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In the future, long-term marriages may become as obsolete as dinosaurs. No one will worry about how to preserve them, because it will be automatically assumed that you dissolve a marriage when it no longer works. Divorce is a common solution to marital woes today, of course, and many men have already gone that route once, or twice, before they reach their forties. But others are still struggling to hold together a relationship of fifteen or twenty years’ duration.

This is not an easy task, especially for a generation of men and women who were taught that you grew up, got married, and lived happily (more or less) ever after. When dissatisfactions mount, as they do almost invariably at this stage of life, there is a tendency to blame the institution of marriage itself, as if the marital relationship were something fixed and immutable.

But the fact is that marriage is a process, a fluid relationship that assumes many different forms throughout the years, a relationship that is always either growing or deteriorating. Moreover, the marital bargain that each couple makes is unique because it is based on a psychological contract incorporating their individual needs, desires, fantasies, and expectations. Frequently, however, the terms of this contract have never been openly discussed. Despite the fact that it is much more difficult to renegotiate an old marital contract than make a new one with someone else, this is the challenge facing mid-life couples who want to revitalize their relationship: To the extent that either of them has grown and changed, they will have to hammer out a new contract that accommodates these changes—a new bargain, based on old roots but purged of old rules.

Unless such an effort is made, many members of the helping professions do not hold out much hope for long-term marriages. “I’m really not convinced that our pattern of marriage is a very good one for more than twenty years,” said one marital counselor off-the-record. “Many people I see are really just dead on the vine. They live a pointless, meaningless kind of life.” Other experts claim that a muted accommodation may be the best some couples can manage. In time they settle for a static union, by detaching and disengaging from each other, because they cannot bear the conflict continually required to achieve something more creative.

When mid-life couples do decide to renew their marriage, rather than merely continue it, they generally do so only after considerable struggle and effort. Because rates of growth differ, and circumstances and interests change, two people have to face these changes and confront each other with their feelings if they are going to enliven their relationship—a painful process, indeed. Some few couples manage to do this continuously, and their partnership evolves steadily throughout the years. More often, however, resentments accumulate silently until an explosive crisis shatters the deadlock. Couples who refuse to deal with this mess either settle for a hostile truce or run to get a divorce. Others open up the hornet’s nest and work through their difficulties.

It can get very messy, but the revelation of an affair sometimes precipitates a thorough restructuring of a stagnant marriage. Consider the case of Martin V., a Detroit executive who began feeling restless and dissastisfied at thirty-eight, despite having just begun an exciting new job. Married twelve years, he and his wife, Carol, had no major problems. But he was tyrannical at home, and the tensions had built up. A taste of success made Martin feel that he deserved a more spectacular woman, a wish that led to his falling in love. Devastated when his brief affair ended, he impulsively told his wife about his romance. His confession blew open their relationship, involved months of talking, and finally resulted in their building a new way of life—together. Martin tells what happened:

I was really very immature when I married Carol, and I would yell at her a lot and try to make her into something else. She was very shy and for quite some time she just suffered quietly. I was trying to make her change, but I was also undercutting her—being critical, telling her she couldn’t do things well. Really being mean. Slowly she began to consolidate strength and get angry, and let me know she wasn’t going to take that stuff. But I hadn’t changed a great deal. So just before things blew up we weren’t arguing much and there wasn’t any open hostility, but she was sad and disappointed and confused by me. And I was impatient and uncharitable and greatly self-pitying.

I had come into the company at a much higher salary than very experienced people, and I really felt quite alone there. Sometimes panicked and scared shitless, really. So I was aggravated by the pressure, and my wife was getting more unhappy about the hours I was keeping, and things were getting tenser and tenser.

With the new work pressures I began to realize that having this suburban family life was really a terrific business handicap. And I began to think Carol wasn’t enough for me—that I needed a jazzier, more socially competent person, someone who would attract people to me and be a great hostess. I had this terrible Faustean feeling that I wanted something better, and I would trade an awful lot for it. I wanted to dress a different way, lead a different kind of life, have a different kind of wife—all that “fresh start” stuff was terribly appealing.

Then I met this woman at a party. She was a journalist—a marvelous brunette with terrific legs and a nice big chest—and she was smiling at me in the most interested way. I went right back to where I was when I was 17 years old! I really couldn’t believe anyone that nice could be interested in me!

