How to spot your man’s midlife crisis
By five brave authors in the throes of their own!
‘It’s a severe quadricep contusion with haematoma, mate,’ the cheerful Aussie physio told me. ‘ You were lucky. A little bit deeper and you’d get myositis ossificans— where damaged muscle tissue turns to bone. How did you do it?’
I hesitated. the truth was that, approaching my 50th birthday, I’d panicked and — in a bid to be ‘fit for 50’ (as if alliteration would help) — signed up for a tough Mudder race.
It’s a bit like the sAs meets It’s A Knockout. You crawl. You climb ropes, scramble over walls and dive into deep pools of murky water. At the end, you run through a field of electrified wires that hit you with shock after shock. In the mud.
During training I’d hurtled over a steel bar, smashing both legs into it — which is why I hobbled to the physio — and I’d just lost a fingernail after dropping a kettlebell on it. I’d actually paid money for this. Clearly, I’ve gone insane.
I’m not alone. You’ll see people like me everywhere — clad in Lycra, pedalling furiously on bikes on a sunday morning, puffing along the canal with a rucksack full of rocks or wild swimming in freezing rivers and flooded quarries. We’re all mad.
they’ve even made a film about us — swimming With Men, out now, which sees Rob Brydon seek solace in a men’s synchronised swimming team when he hits midlife.
tough Mudder is the more popular option for men my age. It claims 10,000 participants per race and there’s at least three every summer month — not to mention total Warrior, Insane terrain, HellRunner or any of the 100-odd copycats. there are no official figures for how many of the competitors are middle-aged men, but looking around it felt like a dad’s club.
these are my people — Generation X hitting our midlife crisis so hard we’re suffering contusions. My problem — my generation’s problem — is that we literally can’t afford our parents’ midlife crisis.
‘the Baby Boomers’ mid-life crisis was having affairs and buying fast cars, which came from financial stability,’ my City- worker- turned- academic friend told me over a pint or two ( but not three, because these days . . .)
‘I can’t afford a Harley Davidson. the Boomers won’t retire, the Millennials are leapfrogging us, we’ve been in recessions ever since we started work, we don’t understand snapchat and we’re broke. We’re not looking to quit our jobs and become artists. We’re just hoping we can hang on for the next ten years.’
so, my generation’s crisis is about experience, not possessions. We’re getting tattoos, running electric shock- laced races and if we do have money we’re buying high-performance bicycles, not a Porsche.
When I hit 50, as a divorced father of two who doesn’t know what a KPI is or why UX is not a World War II submarine, watches money bleed into mortgage and alimony payments, tries to date people based on algorithms and can’t afford a new Mini, let alone a sports car, I knew the only thing I could change was myself.
Is it about the crisis of masculinity? Possibly. Does being a bit fit make me feel better about myself? Absolutely. And there’s a camaraderie and a sense of achievement in tackling daunting obstacles with a bunch of blokes.
Are we kidding ourselves? Of course. We’re the kind of people who lie to physios — I told him I hurt my legs when scaffolding fell on me. But at least I’m trying… MY WAKe up call was a holiday snap of me looking not unlike a beached whale. studying the photo I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the svelte young man I used to be. Had I perhaps eaten him, along with a side order of chips?
I never used to have a problem with food. In my 20s I’d go weeks without so much as glancing in the direction of a bar of chocolate. And even if I did inhale the odd Crunchie, the sheer amount of energy required to be young and alive was guaranteed to burn off the calories.
twenty years later it’s a different story. I’m married with kids, lumbered with a massive mortgage and a house in need of constant repair. evenings once spent in a Britpop- era blur of record company showcases and after-parties have been swapped for nights falling asleep in front of the latest scandi-noir boxset.
Is it any wonder I cheered myself up with a nightly cheeky beer or three? Is it much of a surprise that I turned daily to family-sized packs of crisps to get me through numerous deskbound deadlines? surely it’s understandable I developed a post-lunch twix habit simply to stay sane?
Of course, I tried to delude myself that I still had the metabolism of my youth, even as, for the first time in my life, trousers started not to fit. But having to buy bigger clothes didn’t stop me over- eating, and neither did a doctor’s warning.
No, what it took was a holiday snap of me looking like a man mountain. It was a line drawn in the sand. From that day onward I eschewed snacks, cut down meal portions, and even adopted a retired greyhound so I’d get some daily exercise. the change was so dramatic you could almost see the weight falling off.
But the most important transformation was mental: I stopped seeing family obligations as a burden, but rather as a gift. I don’t have to work hard to keep a roof over my family’s head. I get to work hard to keep a roof over my family’s head. It’s a subtle shift, but the dividends are huge. Being resentful of the life I had caused my midlife crisis. And it was learning to be grateful for it that brought it to an end. mIke Gayle’s The man I Think I know (Hodder & Stoughton). I WAs 47. I woke up on an old single mattress in my office. My relationship had failed — my fault, I’m sure. I was a father, but I was not waking up in the same house as my son. My writing career had taken off, then landed again.
I had almost, but not quite, stopped drinking. I knew it, I told myself — I knew that drinking had been part of the problem. I thought: oh, if only I’d stopped drinking years ago!
I eased myself up from the mattress. the thing was that the years had slipped by so fast — that was the core of the problem. At 47, you remember how long it took to get from 27 to 37. It felt like ten years, or at least eight or nine. the next ten years felt like five years. Now, time was speeding up even more. By my calculations, if I lived to the age of 90, it would feel like another — what, ten years? Not even that.
