Photo by Pat Butler
Sitting on beach towels, Claudia and I kept our eyes trained on our kids playing in the lake while we chatted. That summer we were both reading Gail Sheehy’s remarkable bestseller, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, [1] and it was thrilling to find how closely it described our thirtysomething lives. Self-help books were rare in the 1970s.
When studying adult development for a master’s degree in 1978, I was delighted to have
Passages assigned as a textbook. Sections titled The Trying Twenties and Passage to the Thirties really spoke to me because familiar personality challenges were clearly defined. For example, I learned that my desire to earn my mother-in-law’s approval was natural – due to being in my twenties – and not caused by a lack of self-confidence.
Renewal covers transitions that happen in the 50s, which were too far off for me to care about at the tender age of 31. Now in my 70s, I revisited Passages – curious to see how Sheehy handles the crises I later encountered. (Having earlier underlined significant concepts, several now caught my eye in the yellowed paperback.)
Middle-aged marriage
“Studies record a dramatic climb in satisfaction with marriage in the mid-forties for those couples who have survived the passage into midlife together. What this finding reflects is not that our mate miraculously improves but that tolerance can become spontaneous once we stop displacing our inner contradictions on our spouse. The steep rise of contentment levels off after 50 at a higher plateau.” [2]
In middle age, “There is a good chance of having someone to grow old with, to share friends and memories and walks in the rain with, someone to absorb the hush of a household where children no longer reside and to make it resonate with the joys of recaptured time together.” [3]
After enjoying "recaptured time together” once our nest was empty, my own marriage dissolved. In viewing my own middle-age through Sheehy’s lens, will her insights astonish me the way they did long ago?
Living alone
“Middle life is definitely a time to have a healthy respect for eccentricity. This is only possible when we overcome the habit of trying to please everyone, which seems to be a late development for many women.... People who are alone in middle age may be ready to accept that learning to live alone is not just transitionally good; it can also be essentially good. Especially if one’s light has been eclipsed by a mate’s dominant personality or if having existed for many years as that corporate entity known as the couple, one has no idea if the resources are there to survive as an individual, it can be a self-affirming experience to discover that the answer is yes.” [4]
That quote applies to me. Having been part of a couple for 45 years, I subconsciously folded many of my opinions and preferences into my husband’s. For example, in modelling my mother’s
stance, I did not pay attention to our investments or charitable donations.
When suddenly living alone, I thrived. My values came into focus when I was free to spend my time exactly as I wished and make independent financial decisions. Only after a healthy transition to living solo did I seriously seek a new life partner. I’ve now been remarried for more than ten years. By occasionally maintaining my own space (both physical and emotional), I am building on new skills
developed in mid-life.
Approval of oneself at last
“One of the great rewards of moving through the disassembling period to renewal is coming
to approve of oneself ethically and morally and quite independent of other people's standards and agenda. By giving up the wish that one's parents were different and by navigating through various
lifestyles to that point of dignity worth defending, one can achieve what Erikson[5]calls integrity. By this he means arrival at that final stage of adult development, in which one can give a blessing to one's own life.” [6]
“To accomplish such a step may mean breaking out of a life pattern that has been unsatisfactory. It certainly means becoming aware of one's own step-style so that one can play into it or work around it but not be defeated by it.” [7]
When a couple separates, disassembling of long-established life patterns happens daily.
Responsibilities they’d previously distributed are reconfigured: food preparation, money management, and car maintenance now fall into each person’s lap. Awareness of one’s own step-style arrives with a thunderclap. To quote Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
Enough leads to self-respect
“Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough.
Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect… It would be surprising if we didn't experience some pain as we leave the familiarity of one adult stage for the uncertainty of the next. But the willingness to move through each passage is equivalent to the willingness to live abundantly. If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we're not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning.” [8]
I agree.Today, watching contemporaries cope with serious, debilitating illnesses, I see plenty of pain, but there’s also growth. They make tough decisions, and then try again if the first choice doesn’t work out as expected.
“If physical strength and pleasures of the senses are held to be life's greatest values, then we deny ourselves anything beyond youth but a dull ebb of all experience. If we see nothing to rival the accumulation of goods and success, then we trap ourselves into a stale and repetitious middle age. Yet the delights of self-discovery are always available. Though loved ones move in and out of our
lives, the capacity to love remains.” [9]
The desirability of accumulating goods fades during a marital separation. Dividing joint possessions between two homes takes energy and a new perspective. “Why on earth did I buy
that silly thing?” came to mind more than once as I emptied closets.
The capacity to love does remain and I now joyfully foster new in-person friendships –especially after enduring pandemic lockdowns.
She nailed it
Revisiting Sheehy’s masterpiece has been affirming because her celebration of self-discovery during middle-age aligns beautifully with my own experience. I like to reach out to authors whose writing has touched my heart, so I’m sad to discover that she died in 2020 at the age of 83. My revisitation was too late.
Gail Sheehy was a luminary; Passages is a groundbreaking book, in my opinion.
[3]Ibid, 506.
[4]Ibid, 507.
[5]Erik H. Erikson lists stages of the life cycle in Childhood and Society (1950).
[6]Ibid, 509.
[7]Ibid, 510.
[8]Ibid, 513.
[9]Ibid, 513.