NEW HOPE FOR AN OLD PROBLEM: A FAMILIAR SYNDROME

Harry probably sounds familiar to you, and so do his complaints. It has long been an item of popular wisdom that forty is a difficult age for a man, and an age when he also makes life difficult for others.

You may have seen men like Harry on TV programs about male menopause, or read about them in articles on the same subject. Or perhaps you’ve encountered such men in movies like Scenes from a Marriage and Carnal Knowledge and Save the Tiger; or in books like Joseph Heller’s Something Happened and Alison Lurie’s War Between the Tates.

Maybe Harry reminds you of someone you know—a friend or colleague. Your husband or lover.

Maybe you even feel like Harry yourself.

If not, take another look around you. You’ll discover that a great many men start behaving strangely sometime in the middle of their lives—doing things they never thought they’d do and asking questions they never imagined grown men had to ask. This is the time when careers nosedive, affairs flourish, and marriages flounder or fall apart. Such events are only the tip of the iceberg.

Arriving at the brink of middle age is like being stranded in a foreign country: With few guideposts to direct him, a man feels disoriented by the unfamiliar terrain and the multiple changes jarring his psyche. Suddenly the past seems a humiliating reminder of risks untaken, women unconquered, and chances ignored. And the future seems to be hurtling toward a dreaded rendezvous with old age and death. Meanwhile, responsibilities are mounting and physical energies are ebbing. Children are rebelling or departing, wives becoming assertive and demanding, and parents falling ill or dying. Younger men are scrambling up the work ladder, and job options are shrinking.

With so many altered horizons, a man begins to feel as if he’s lost his focus on things. Outward circumstances and inner stirrings now clash in a new way—-and something disquieting starts happening.

Most of us will recognize the more common symptoms of mid-life turmoil.

This is the time of life, for example, when a man begins to worry about his body. Suddenly he suffers from prostate troubles and pulled muscles. Suddenly he needs glasses or root canal work. His cholesterol count goes up, his energy level down. His body is less reliable on the tennis court, less resilient under stress. He can no longer work such long hours or travel at his usual hectic pace.

He finds it maddening, this loss of control. He feels that his body has betrayed him.

High blood pressure develops and so do ulcers. Psychosomatic illnesses erupt: A man is suddenly beset by chronic fatigue, acute indigestion, mysterious backaches, painful joints, and migraine headaches. He complains a lot or even becomes hypochondriacal, convinced that every cold is the forerunner of pneumonia, every pain the sign of cancer, and every rapid heartbeat the precursor of a coronary.

Often he panics over his sexual performance and suffers from bouts of impotence. He may become lethargic about sex and cut down his activity. Or do just the opposite, pursuing new sexual conquests with a vengeance. He jokes about sex compulsively, develops a sudden interest in X-rated films, or brags outrageously about his exploits.

To confirm his sexual appeal he may try to regain a youthful image by changing his appearance. He grows a beard or mustache, gets his hair styled or dyed. He buys a toupee, undergoes a hair transplant, or gets rid of his wrinkles and jowls by plastic surgery. He may also change his style of dress:

•A conservative executive trades his dark suits and striped ties for velvet jackets and turtlenecks.

•A diffident accountant becomes a weekend hippie, transformed by French jeans, a shirt slit to the navel, and chains around his neck.

•And a quiet dentist switches to suede jumpsuits and platform shoes.

Habits change, too. A man suddenly becomes serious about dieting or exercising. He gets into Transcendental Meditation, Arica, or EST. He gives up smoking cigarettes, tries marijuana instead. A sedentary lawyer becomes a tennis or jogging enthusiast. A teacher takes up skiing or backpacking. And a salesman goes off to shoot the rapids, hunt deer in the wilds, or learn how to pilot a plane.

Sometimes a man makes a wildly impulsive purchase, treating himself to a luxury item he’s dreamed about since youth:

•A newly divorced engineer spends thousands on a racy red sports car, despite his tardiness in meeting alimony payments.

•A computer operator who used to love mountain climbing buys a cabin high in the hills for family weekends, oblivious to the ten-hour drive involved.

•And a store manager who is still struggling to pay off the mortgage on his home splurges on an eighteen-foot cabin cruiser.

This is the time of life when a man often starts behaving in oddly uncharacteristic ways. He ignores his wife and screams at his children. He complains of boredom and fatigue, insisting his life has no meaning. He becomes increasingly detached, withdrawn, and introspective.

