best way to live your life is to stay in your marriage until death do you and your spouse part.

And what I see happening is that people start to believe that this idea about how one should live is not just an idea that some people have, but the TRUTH of what’s BEST for everyone.  And what happens then is that people come up with reasons to doubt what they want, and they often – before they start working with me anyway – lack the tools to deal with their doubts in a critical way.  And this leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering.

And more specifically, this leads a lot of people to subject their relationship with their affair partner, or their desire for a non-affair relationship with their affair partner, to an intense and perhaps excessive degree of scrutiny.  I’m not saying that you don’t want to carefully evaluate your relationship with your affair partner before you make decisions about how to resolve your infidelity situation.  Of course you want to think carefully about your relationship with your affair partner as you go about making choices.  What I’m talking about is a little different.  What I see a lot of people doing is saying, “Well, if it’s fundamentally better for me to stay married than to leave my marriage and pursue a relationship with my affair partner, then my relationship with my affair partner better be PERFECT in order for me to consider leaving my marriage in order to pursue it.”   

People.  Perfection is a pretty high bar to set for any relationship.  If your relationship with your affair partner has to be perfect in order for you to see it as a legitimate relationship that’s worthy of pursuing, rather than viewing it as a symptom of a midlife crisis freakout and nothing more, then your fate is probably sealed.  And you might not want to do that to yourself.

Rather, I encourage you to consider that your affair relationship may be something that you really want to pursue!  And I encourage you to consider that that’s a legitimate thing to want to pursue!  If you’re going to consider the possibility that your affair relationship is “just” a manifestation of a midlife crisis, then at least give equal consideration to the possibility that it isn’t that.  If you’re considering that maybe the best thing for you to do is just stay married and end your affair because everyone says that’s what you’re supposed to do, at least give equal consideration to the possibility that maybe it’s okay to do something other than that.  If you’re considering the possibility that maybe your affair relationship has to be perfect in order for you to consider making big changes in your life in order to pursue a non-affair relationship with your affair partner, at least consider the possibility that by setting the bar that high, you may be cutting yourself off from wonderful experiences.

Finally, I encourage you to consider that you have the right to change, and evolve, and grow.  You have the right to shape-shift as you go through life.  Yes, shape-shifting may involve extricating yourself from commitments you’ve made, but it is possible to do this, and to do it with care and respect for those who may be impacted by your choices.  Consider the possibility that it isn’t a crime to want different things than you once wanted.  And consider the possibility that if it takes a crisis of some sort to evolve into the fullest expression of who you are, that might be a crisis well worth having.

All right everybody, that’s it for today.  If you want my help resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s get to work.  Head on over to the services page of my website, mariemurphyphd.com/services, to get started working with me one-on-one, or to purchase my self-guided course. 

Thank you all so much for listening.  Bye for now!