Anyway, we talked and she was just delightful, and I asked her to dinner the next night. We went to a French restaurant, drank quite a bit and began to be very drunk and very much in love. Just tumbling into each other. Sucking each other’s fingers and exchanging wine between our lips and stroking each other—totally ignoring our meal and outraging the chef. That night she was the most beautiful woman I had ever been with!

We went back to her apartment and she said, “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight because I’m awfully tired—but we will soon.” So we kissed a lot and held each other, and then I went to my hotel room and I Stayed up all night, just thinking. I had really fallen deep! And she had even worked me into a whole marriage thing during dinner, which even at the time I knew was slightly absurd. But I kept thinking over and over, “I’m going to have to kill myself!” Not really with conviction, but the words kept springing to my lips.

I couldn’t resist calling her two days later, which was Saturday. But when I did she said she had thought about it more, and she just couldn’t risk falling in love again and losing. I went catatonic. I had to hang up after barely croaking out, “I understand”—but I was devastated. When Carol and I sat down to dinner my eyes were brimming and I just couldn’t talk. She kept asking me what was wrong, and finally I lost all control of myself and told her I was in love with another woman, but it was over. She started to shriek and got hysterical, and then we both burst into tears and I confessed the whole thing.

At first she was bitterly unhappy and kept saying it was all over for us. But we talked, we talked endlessly for two months. We’d sit up in the bedroom and talk and fall asleep, and then wake up and talk some more. We were getting it all out—all my feelings about her, and all her disappointments in me. And sometimes we had great tearful embracings and we’d make love. And sometimes I would come home at night and she would have written me beautiful long letters telling me how she felt about things. Angry letters, loving letters. There were times when I thought I had wounded her too deeply and she would never forgive me. But we went on, day by day, working it through.

There was great suffering, but we finally began to put it back together. Carol had said that if we were going to stay married she had to be part of my world—and that we would have to move into the city. That our lives had been too separate. Having a dream house and managing a demanding job—it had all soured. I loved the house but it had become a menace. So that’s what we did several months later. We moved into the city.

It has worked out beautifully. My wife isn’t isolated anymore, and she is blossoming and having a marvelous time. And now I’m with her and the kids much more and there’s more fun, more to do. Marvelous entertaining, with people pouring through our house. And Carol can dash out and join me at any old thing. These are very rudimentary things. But you alter the circumstances and you alter the essence.

We’ve had great companionship since the move, and in a funny way I feel this is sort of a second marriage. My life has changed enormously for the better—largely because of the way that whole experience was grappled with.

Though Martin’s romance may seem too brief to have threatened his marriage, the fantasy elements exerted tremendous power over him, making this affair much more significant than others he deemed “merely sexual.” His experience is by no means unique. At this stage of life, when a man is ripe for love, even a fleeting affair can stir up deep feelings.

As we have already seen, the tendency for a man to become more emotionally expressive in his forties has varying consequences. Martin’s story contains an important message for the wife who feels threatened by her husband’s mid-life changes, because it illustrates that the “other woman” is often the catalyst who releases the parts of a man’s self that had lain dormant—the tender, impulsive, caring parts. Thus despite a man’s announcing that he has simply “fallen in love” with another woman, the wife who understands that something more profound is happening will realize that her husband’s new capacity for feeling can frequently be turned back toward the marriage.

Couples who cannot cope alone with a highly charged marital crisis are turning with increasing frequency to marital counselors or psychotherapists for guidance. Such authorities generally help couples understand that an affair does not necessarily mean the end of a marriage, that they can live through it and sometimes even learn to build a better relationship than they had before.

Underlying most attempts to revitalize marriages is the notion that people grow and change, and that their relationship must too. Couples in treatment of almost any sort soon learn that they have expectations of each other that have never been discussed. They discover how to clarify, and alter, these expectations as they fashion a new foundation for the future. They also discover how to avoid rigid role-playing, express their feelings openly, and give each other more freedom to grow by becoming less dependent and possessive.