He drives himself relentlessly at work, snapping at his colleagues and staying at the office later and later. Or he abruptly loses interest in his job, taking longer lunch hours, forgetting appointments, and dawdling rebelliously over deadlines. The man who was generally calm and easygoing now becomes a demonic whirlwind—always busy, always traveling, always overscheduling himself. Another man, previously cheerful and boisterous, suddenly turns morose and moody. He can’t take a joke anymore, hardly laughs at all.

Weekend patterns change, too. The former sportsman and devoted father now sulks in front of the TV, retreats to his basement workshop, or falls asleep at peculiar hours. When his wife suggests a local movie, or ice skating with the kids, he glares at her reproachfully. And the contemplative man who always relished solitude now fills his weekend with activity—squash, handball, poker, backgammon, anything involving people. Urgently gregarious, he suddenly wants his wife to entertain more, too.

This is also the time of life, as most of us certainly know, when a man is likely to develop lascivious urges. Marriages shake, and sometimes shatter, as men in their forties counter boredom or bickering in the connubial bed with sexual conquests. Suddenly susceptible to erotic adventures, they try everything from intense flirtations to casual liaisons to consuming love affairs. The outcome varies:

•A country preacher refrains from acting on his sexual desires for a young widow with whom he has become enamored. But when he lunches with her weekly he feels terribly guilty nonetheless.

•A timid chemist initiates a furtive affair with his lab assistant, after years of resisting her seductive glances. Six months later he stuns his wife by demanding an immediate divorce.

•A stockbroker begins flirting slyly with the girls in the office, and then graduates to a full-fledged affair with a former high school sweetheart. Unwilling to abandon his children, he settles for a double life instead.

•After years of casual promiscuity, a TV celebrity leaves home because he’s found true love at last. One year later he pleads for a reconciliation, confessing that he misses the kids, the dog, and the Sunday barbeques.

. Whatever the consequences, mid-life infidelities often involve much younger women, in part because the firm flesh and innocent eyes of nubile girls are particularly enticing to men who are anxious to retain their grip on youth. Such romances may be brief and fanciful, just a rejuvenating interlude, or they may deepen and endure. But in recent years it has become increasingly common for men in their forties to remarry a woman many years their junior. Very successful men especially often flaunt a beautiful young wife like another badge of merit. And a symbol of potency. Today such men are more admired than scorned, and we are no longer so shocked as in the past if:

•A publishing executive who claimed his was the perfect marriage leaves home for a copy editor younger than his daughter.

•A television producer who has just bought a lavish apartment suddenly gets divorced to marry a girl who looks exactly like his wife, only twenty years younger.

•And a travel agent who always seemed devoted to his family divorces to marry an ingenue actress he met only two months before.

Newly critical of themselves, their families, and their whole mode of living, men in their forties often entertain dreams of dropping everything—or dropping out. Some fantasize about living in the wilderness, or on a tropical island; others lust for life in a commune, aboard a ship, or on a farm.

\nd then there are those who do more than dream. Rather than simply switching women, they change their goals, their careers, and sometimes their entire way of life:

•Tired of the rat race and urban pressures, a corporate executive gives up his high-paying post and moves his family to a farm in Montana, planning to raise sheep.

•Intent on becoming a commercial illustrator, a mid-western car salesman goes to night school, eagerly anticipating the day he can begin a new career in New York City.

•Fed up with the politics of academic life, a biologist abandons his teaching and sells some stock in order to write the comic novel he has been dabbling with for years.

•And a reporter resigns from his newspaper job so that he and his wife can sail to the Caribbean on the forty-foot schooner they’ve just bought with their life savings.

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GROWING OLD – PREPARING

Just as you need to start preparing for retirement long before you retire, so you need to prepare for growing old long before you are old. If you do that, you will find that old age is, in Alex Comfort’s words, ‘a good age’. If you have the right attitude to growing old, you will remain far younger than you may look; and you can get a great deal of help from old people’s organizations, groups, and clubs. Not only do they mitigate the loneliness of old age, but they encourage their members to keep active, physically and mentally, within the limitations of an ageing body.

It is true that many old people are difficult. They are demanding, they are self-centred, they have fixed habits which make life difficult for their family and friends. For many old people, habit is a refuge, a security blanket against an indifferent world. For those old people who have no consuming interest, a daily routine gives life a meaning. A man can look forward to his daily walk, his daily read of the newspaper, his daily bench in the park, his routine way of preparing and eating food, his fixed habit of only listening to certain radio or television programmes, his fixed time of going to bed. Habits become important because they enable the old person to merge his past recollections with his present experiences and with his uncertainty about the future. Some old people become obsessed with their possessions, and continually adjust and readjust their wills. A possible reason for this is that, in a way, possessions are solidified habits. They give the old person a reason for existing and a purpose to life. If the old person is rich, the ability to manipulate his possessions may enable him to manipulate those of his family who hope to benefit after his death. They give him a feeling of power and so a purpose for living.