And it wouldn’t be enough time to do all the stuff I thought I was going to do. Furthermore, if I didn’t do the stuff I was going to do . . . what then?
this is the crux of the midlife crisis. It’s about time. Cambridge scientist David Bainbridge thinks we develop a sense of time speeding up to remind us to take action. In the first half of your life, time dawdles. In the second half, it zooms. You are suddenly on a fast road. If you need to change direction, now is the time.
I sat up on my mattress and yawned. I went for a walk by the river. I saw a guy whose life had headed in the wrong direction. I slightly knew him. He was waiting for the shops to open so he could buy alcohol. His life had been headed for a bad place. Now he had arrived in that place.
still, I had my daily walks. My Pilates classes. Plans to turn teetotal — for good. Maybe my career would take off. On a walk, as the endorphins flow, one is always more positive.
I know what you’re thinking. A midlife crisis has always been
about drinking more, partying more. In that case, I lived life the wrong way round. But you can look at it a different way. A midlife crisis is about doing the opposite of what you have been. Some people haven’t partied enough. Some have partied too much.
I finished my walk. I thought about what I needed. A house, for one thing. A new life, for another. A life in which time, seemed to pass more slowly. A life, in fact, without alcohol. A duller life, perhaps. A life I hadn’t wanted, but definitely deserved.
Later that day, I opened my laptop and started writing. I fIrSt knew I was in the grip of a midlife crisis when I started lying about my age. When the question came up in everyday situations, I’d hear myself saying ‘mid-40s’, when the truth was that I was pushing 50.
And then I’d feel ashamed, because I was no better in my own mind than those tragic men who tell whoppers when they sign up to online dating agencies.
Don’t they realise their unfeasibly young dates will notice the disparity between the claim and the reality when they meet? Yet there seem to be many more of my contemporaries telling similar white lies. Or is it just that I notice it as I do it myself?
there are occasions when I try to justify it to myself. Like in the workplace. this is, as the Irish poet WB Yeats memorably put it, ‘no country for old men’. the law may have been changed to ban age-discrimination by employers, but reality is heading in the opposite direction. No one wants you when you’ve passed 50.
‘We have to make room for younger colleagues to get promoted,’ a friend in a law firm was told as he was ‘retired’ at 55. ‘I wanted to tell them I was still young,’ he confided afterwards. But 55, by contemporary standards, isn’t young. they make that plain on those online forms where they ask you to select an age bracket. they carefully calibrate 18-25, 25-35, and so on until they get to 55, when the only choice left is to click ‘over 55’. You may as well be 100.
Perhaps the lies come with the shock of reaching that point. Since we are now all allowed in many routine situations to withhold details of our date of birth — my bank asks me for the day and the month but never the year — the temptation is there.
Such are the practicalities, but let’s not overlook the vanity. As we have narrowed the gap between the sexes, the stereotype of the ‘real’ man who doesn’t give a damn about what he is wearing or what is fashionable has been replaced by us all taking a leaf out of David Beckham’s metrosexual manual.
We feel under pressure to look our best, as evidenced by the 20 per cent rise in sales of moisturisers and the like for men in the past five years, making ‘male personal care products’ a £60 million industry in the UK.
But if it were simply vanity, I’d be considering more drastic measures than lying: hair- dye; make-up; cosmetic surgery. But they all require quite some commitment or expertise.
By contrast, when the mid-life crisis hits, fibbing about your age is painless and easy. You have to be careful, though. Knock too many years off, claim to be 40 when you’re clearly 50, and you will only invite pity.
So why stop? Well, my wife tells me I should be honoured to have got to 50 when so many good friends haven’t. But what haunts me is the realisation that I am the same age as my dad was when my 18-year-old self was mortified to be seen with him.
How we grow old, though, shouldn’t only be about climbing up a number scale each year. It is about how engaged we stay with life. And that challenge isn’t met by little white lies.
Peter Stanford’s What We talk About When We talk About Faith (Hodder). I OUgHt to be a shoo-in for a midlife crisis. I’m 54, I lost my only regular job five years ago, my hearing is going and I’m nearly bald. I can no longer pretend that women below the age of 45 look twice at me. Actually, most of them don’t look once.
If I were to think about this carefully I would probably be a wreck, horrified at my insignificance, shaken to the soul by the certainty that old age is hurrying towards me. So I don’t think about it. Or I try not to. It’s only a crisis if you believe it’s one.
there are feelings of dread: what can I do to elude them? I don’t drive, and even if I wanted a Porsche or a motorbike I can’t afford one. I don’t know any young women (see above).
I don’t have a mobile phone and I’m not on any social media. What you must guard at all costs, as you enter the late-middle years, is your dignity, and the surest way of doing that, I still believe, is to be properly dressed.
When I see a man whose jacket sleeves puddle on his wrists and whose trousers bag at his waist, I think: that man is depressed.
Clothes that suit you, and even better, clothes that fit you, aren’t just something that will boost your confidence. they are the sweeteners and civilisers of life. When all else fails, they may even be the saving of you.
that I used to wear a suit every day is not unusual — except for the fact I’ve always worked from home. I could not sit down at my desk in the morning if I wasn’t suited, and maybe booted.
I have since learnt that no problem is insurmountable if you are wearing an excellent pair of suede loafers. this has nothing to do with dandyism. It’s not attention that you’re seeking — it’s peace of mind. Being well-dressed isn’t just about you, anyway. It’s a sign of respect towards others. It says, I care enough about your regard to look smart. A great writer once advised, ‘Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to.’
Most of us are lucky to be alive and healthy at this age. If you are facing a midlife crisis there is something to be said for putting on a brave face and refusing to yield to self-pity, because one thing you’ll notice is that there’s already more than enough pity heading in your direction from everyone else. Our Friends in Berlin by Anthony Quinn (Cape).