“What most people are experiencing at this stage of life is that they are not close,” says Donald Smith, the former director of New York’s American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, who has counseled many mid-life couples. “They are kind of bored with one another, and they just don’t feel close. It doesn’t always work, but the most effective thing we can do is help them learn to talk to one another honestly about what’s going on with them. How they are feeling about themselves, their life with one another, and their fears and anxieties. That’s the key thing.

“If they really work hard in a counseling relationship, most people learn some new things about how to communicate on a feeling level with one another. And life, therefore, gets a little bit more open and free, and a little bit more exciting— because their emotions are what’s important to them. They learn to enjoy new things, things they were unwilling to get into before. And they learn, I think, a higher level of being together.”

*63\93\2*

When an important goal has been reached, a long-standing ambition realized, many mid-life men suffer from what poets have called “the melancholy of all things completed,” a malady psychiatrists sometimes describe as “success depression.” The crucial issue is not what a man has achieved in fact, but how he feels about his achievements.

Consider this portrait of a contemporary man in anguish. Now forty-four, Fred is a renowned newscaster who is in turmoil about both his personal and his professional life. Dedicated and energetic, he had made a name for himself—and a great deal of money—by his late thirties. He had acquired political clout, met many fascinating people, and was traveling constantly. In fact, he traveled so much that he rarely saw his second child until she was about five. But he had obtained everything the American dream promised.

Soon after he had bought an expensive home, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, in the best section of Washington, D.C., he looked out the window one day and wondered, with a sense of numbing despair, “Am I really going to live on this street for the rest of my life?” He had just turned forty.

Suddenly that hard-earned, deeply desired home seemed like a prison. And so did his marriage. Before long he became romantically involved with a movie star. He had power and fame and money. This woman represented glamour and excitement. Eventually he decided to leave his wife, although he didn’t ask for a divorce. “I was riding high and beginning to believe my own press clippings,” he recalls.

For the next three years he traveled far and wide with the 161 actress, intrigued by her dazzling lifestyle and intense vitality—so different from the predictable routine and placid wife he had left. During this period he virtually abandoned his own career to assist his mistress in hers. Gradually, however, he began to tire of the nomadic life and to resent the way this strong-willed woman manipulated him. After increasingly bitter fights, his fantasy-fulfilling affair came to a final, angry ending.

Fred then settled in New York, alone, to resurrect his reputation. Although he felt compelled to resume his badly neglected career, his work bored him, just as it had already begun to bore him when he’d left home—primarily because he had reached the top of his field. And so in going back to the same old thing, he was riddled with conflict and knew, in his heart, that the time had come to establish new directions and new goals.

“I have to find out what I really want to do with my life,” he insisted when he consulted a psychotherapist. Several months later he concluded that he needed his home, needed the soothing structure of the family circle. Also, he confessed, he needed his adolescent children—perhaps more than they needed him. And so he “returned to his wife, who agreed tentatively to accept him on his own terms. “I can’t promise to be faithful,” he had said.

Their relationship is still a tenuous one, fulfilling only partial needs. He spends long weekends in Washington and works in New York. Leading a split life disturbs him, but as yet he has found no better answers. Plagued by both a patchy personal life and an unresolved career crisis, he cannot make a total commitment in either sphere.

Of his present work he says, “It’s not something for a grown man to do.” He has been toying with the notion of writing a book, or going to law school, or even entering politics. Yet he is reluctant to leave a job that provides substantial economic security.

In the meantime he relies on tranquilizers or sleeping pills. An old prostate condition has been kicking up, and he is bothered by his receding hairline. He also jokes about drinking too much. The hell of it, he says, is that no one ever told him he would feel so despondent when there were no more mountains to climb.

This sentiment is shared by many successful men in their middle years, including those who react less dramatically than Fred. When a man has accomplished everything he set out to do and doesn’t know where to turn next, or when despite the public recognition and rewards bestowed upon him he still feels unfulfilled, success becomes a macabre joke. Or, as writer Larry L. King put it, “little to call on when nights grew dry and long and empty.”1

Contemplating the ignominious fate of the “success-haunted” men of Watergate who paraded across his TV screen several years ago, King was prodded to go back in time, recalling the intensity of his own youthful drive, recalling how he had boasted to a high-school classmate, “One day, ole buddy . . . I’m gonna have boatloads of money, and people gonna hear about me.”

