Barbara Ellen
Body Language
According to Gail Sheehy’s new book, Passages in Men’s Lives, the key triggers of male mid-life crisis are: the death of a parent, relationship breakdown and career insecurity. Of the three, the last seems to be the most common.
Certainly, when a friend of mine lost his job, he displayed all the classic signs of what Sheehy rather shrilly refers to as “MANopause”: bitterness, panic, pathetic displays of male virility, all underscored by a deep-rooted fear of all-round redundancy. However, the guy in question was 31, nine precocious years ahead of Sheehy’s “MANopause” cut-off. Indeed, this might be the scoop Sheehy missed with her otherwise exhaustive study – everywhere you look, guys are getting their mid-life crises out of the way early.
This oversight aside, Sheehy seems spot on when she states that men are painfully slow to see the writing on the wall. Or maybe they do see it (in the mirror, on their birth certificates, in the eyes of the beautiful blonde who looks straight through them instead of at them), but assume that their mortality is a terrible mistake easily rectified if they keep their heads down, or get powerful enough.
“I don’t think I’ll bother with all that dying stuff,” one friend said to me recently, in drunken seriousness. It must be one of those “guy things”. You could imagine Bill Clinton crossly dictating a memo to God from his deathbed (“What about our deal?”), but you could not imagine Hillary Clinton being so deluded.
However powerful she might be, no woman could ignore the twin biological bookends of menarche and menopause – somewhere along the line, even first ladies are forced to accept that they won’t be needing tampons anymore.
For men, it’s probably a little harder to work out when it’s time to draw the chalked outline around their youth. But not that much harder, frankly. Sure, we’re all getting younger by the minute (“50 is what 40 used to be,” says Sheehy), and some men clearly age better than others.
However, there are still a few pithy clues for the mature male professional if he cares to sit up and take notice. And even if he doesn’t (and who can blame him?), the game’s up now.
It’s all there, in gory detail, in Sheehy’s book. The adult children. The fatigue. The work-out-resistant paunches. Those young guys around the office, who view him as some kind of wise old lion to their callow young cub (or so they say to his face). That “little problem” he occasionally has that dare not speak its name, but which will one day gobble up Viagra as surely as menopausal housewives once gobbled down Valium.
All this, and Sheehy hasn’t even got to the bit where the poor sod gets sacked. One can only imagine the feeling, that terrible mid- life/pre-death feeling of being stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel when the safety bar has fallen off and the only way is down. Indeed, Sheehy’s take on male menopause is enough to make grown women weep (it makes our menopause resemble a Sunday morning stroll to the bottle bank). And there lies the rub – only women are likely to read it.
When will publishers get the message: the average man is about as likely to buy himself a self-help book as he is to run, cheering, into a room where Chris Evans is naked. Men don’t need self-help because they’ve got wife-help, and girlfriend-help.
Sheehy claims that men “bottle things up”, but this is only true in front of other men. Where women are concerned, men are only too happy to be caught with their emotional trousers down, only too keen to suck us dry of the last drop of feminine insight and empathy. They might be being strong and silent at the pub, but at home they’re squealing like stuck pigs at the injustices they have suffered during their working day.
And so it will be with their “MANopause”. Just as it was women who bought Sheehy’s previous bestseller on the female menopause, The Silent Passage, it will be mainly women who buy this one.
All the better to understand you with, my dear.
Passages in Men’s Lives is published by Simon & Schuster