Do Women Even Have Midlife Crises?

The male midlife crisis is well-documented and parodied, but we have no concept of what a deep reckoning with the female self looks like.

For my 40th birthday, I said we should go to the mountains. My partner, who has an international job, and I were living in Romania at the time, and I wanted to see some medieval villages and a famous road that winds through the Carpathians before our time there was up. But really, I wanted to do something that was the opposite of see-and-be-seen. 

I didn’t feel like getting on an airplane and going to a fancy European capital. I didn’t feel like having a party. I didn’t feel like inviting friends to a bar. I felt like driving deep into the forest where, other than getting attention from my partner, I would be largely overlooked for several days. We dropped off the dogs, jumped in the car, bought two pieces of cake before we left the city limits, and disappeared for days.

A question I had been asking myself a lot at the time, no matter where I traveled, was, Will I ever be back here in my lifetime? It had a new realness to it. I was thinking more often of the things I might never do, and I felt strangely at peace with most of them, an emotional state somewhere between giving up and being existentially tired. Maybe I was depressed. Or maybe I was in phase one of my midlife crisis.

‘Aging’ vs. the male midlife crisis

Women are socialized to talk about “aging.” We debate how to age gracefully, what we are and are not allowed to fuss over, like gray hair or crepey skin or jiggly underarms, or whether lip plumpers, face fillers, and weight-loss injections are perfectly acceptable. But talking about wrinkles is not the same as having a midlife crisis.

So, what even is a female midlife crisis?

The male midlife crisis is such a well-known phenomenon that it has its own tropes and stereotypes. It starts with an existential reckoning with mortality. A man realizes life is short and he should live a little and enjoy material things. So he buys a sports car. He deserves it. He has an affair or leaves his partner for a younger one and perhaps starts a new family. He shops for products to grow his hair back or make his dick as hard as it used to be. He wants to feel alive again. He becomes selfish in a way that other men find relatable. After all, he’s worked all his life—for what? He deserves to seek pleasure and be happy.

We don’t have a cultural narrative for a typical female midlife crisis, though. Is it a shared experience among women to confront their impermanence in this world as a normal part of reaching their 40s or 50s? Do they awaken one day to realize they are worthy of the things they want for themselves? Struggle with their changing identity? Question their life’s priorities? Why has no one ever brought it up in conversation? I can’t even think of more than one or two examples of women in midlife crisis in movies or television (Libby in Fleischman Is in Trouble comes to mind, though Fleischman’s was just as glaring).

For a long time, I kept quiet about my age. I didn’t want to be discriminated against in my career as a tech writer. Too young and you don’t know anything; too old and you’re out of touch. I was being practical. After 40, though, other signs began to surface that I was dealing with something bigger than merely protecting my professional reputation.

Since my 40th, whenever I’m forced to confront the number, I want it to be smaller. It’s an irrational thought that’s out of character for me, and yet it’s true. I feel the same way about being 41, 42, 43 years old as I do about weighing 145, 146, 147 pounds. I’ve been socialized my whole life to believe that whatever the number is, it should be less. I don’t want people to know the number and judge me for it. Worst of all, I’m angry with myself for feeling this way because aren’t I a strong, independent feminist who doesn’t care what other people think? It’s as if one part of my brain is betraying the other.

I wondered if maybe “the female midlife crisis” was a cultural phenomenon I’d simply missed, which happens sometimes when you spend chunks of time outside the U.S. the way I have. Maybe I wasn’t alone after all. So I Googled it and waded through two pages of links looking for sources I trusted. There weren’t many, but I read as much as I could stomach. Women go through menopause, they said. Some experience perimenopause—a period of transition marked by hormonal changes, weight gain, and depression as children move out of the house.

“That’s it?” I said to myself. Nothing came up about rebellion, nothing of ennui followed by soul-searching followed by pleasure-seeking. Nothing about women who, like me, chose not to have children. Everything came back to “your hormones are going to mess you up” and “try not to be sad about your children leaving.”

Early signs

The thing that I am now calling my midlife crisis took a few years to unfold. It also happened within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and an overseas move that only added to my anxiety, which is to say other factors were at play. Then again, no one lives in a controlled experiment. We all deal with unpleasant life events and trauma simultaneously as we age.

The earliest signs, I’m embarrassed to admit, were a preoccupation with my changing face and a lot of shopping to “fix” it, or at least stop it from getting worse, whatever that means.