In his mid-forties, King concluded: “Tf I had not made boatloads of money I had, by boyhood standards, got near to a small canoeful. I had published books, been nominated for prizes and—yes!—had even been mentioned in the New York Times. I lived well: dined with U. S. Senators in Georgetown, occasionally accompanied rich ladies. It wasn’t exactly had, you understand—hell, sometimes it was real good. I never once thought of trading it back for my youthful oil-field or cotton-field sweat—but, somehow, it had failed to set me free or ring my bells.”2

Modestly, King describes what he achieved as a certain “tinny, minor fame,” but a similar disappointment is also felt by men who make it on a major scale, men who do succeed in accumulating “boatloads” of money.

“It was Christmas week and I had gone skiing with my wife and my children in Aspen, Colorado, and one afternoon it suddenly dawned on me that I had accomplished every objective I had set out for myself,” said Peter J. “I had a senior partnership in a large accounting firm and a thriving practice. I had written two novels, and, by God, they had both become best sellers. And I had just made a couple of million dollars in the stock market.

“I was thirty-seven years old and I was dead! I had nowhere to go. I think at that moment I decided, not consciously and not deliberately, that I was going to put everything in the ashcan and start over. I had lived out the first half of my life, and wouldn’t it be fun to smash everything and start again? That was my insight of the afternoon.”

Within the next year Peter J. resigned from his accounting firm, sold all his investments in the stock market, and also got divorced. Now happily remarried, he continues to write and is contemplating starting a business of his own. But he has not yet attained the inner peace he craves or figured out the meaning of success:

Anytime I take on anything new T seem to have a marvelous time while I’m working, and then when I’ve got it I don’t want it anymore. The real happiness is in the process of getting to it, but I haven’t yet found out what you do when you get there.

It’s ludicrous to spend the rest of my years continually getting there and throwing it away, which is essentially what I spent the first half of my life doing. That’s not a sensible way to live your life! There must be a proper way to view it when you achieve a goal and get what you want, and I haven’t worked that one out yet.

I have a lifestyle now where I don’t have to work, and yet I have to work. I mean inside T have to work. I do a number of things which I really do enjoy and savor. A great deal of success or accomplishment is not one of them, however. T can’t cope with that.

You see, as soon as I hear the word “success,” something sort of rebels. I don’t consider that I’ve ever had success, really. I’ve managed to achieve certain limited goals, and get the rewards in terms of money, or in some situations, acclaim. And in that way I exceeded what I set out to get. But to me success has to be measured in terms of some sort of internal contentment. And that I have never had, and never will.

*48\93\2*

On the brink of middle age a man can no longer nourish dreams of great new conquests in the working world. Even more fundamental to his sense of manhood, he can no longer count on asserting his masculinity with an instant erection. Time, he feels, is castrating him.

Earlier in life women seemed to be suffering from penis envy, but now the tables have turned: After forty men suffer from penis angst—a condition which, as we shall see, has many ramifications. This anxiety is aggravated, certainly, by our attitude toward the elderly. Our culture endorsed the fiction that sex is reserved for the young (and beautiful), while the old (and ugly) are relegated to rocking chairs and celibacy. This prophecy is so pervasive that even men who had dismissed it in their youth are suddenly beset by doubts when they discover that their penis doesn’t harden as quickly as it used to, and sometimes to their horror doesn’t harden at all. No longer able to respond automatically, like a superb athlete or a macho superstar, they become preoccupied with their waning sexual prowess—and harbor deep-seated fears for the future.

“The conventional male fantasy of being ready to perform anytime, anywhere is wholly neurotic and impractical,” says Dr. Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex. “Only the totally insensitive are all-time fucking machines like a stud-bull and stud-bulls too have their off-days.” But the fantasy persists, causing havoc at mid-life. Which is why impotence begins to trouble many men, sporadically at least, and even those who do not yet have serious problems worry that they will.

In response to these anxieties, Norman C. King, a media consultant and selfmade millionaire, has decided that the problem of “obtaining and sustaining an erection” is so enormous that a national solution is required. In 1969, he recalls, “I was sitting around with a very famous broadcaster, a very famous comedian, a couple of banker friends, and a movie producer, and a couple of guys indicated they weren’t performing like they used to and were very concerned about it. But no one knew where to go to solve the problem—including me. And I’m supposed to be an expert in everything!”