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ADJUSTING TO THE CRISIS OF MIDDLE AGE

What can be done to help a man adjust to the crisis of middle age? The first step is for him to be aware that he has to adapt to middle age. He has to recognize that he is no longer in his twenties, full of the aspirations of youth. He has to recognize that many of his hopes have not been achieved. He may have to accept that his status is not as high as he had hoped it would be. He may have to accept that his work is monotonous. The days stretch greyly on towards retirement, the challenge has gone. He has to accept that his body is ageing and is less responsive than it was. The years of over-eating, too much alcohol, too little exercise, and stress have had their effect. His chin is less firm, his belly is more flabby, his waist is thicker, his hair is thinner, and his face is beginning to show the marks of ageing. He has to recognize that he is being challenged by his children who may reject his conventional views, repudiate his values, ignore his advice, and behave in a way he regards as bizarre. He has to recognize that his wife may also be going through a period of readjustment and needs help just as much as he does. Both may have to accept that their relationship may have lost the excitement it once had. The man may have to recognize that neither his wife nor his children talk to him, or he to them – they talk at each other, but are unable to communicate with each other.

GENITAL HERPES

Recently, an increasing number of sexually active women and men have become infected with genital herpes. The condition is caused by a virus which is similar to that which causes cold sores on a person’s lips. The virus, usually herpes simplex virus type 2, or HSV2, prefers to grow in moist areas, choosing especially the entrance to a woman’s vagina and the shaft of a man’s penis.

A few days after being infected during sexual intercourse with a partner who has the herpes blisters on her vulva or in her vagina, the man notices a localized burning feeling on the shaft of his penis. The burning is followed by a crop of small blisters which burst, forming shallow, painful ulcers. After a day or so the ulcers are covered by scabs, which separate in about four days leaving a faint scar. The whole disease lasts between 7 and 10 days.

Unfortunately, there is no treatment; and even more unfortunately, the infection tends to recur after a long or short interval. This is because the virus invades the nerves supplying the area, where it lies dormant. When something occurs, such as stress, its activity is triggered and it moves along the nerves back into the skin, where the blisters form once again. About 5 per cent of people infected with HSV2 develop recurrences.

Genital herpes has a further danger. A man who has herpes on his penis may infect his sexual partner. If the infection occurs on the cervix of her uterus, the virus may be a factor in the development of cancer, years later.

The lesson is clear. If you develop genital herpes, avoid sex until the disease has disappeared.

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LACK OF SEXUAL DESIRE AND ERECTILE FAILURE – FAILING OF SEXUAL DESIRE

During talks with his therapist, he gave the information that he ‘was turned off by his wife because she had stopped bothering about her appearance and had become a slob’. He had failed to notice that he had developed a beer-belly and was spending more time drinking in the pub. He was asked if he had tried to talk with his wife about their problems and replied that it ‘wouldn’t do any good’. The therapist suggested that the couple should talk, each asking the other to say what annoyed them, and the problem was resolved. In many cases of inhibited sexual desire such simple techniques.

Unfortunately, even psychotherapy fails to help at least half those who have this problem. Inhibited sexual desire obviously inhibits sexual arousal and consequently a man fails to obtain an erection. Because the man’s sexual desire is inhibited, the emotional distress caused is likely to be less than if a man has normal sexual desire, is sexually aroused but, in spite of this, is unable to achieve an erection or to sustain it for long enough for him to insert his erect penis into his partner’s vagina. His erectile failure may make him feel that his masculinity is suspect or that he is an incomplete man, a failure. He believes himself to be impotent. When this occurs, his image of himself as a man diminishes and anxieties about his self-image increase.

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ADJUSTMENT TO PARENTHOOD – FATHERS SUPPORT 2

Faced with the problems of learning how to mother the infant, often lacking sufficient confidence, and without support, the new mother may begin to feel that her baby’s demands are excessive and she is never going to be able to satisfy them.

She is woken at night, and becomes increasingly tired, so that even normal household duties become an effort. As most women are reared to believe that they can be housewives and mothers, she feels inadequate if she is unable to care for her child and keep the house as clean and tidy as she would wish.

She is also anxious that her relationship with her husband is deteriorating. Previously they could give a good deal of time to each other. Now the baby occupies much of her time.