Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

It is no longer enough to be competent and promising; a man wants now to be recognized and respected.

If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

No two people can possibly coordinate all their developmental crises.

And even as one part of us seeks the freedom to be an individual, another part is always searching for someone or something to surrender our freedom to.

Though loved ones move in and out of our lives, the capacity to love remains.

Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don’t exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don’t grow.

Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life’s uniforms

ONE OF THE terrifying aspects of the twenties is the conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. If we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don’t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.

50, there is a new warmth and mellowing. Friends become more important than ever, but so does privacy. Since it is so often proclaimed by people past midlife, the motto of this stage might be “No more bullshit.

Single women in this country experience less discomfort and greater happiness and appear in most ways stronger in meeting the challenges of their positions than single men. Unmarried men suffer far more from neurotic and antisocial tendencies and are more often depressed and passive.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are 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. As Dostoevsky put it, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." The real fear should be of the opposite course.

Would that there were an award for people who came 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.

You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations, in search of an inner validation. You are moving out of roles and into the self.

We look to our mates, to our children, to money or success, hoping they will extend the protection of the caregivers from our childhood.

We are the only ones with our own set of thoughts and bundle of feelings. Another person can taste them, through shared experience or conversation, but no other person can ever really digest them.

It is frightening to step off onto the treacherous footbridge leading to the second half of life. We can’t take everything with us on this journey through uncertainty. Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety. We must learn to give ourselves permission. We stumble upon feminine or masculine aspects of our natures that up to this time have usually been masked. There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone—not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates. It is a dark passage at the beginning. But by disassembling ourselves, we can glimpse the light and gather our parts into a renewal.

THE TRYING TWENTIES CONFRONTS US WITH THE QUESTION of how to take hold in the adult world. Incandescent with our molten energies, having outgrown the family and the formlessness of our transiting years, we are impatient to pour ourselves into the exactly right form—our own way of living in the world.

As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.

The caring of experienced partners goes less into roles and more into enhancing the special qualities and endearing idiosyncrasies that brought them together in the first place.

Many people find it easier to live together when that commitment is voluntarily renewed. The

The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety

Ignorant of our own and our mate’s inner life, we are ruled largely by external forces at this stage.

If there’s something about me you don’t like, just tell me,” says the newlywed anxious to please. “I’ll change it.” If he or she is not forthcoming with such an offer, the other one is determined to change it for the partner. “He may drink a little too much now,” the bride confides to her friend, “but I’ll reform him.” Examination

Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One

And to what degree does the young woman invent the man she marries? She often sees in him possibilities that no one else recognizes and pictures herself within his dream as the one person who truly understands. Such illusions are the stuff of which the twenties are made.

No matter how different the forms we choose, our concentration during the Trying Twenties is on mastering what we feel we are supposed to do.

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. And if we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

The myth that marriage offers an equally supportive structure for the development of men and women is dealt a blow, however, when husbands and wives are compared…The mental health hazards suffered by married women are far greater than those of married men.

The change in time sense forces each of us to a major task of midlife. All our notions of the future need to be rebalanced around the idea of time left to live.