This conversation led King to gather information, consult physicians, and research the market for a potency clinic. When he sent a mailout on his projected clinic to fifteen hundred executives making forty thousand dollars a year, he received over three hundred phone calls. When another mailout to men making only twelve thousand dollars elicited the same number of calls, he concluded: “It has nothing to do with money. The need—the desperate need—is there.” Thus he plans to open a chain of clinics, the Male Potency Centers of America, in the near future.

“I really believe I’ll make a billion dollars out of this deal,” says King, who sees himself becoming “the Oral Roberts of the genitals.”

King claims to have found the magic formula that will get the sexual athlete performing again quickly, simply, and relatively cheaply. The treatment at his clinics, to be staffed with a doctor and a psychologist, will be mostly chemotherapy (male hormone shots, or pills) and will cost five hundred dollars for ten visits. Best of all, in his view, no partner is required. Scornful of sex therapists who treat couples only, he says: “You have to make an appointment to go with your wife, or go with your girlfriend and pretend she’s your wife, and be prepared to give four weeks of your life. One wonderful thing about my clinic is the man goes by himself, like to treat a sore finger or a cold or a pain in his side.

“What he really has here,” King says of his future client, “is a pain in his heart, generated by the fear that he can no longer get a hard-on. I plan to solve this by chemotherapy. You know, marketing an erection is no different from marketing a lipstick.”

Can impotence really be cured by hormones? As we have seen, there is no “male menopause.” There is a syndrome called the male climacteric, which affects only a small percentage of men, and then usually in their fifties or sixties. Characterized by a sudden failure of the testes to perform, and a sharp drop in hormone production, it does indeed lead to impotence. But it is a relatively rare condition: Only 15 percent of older men will ever suffer from the climacteric, say most authorities. An illness, not a natural event, this condition can and should be treated by hormone replacement therapy.

Such disorders aside, however, what are the ordinary hormonal changes that occur with aging, and how do they affect a man’s sexual response? In the male the testes are the sex glands that produce testosterone, the hormone that makes a man aggressive, virile, and sexually active. Testosterone production begins in puberty, continues to increase until a man is in his twenties, and from then on decreases very gradually as he ages, too gradually in most cases to interfere with sexual activity or account for impotence. This means that the average man in his middle years will not suffer any symptoms that can be attributed to a radical change in hormone production. Nor will the aging process itself prevent his having a vigorous sex life—ever.

When impotence troubles a man at mid-life the problem is usually in his head. Consequently attempts to counter sexual fears and failures with chemotherapy are likely to do little good. In fact, the attitudes of men like Norman King—that sex is simply a matter of physical performance, and sexual problems a matter of technology, best solved in secret—are part of the problem, not the basis for a solution.

The male is not “a push-button sexual performer,” as Masters and Johnson have often stressed. To the contrary, his sexual response is influenced and inhibited by many factors—his attitudes, expectations, feelings, and past experiences.

One of the most important recent advances in the field of human sexuality is this discovery that the male’s sexual response is as complicated as the female’s. The theory used to be that impotence was always a sign of pathology, but now there is ample proof that it has multiple causes. In general, say the experts, erectile failures are produced by anxiety— and this anxiety can spring from many sources: anticipation of failure, a stressful sexual atmosphere, criticism from a hostile wife or lover, guilt about sexual pleasure, and grandiose performance expectations are among the most common.

But the anxiety can also be totally unrelated to sex—a finding that has special relevance during the stressful mid-life period. It has been shown, for example, that sporadic impotence can be caused by anxiety generated at work, when a man’s job is in jeopardy or he feels under extraordinary pressure. It can also be caused by depression, mental fatigue, excessive alcohol, marital tensions, or psychological conflict of any sort. Moreover, recent studies have shown that depression, defeat, and chronic stress can themselves product a sharp drop in the level of testosterone production, thus documenting the impact of emotional states on the hormonal system.6

Too, the sexual attitudes of this generation of American men exacerbate their penis angst. Thanks to our puritanical heritage, most men now in their middle years were poisoned from an early age by taboos suggesting that sex is sinful and disgusting. The worst result of this training, says Dr. Helen S. Kaplan, a psychiatrist who heads the sex therapy program at the Payne Whitney clinic of New York Hospital, is that “the erotic impulses are not acknowledged as part of the personality. They arc dehumanized, relegated to the alien realm of ‘dirty’ and pornographic. Sex becomes a conquest or a submission instead of a beautiful integrated aspect of the self.”

