SSH and the Middle-Aged Wife

The male midlife crisis is a response

A recent headline in a UK newspaper about how middle-aged women tend to be repulsed by their husbands is interesting because it violated the feminist taboo about how everything is always the fault of men.

I’m at the age now where I’ve been seeing this phenomenon play out in the marriages of friends, acquaintances, and other age-peers for a few years now. Sometimes it’s surprising, sometimes it’s disappointing, and sometimes people impress you with their unexpected ability to rise to the challenge.

The fact is that to a certain extent, the hormonal changes of menopause literally transform a man’s wife into a woman that he doesn’t know, doesn’t like, and didn’t marry. While she’s the same individual in many senses, in chemical terms she’s literally not the same woman who was attracted to him and married him twenty or thirty years ago.

Given how we know that merely being on or off birth control affects the sort of men to whom women are attracted, it should not be a surprise when the significant hormonal changes that take place in middle age have a similar effect. And since a woman is usually attracted to the man she marries, it shouldn’t be a surprise when a change in her body’s chemistry has a deleterious effect on the chemistry of the relationship.

So, the first thing for a man to understand is that regardless of what she says, none of this is his fault. It’s not only normal, it’s literally inevitable. A middle-aged woman is going to be significantly less attracted to her middle-aged husband even if he doesn’t gain weight, lose his hair, fail to get the big promotion, or stop playing lead guitar in a bar band.

The second thing for a man to understand is that there is absolutely nothing he can do to fix his wife or fix the situation. It is what it is for scientific reasons far beyond any man’s control.

Which, of course, leads to the primary question: what does the middle-aged man do in response to discovering that his wife has become an angry stranger who doesn’t like him and isn’t attracted to him anymore?

The so-called midlife crisis is usually, in my opinion, a man’s attempt to reassure himself that despite his wife’s newfound disattraction to him, he is still attractive to other women. Hence the sports cars, the hair implants, and the various and sundry ways in which a man goes about establishing that he is still attractive to women in general, even if his wife disagrees.

This is, contra the media mockery, actually a healthy and self-protective impulse. Because, of course, women are psychologically driven by fear. Once she starts seeing the too-familiar figure of her husband through other women’s eyes, and realizes that he’s actually got a fair amount to offer another woman who is less chemically disordered, she is provided additional motivation to attempt to get over the hormonal hurdles that life has thrown in her way.

Which is why the normal male response of hunkering down, trying to lower the temperature, and attempting to appease a wife who increasingly despises him is exactly the wrong way to go. Being conflict-avoidant, or worse, passive-aggressive, is only going to make matters worse.

A man should never, ever, be afraid to allow a middle-aged wife to jettison herself from the marriage. If her hormones are more important to her than her vows, then that’s not your problem and that’s not your responsibility.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have zero desire to be around anyone who despises me, hates me, or finds me repulsive, no matter how much history I may have with them. I really like my wife, and I’m fairly confident that she likes me because I can see the effort that she sometimes has to exert just to keep the complications of time under conscious control.

So here’s the third thing that a man has to understand, and particularly those Deltas who have a terrible tendency to believe everything that comes out of a woman’s mouth as if it were the oracle of Delphi: don’t hold what a woman says in the throes of hormonal imbalance against her or take whatever she says in those circumstances too seriously.

This may be why the challenges of middle age are easier for the high-status men, not so much because we have options if we want to walk, but because we haven’t taken women literally at their word since we were in high school.

Marriage is a good and necessary institution. But, as with most things, the most certain way to ensure that a woman leaves you is to live in fear of her doing so. Remember that most men are better off post-divorce, and end up with younger and more attractive partners than the wives who left them, not because divorce is the goal, but because avoiding conflict with your middle-aged wife is going to destroy your relationship with her.

Hormonally-addled or not, a woman always finds the man who is willing to unapologetically be a man far more attractive than the man who is not. Never run from conflict; to the contrary, embrace it without fear for the consequences.