Crisis? What crisis?

Fortysomething and fed up? Feeling restless and reckless? Don’t panic, you’re not alone. Raúl Peschiera finds meaning in the madness of middle age. Illustrations by Adrian Valencia

As the years roll on and levee around your midriff, you might find yourself, like Dante, wandering the dark wood that borders youth and old age. The milestone decade between 35 and 45 is when most of us take stock of our lives and consider what we have achieved, what we have not, and what we have to look forward to in the years to come. Whether we see our lives as half-full or half-empty determines the recklessness of our reaction. We could chuck in the job, the spouse and the home, hit the road in a classic soft-top E-Type with nothing but a map of Italy and that fiery marketing intern as navigator—and, like that V12 beneath the bonnet, feel there’s still plenty of kick left in us.

Even if this cliché of a midlife crisis were to materialise, sooner or later the Jag would be up on its haunches dribbling oil and that intern would have ditched you for someone who doesn’t always moan about how his father never understood him. And once you’d bashed the life out of your mobile for lack of reception, in no time you’d be somewhere in the Tuscan hills, pleading with your wife over a service station’s phone to take you back and, while she’s at it, book you a room in Siena’s Grand Hotel Continental, if it’s not too much trouble.

If only someone could have warned you, helped to keep you on the right path. Granted, Dante had his Virgil—but what good is that to you now? And even if you gleaned a little from Lost in Translation, Bill Murray had Scarlett Johansson to cushion the effects of his crisis. But somewhere between an inscrutably pouty movie star and an Ancient Roman

poet, there’s probably a sympathetic guide out there who can help you find your own way.

While men tend to hog the spotlight when it comes to midlife dramas, women certainly have their share of critical moments that can turn into a final mad dash to cling on to their youth. For them, coping may mean going under the knife, says Claudia Croft, fashion editor of the Sunday Times Style magazine. “They are less likely to leave their families and take up with a toy boy, but they are more likely to focus on how they look and improving that. They [may] suddenly go away for a couple of weeks and come back with new breasts.”

For men, she says, the telltale sign of a burgeoning midlife crisis is cultivating a rebellious look circa 1953: a sort of tousled tough guy. “It’s growing their hair long, the leather jacket obsession and the Tony Blair-type jeans—everything is uncomfortable and just doesn’t work.”

Croft adds that the emergency is caused by an underlying malaise. “It’s all just a symptom of people not being happy being who they are. I think the only cure for it is when

people are happy with themselves. In the meantime they will

medicate themselves with fashion and plastic surgery and younger girlfriends—anything but facing reality.”

Finding contentment outside a surgery or the work-experience pool is usually a good idea. But is there harm in indulging guilty pleasures? According to Tim Blanks, fashion correspondent for the New York Times and host of the syndicated television programme Fashion File, the midlife crisis is an invention that “rolls every single iniquitous human impulse into a ball and promotes it as some kind of excuse for bad behaviour. It’s a mutually reinforcing thing: once one person has one, somebody thinks, ‘I should have one of those’. It’s like shopping for psychological states.”

Blanks believes that the label is merely a smokescreen for indulging long-repressed desires, the window dressing for some degree of dissatisfaction in life. “[It’s] the ultimate escape route for people who maybe don’t have the guts to just stand up and say that [they] really feel like a change,” says Blanks. If somebody is in a failing relationship in their late thirties, forties or early fifties, it’s “terribly convenient”, he says, to put it down to a midlife crisis. Instead of facing up to what they want, people are casting themselves as victims of their lifelines.

Perhaps, then, the midlife crisis can be put down to a fear of change. And while change was good and necessary when we were younger, for the more mature adult it can be daunting coming to the realisation that contentment entails change throughout our lives. Bronwyn Cosgrave, former features editor of Vogue, decided to leave London at the height of her career to return to Canada and write her book, Made For Each Other: Fashion and the Oscars, which will be published early next year.

“I think that if you live a very busy life, it goes by quickly,” she says. “Sometimes you have to shake things up, step back from your environment and ask, ‘Are these things making me happy?’—and if not, you have to change [them]. And very few people change things. It takes guts, it really does.”

Cosgrave says that while women fear major changes as much as men, the midlife crisis can hit women quite hard. They have to both look and behave young for as long as possible, so when they start feeling their age, the shift can be all the more disconcerting.

“We live in a very strange world because thirtysomethings and fortysomethings are younger than ever. Madonna on her album cover is pretty much dressed as a teenager and women are wearing designer denim that their teenaged daughters wear. I think that you do reach a point where you just can’t live like a teenager.”

While a woman going through a midlife crisis is realising that she can’t be young forever, the equivalent male starts to rediscover his innate immaturity, according to Bill Prince, deputy editor of GQ. “Men never mature, we’re all basically 18 or 20 under the skin,” he says. “It’s interesting how close to adolescent taste the midlife crisis adheres.”

Prince thinks that the rationale behind the midlife crisis is flawed. Rather than a nostalgic look back at times gone by, he sees it as a time where you can reassess your life and make a change for the better, however radical that change may be. “The crisis can be a positive thing if it makes men stop and ask themselves: ‘Am I happy? What can I do to make myself happier? What kind of things have I put off that I shouldn’t put off?’ If something really appeals to you or you get an offer you can’t refuse, then take it,” Prince continues. “I think that it is a huge sign of confidence, the midlife crisis: you say, ‘Sod the lot of you; I want to do what I want to do’.”

But it all goes pear-shaped, he adds, if the crisis takes the form of a last desperate grasp for the hem of youth and vitality. Turning your life upside down and seeking change for its own sake is likely to land you back at square one. “A midlife crisis goes horribly wrong when men leap out into the great unknown and feel that everything in their life is bad and that they can find better somewhere else.” In fact, says Prince, “I don’t think that is a midlife crisis—it’s a mild depression. A midlife crisis is not a moment of panic but a realisation that it is not too late.”

As long as you are indulging your passion in the course of it all, it’s fine, he explains. “But if you are indulging someone else’s concept of what you should be doing, because you are in your forties and are thrashing about trying to find sense in your world, it’s probably not fine.”

Whether a midlife crisis becomes a renaissance of your long-lost youthful enthusiasm depends, it seems, on how it manifests itself in you. And while inner happiness may be elusive, finding your own way on the path that never strays is as important as realising that, despite it all, you’re only halfway there.

“People medicate themselves with fashion and plastic surgery and younger girlfriends—anything but facing reality”

10 TELL-TALE SIGNS

Doing a Jeremy Clarkson: tousled hair, leather jacket and those jeans

Buying dresses to fill out rather than slim down to

Fathering—or giving birth to—a child at 50

Believing a new Harley Davidson makes you look hard

Starting to think Cher looks good for her age

Using slang picked up from your children

Thinking a two-month bicycle tour of Europe is good for the family

Hoping someone 25 years younger than you isn’t only interested in your money

Collecting prices and brochures for cosmetic surgery

Making notes while watching Nip/Tuck