Our society encourages this schizoid split primarily in the male. Traditionally women have been conditioned to integrate their sexuality with their feelings, to regard sex as permissible only when accompanied by love, or at least affection. Men, on the other hand, have been taught to separate the two.

The double standard is slowly dissolving, but that is of little help to men over forty who remain sexually muddled by the madonna/whore dichotomy absorbed in their youth. This dehumanizing code ignited a ferocious adolescent battle in which boys gained status according to how much sex they got, while girls became desirable according to how little they gave. It has also promoted a marital mentality in the adult male, inciting him to prove his masculinity through conquest, while viewing women as the enemy to be vanquished and bed the battlefield where orgasms are won.

Other cultures have taught that sex is sin, or war, but the American male is further sabotaged by the application of athletic metaphors to sex: Having been trained to compete aggressively, perform perfectly, and score frequently, he often participates in sex like a quarterback intent on plowing. toward the end zone—proud of his feats but oblivious to feelings.

The tragedy is that while this gung-ho approach can provide erotic calisthenics for the younger man, it stops working at mid-life when athletics are no longer so easily performed, nor high numbers so readily scored. Too, it reinforces the profound split between sex and emotions that the double standard encouraged, a split that can eventually short-circuit a man’s sexuality.

*34\93\2*

The handicapped generation is coming of age burdened by a crippling heritage: They were taught that their manhood depended on living up to the masculine mystique and maintaining a macho style. But it is a style that usually self-destructs at mid-life.

Based on biology, the masculine mystique inflated the obvious fact that potency requires a hard penis into a definition of masculinity that dictated that a man be hardheaded and hardhearted as well. A real man must be aggressive and tough, according to the mystique, because male superiority insists that he compete, perform, achieve—and win. Not just once, but repeatedly. Based on values that obtained in the frontier days, this macho style has in recent years been transferred to the sports arena and transformed by athletic metaphors, but the clement of combat is still essential: How, after all, can a man prove he is the toughest gun in town unless he is always ready to challenge his competitors, defeat his opponents, and destroy his enemies?

Manhood becomes a compulsive concern with potency and power, according to this code, and a man must prove his masculinity again and again. Therefore the mystique demands that a man be cool and in control, his fears disguised by a cock-sure swagger, his feelings concealed beneath a menacing mask.

At mid-life, however, this macho commandment to keep cool and hang tough becomes increasingly impossible to sustain. It is a style that never worked very well, except on the frontier or in the movies. But even at its best, glorified by heroes like Billy the Kid and John Wayne, by flashing guns and finely Set jaws, it is a young man’s style, a style that ultimately becomes exhausting and futile.

The injunctions on masculinity were just as treacherous as those imposed on women by their traditional sex role. Narrow and constricting, the feminine mystique taught a woman to be childish, passive, and dependent—a servile homebody, a submissive wife, and a sacrificial mother. It was the golden rule that all girls growing up in the 1950s or earlier were supposed to follow.

In essence the feminine mystique required women to be subhuman. But there was a golden rule for boys, too, which was simply the other side of the coin: The masculine mystique required men to be superhuman.

The frustrations felt in the middle years by American men who modeled their lives on the traditional male sex role are comparable to those felt by women once their too-narrow role began to pinch.

When Betty Fricdan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, identifying a problem that until then had no name, she described masses of women who had done everything they were supposed to do, everything they were programmed to do; dedicated mothers and loyal wives sitting in their split-level houses, surrounded by the most modern conveniences— and in despair.

They were dying of boredom, dying of depression, dying of alcoholism. Miserably unhappy with their lives, they felt guilty and lonely and puzzled. They wondered what could possibly be wrong.

What was wrong, said Friedan, was the myth: The myth which insisted that a woman be confined to the home, her whole life centered on marriage and motherhood. It wasn’t enough, this rigid role prescribed by the mystique. By prohibiting a woman from using her skills in the larger world, by prohibiting her from seeking satisfaction in the work arena, it was stunting her development as a complete human being—in the name, supposedly, of femininity.

