I was a kid the first time I heard the words midlife crisis. My mom said them at our kitchen table, about my dad, and I remember thinking, what on earth is that, because whatever it was, it did not look bad from where I was sitting.
My dad was having the time of his life. He’d load us into the back of the truck and peel out of the dump while we got thrown around in the bed. He bought a new car. He dug holes in the backyard until it was a golf course.
My mom was horrified. I didn’t understand why until I was looking at sixty myself.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know at that kitchen table. A midlife crisis is not a diagnosis. It’s a reckoning. It tends to land somewhere between forty and sixty, after a couple of decades of doing precisely what you were told would make you happy, and then one ordinary morning you look around at the house, the career, the kids you raised, the box you checked and the next box after that, and something in you says: this was it?
That question is not a small question. It takes the floor out.
And from the outside it can look like my dad in that truck. Somebody who has gone lighter and louder and more reckless, doing things that do not look like them. What you cannot see from the passenger seat is that the person is trying to work out who they are now that the first half is spent.
If you’re the one watching this happen to somebody you love, you are in a terrible spot, and I’d rather say that plainly than talk around it. You didn’t ask for any of this. Your life is being rearranged by a reckoning that isn’t yours. And then they tell you they need space to figure themselves out, and you’re left holding the question nobody wants to say out loud, which is whether they’re figuring out themselves or figuring out you.
The part that makes people angriest is what comes next. They announce they need space to do some soul searching, and then they’re on a fishing trip with their buddies, or they’ve bought the car, or they’re on the app. And you think, that is not soul searching.
You’re right. It isn’t. But it also isn’t what you think it is.
Sitting down alone with yourself is the most frightening thing a person ever does. Most of us will try absolutely everything else first. The acting out is not the search. It’s the stalling before the search.
Knowing that won’t make it hurt less. It might keep you from spending a year arguing with the wrong thing.
Here’s what I most want you to hear, though.
You cannot do the choosing for somebody else.
You can listen. You can ask real questions rather than leading ones. You can say plainly what you’re living through and invite them to work it out alongside you. What you cannot do is make a person choose the relationship. And if you somehow could, what you’d end up with is the version of them that got cornered into staying, which is not the person you fell in love with.
And while they’re working out what they want, you still have a life to live and choices of your own to make. I say that to people constantly and they look at me like I’ve handed them something they weren’t allowed to have.
So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with this week. Where have you put all of your attention on what they are going to decide? And what would change if some of it came back to you?
In the episode we go further than I can here. We get into why the people who checked every single box are so often the ones this hits hardest, what to say when you can see it happening to somebody you love, and why an invitation lands in the body completely differently than a demand does. Brooke also tells a story about a job she stayed in years too long, and what she actually felt in the moment she found out she was okay. I didn’t see that one coming.
One last thing. If your partner has gone distant and you’re spending every bit of your energy trying to work out what they’re thinking, the Better Love Quiz turns that question back around toward the one person you can actually do something about. Twenty-two questions, about five minutes, completely private. Your partner doesn’t take part and is never contacted.
