Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

Reactive attachment disorder—also known by the ironic acronym RAD—involves trouble forming loving relationships as a result of not having had basic needs for caring and affection met.

In midlife, we must reconcile the two primary messages of our childhood: One: “Reach for the stars.” Two: “You’re on your own.”

“No visible means of support.”

One of the goals she encourages women to pursue is what’s known as “radical acceptance”—finding a way to take life as it is, not as you thought it would be. “It’s one of the hardest things,” Chafin says, “to radically accept what’s in front of you.”

“When your mother needs to go to the doctor, you take her, even when she doesn’t ask nicely. When the school nurse calls, you rush to pick up your child even when you have a lot of work to do. You know how to do this already: love when it’s difficult. It’s a superpower. You just need to use it for yourself, too.”

Last year, I accepted an invitation to appear at a conference where I would listen to entrepreneurial attendees’ spiels and give them advice on pitching their projects to the press. I would receive $250 to be there for a few hours, and I believed I would be useful. Having worked at magazines on and off since the early 1990s, I felt confident that I could give them advice on what to do and not do. What I did not know is that a huge number of those pitching that year were aspiring life coaches. The stories I heard from many of them were ghastly: One told me she had eight family deaths and five miscarriages in one year. Another said her child was abducted. Several had survived domestic abuse or cancer. These experiences made them want to transform their lives, to help people, and so they had become empowerment speakers. They were following their passions. But it was unclear to me how these passions would result in the paying of bills. Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “Aspirational labor is a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”55 The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.

Don’t ever compare your insides with their outsides.

“The people I know who are happy realize they can’t care about everything,” says Deal. “You have to decide what you care about. If everything matters to you, you’re going to go nuts.”

More than half of divorcees and widows are in for financial surprises. Among the most common shocks: secret spending, debt, and outdated wills. Suzanne Woolley, “Rise of ‘Gray’ Divorce Forces Financial Reckoning After 50,” Bloomberg.com, April 13, 2018.