The mystique stopped a woman from growing and left her with a forfeited self.

Like the women Friedan described, many mid-life men today are dying of boredom and depression and alcoholism. Or dying of heart attacks. Like Harry, they feel as if they’re running all the time, just running—but they no longer know what it is they’re chasing.

They are beginning to discover that striving and competing are not enough, that achievement at work is not the answer, and that even success docs not bring happiness. They are feeling guilty and lonely and puzzled. They are wondering what could possibly be wrong.

In part their dissatisfactions are related to the mid-life crisis: This is the time when a stabbing recognition of mortality and the limitations of time spontaneously trigger new questions about life’s meaning.

But for this generation of men, the painful nature of the crisis is intensified by their particular heritage. The masculine mystique has stunted their development just as the feminine mystique did with women, and they too have been left with a forfeited self. Based on distorted definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman, these traditional roles have prevented both sexes from realizing their full human potential: Women were cut off from the outer world and deprived of a working self, while men were cut off from the inner world and deprived of a feeling self.

At mid-life the amputation begins to ache.

*19\93\2*

In the following chapters we will examine many problems that concern men in their forties, problems we all thought were so familiar, and show how when seen as aspects of a developmental crisis they become meaningful and manageable for the first time.

We will listen to the voices of many men, each contributing a unique insight, each willing to share what he has been through and learned so that others may benefit, too.

We will also present the most helpful opinions from medical researchers, physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and industrial consultants; as well as the most useful findings from studies related to different aspects of the middle years.

And as we look at those areas of life that seem to be causing difficulties, demanding change, or presenting new challenges, we will try to answer a variety of questions:

•What physical changes occur at this time, and what impact do they have? How does a man feel about his altered body? How does he react to the pain of aging and the prospect of death?

•Why are more American men in their forties having heart attacks than ever before? How does their way of life contribute to their premature death? And what can they do to protect themselves?

•How does the masculine mystique handicap this generation of mid-life men? What consequences do they suffer from having been taught to worship the Protestant ethic? Invest their total identity in work and achievement? Be strong and self-controlled at all cost? And why do constricted emotions cause so much trouble at this time of life?

•Why does the meaning of a man’s work change now? Why are the rewards less satisfying than he expected? What’s happened to his dream? And can he formulate a new one? How does he feel about success? How does he handle failure? And how does he set significant new goals?

•Why are so many men worried about impotence as they age? How does male sexuality change during this period? What can a man do to increase his potency and improve his sex life? And why the extraordinary appeal of young girls?

•Why do so many mid-life men feel lonely? Why do they suddenly become ripe for love? Why do so many long-term marriages fail? And how do others manage to survive? Or be revitalized? What about extramarital affairs? Divorce and remarriage?

•How does a man feel about his aging parents? The death of a parent, especially his father? How does he feel about his maturing children? And his own changing role as a father? I low does he manage if divorced? And why is the issue of fatherhood so important at this stage of life?

•How does a man handle his hopes and fears and feelings dining this period? How does he handle painful emotions? Or loving ones? And what does he do, where does he go, when help is needed?

•Finally, how and why do some men alter their lives in I heir forties? Change careers? Start a new family? Or forge a new self? Why are some changes destructive and defeating, while others are enriching and rewarding? What is the real reason some men self-destruct in their middle years while others expand and thrive?

As we explore these questions in greater depth it will heroine clear that there are better ways to respond to mid-life challenges than brooding, drinking, chasing girls, overworking or running away.

It will also become clear that the way in which each man handles himself at this crossroads will determine the road he will travel for the rest of his life. For better or for worse.

At the end of this book we will draw together all our findings and formulate some guidelines to help men and women deal with this difficult time more effectively:

•We will outline specific steps men can follow to make this period pay off for the rest of their lives.

•We will spell out what women can do to help their husbands or lovers.

• And we will suggest ways in which we can improve our institutions to make them more responsive to adult growth and change.

If dealt with courageously and wisely, the mid-life can be a glorious opportunity for setting new directions.

It can be cause for celebration.

The purpose of this book is to give every man in middle years the “permission” to change his life that our society still denies him, and to show him how to make the beyond forty genuinely exciting and rewarding.

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