I bought retinol serum, hyaluronic acid eye cream, vitamin C ointment, and firming under-eye gel. I read about lotions and potions that claim to remove dark spots and got some samples to see if they would erase the sun spots on my hands (they didn’t). Not long after, my focus for what I needed to improve shifted from my face to my overall look. I bought nicer shoes, outfits made of 100 percent cotton instead of cheap poly blends, and second-hand designer sunglasses hoping to feel a little more outwardly polished. For someone who never cared much about how she looked, I was spending a lot of money on it. But I deserve it, don’t I?

Conversely, I stopped caring so much about publicly succeeding in my career, though I did start to wonder how many good career moves I had left. I rode the high of publishing and promoting my second book, but almost immediately after took a role doing more editing and less writing, more mentoring and fewer on-camera appearances. I interviewed for three jobs that I thought were very impressive. None worked out, but they got me thinking that my next role absolutely must be something I care about deeply. No more lateral moves.

In my very personal life, I read about how oral birth control might be linked to lower female libido and stopped taking it for the first time in more than a decade. To hell with pumping myself full of hormones.

Then I fractured a tooth while eating a salad (a stray shard of olive pit, perhaps, I’m not even sure) and needed my first dental crown. A memory of seeing my now-dead grandmother’s dentures on her bathroom counter flashed through my mind. That very real fear of losing something so permanent as a tooth—a bone!—awoke a sense of mortality in me. My teeth are going to fall out, and I am going to die. And that is when I started using the term “midlife crisis.”  

The first time I said the words it felt like when you make a too-loud joke followed by an uncomfortable laugh, and you think that everyone can see right through you to your pain and unhappiness. I needed to get a handle on it and get over myself. I needed to talk with other women and find out if they were having midlife crises, too. I didn’t want to bait them with that term, though, so I started asking my friends one simple question, “How do you feel about getting older?”

The 30-somethings

I made the mistake of starting with some friends who are still in their 30s and have toddlers. One sounded like a much younger version of me, saying things like “age doesn’t define you” and “I’m more comfortable with myself than I’ve ever been!” Another mentioned being unhappy with her face but feeling proud of how strong she’s gotten recently. Could it be that my child-having friends were so preoccupied with raising kids that they didn’t have time to be so self-centered about what the second half of their ever-dwindling life will be? 

Another friend of mine, who, like me, intentionally doesn’t have children, had just gotten back to the U.S. after a few years in Ethiopia. She is not yet 40. When I asked about aging and any potential midlife crisis, she laughed and said she didn’t think much about it but she was looking forward to all the Botox she could safely get state-side. 

I was happy about where all these women were on their journeys but felt a disconnect. So far, I was alone.

The 40-somethings

After Christmas, I spent a few days with a friend who is, like me, in her mid-40s, and who has made some unexpected life choices of late, like moving from a Brooklyn brownstone to an enormous house deep in the suburbs. She has one child who took some trial and error to conceive and finally arrived a little later than she had aimed for.

I asked her what comes up when she thinks about getting older, and her eyes welled up. Everything that came next focused on her relationship with her six-year-old. When he’s 17 and she’s in her mid 50s, what shape will her body and mind be in? How much longer will he want bedtime stories? How many more cuddles left? She said she regretted not having a second child.

We shifted to career talk. She confessed that her job hasn’t had much work for her in the last two years, and although she was still employed, she was hoping for a clean way out. She told me she’s tired of a corporation taking up all her time.

Though I couldn’t relate to her thoughts about her kid, I felt seen in a few other things she said. There was a hint of rebellion and a lot of self-reflection. She was growing, changing, and reprioritizing her life while thinking a lot about what she wanted. 

Another good friend in her 40s with no children, and who may be the most well-adjusted person I know, talked a lot about taking care of her body as she ages. “I want to be able to do the things I want to do.” When COVID hit, she quit drinking for several months, went vegan, and started walking 10 miles a day. She had been in fine shape before, but she took her health more seriously as she watched the elders in her life become frail. She said if she wants to travel, hike, and camp in her 50s, 60s, and 70s, she has to take care of her body now.

Practical as always, she told me she’s also been pushing her doctor to talk to her about perimenopause. “Are you having symptoms already?” I asked. No, she said, but she doesn’t want to be caught off-guard and is going to demand treatment the minute symptoms start. The way she was planning ahead made me realize how much I was stuck thinking about the past and what I was leaving behind. Was I in fact bitter about having crow’s feet, or was I simply  sad that my smooth skin was gone forever? Was I really preoccupied with what my next career move might be or just mournful at the thought that the peak of my career might already be behind me? Maybe part of the female midlife crisis is grieving the loss of youth. Then again, maybe it’s another example of the ways women have been socialized to think about themselves.

The 50-somethings 

Finally, I talked with a friend in her late 50s who has been something of a role model since we met. Like me, she chose to not have children and worked in a male-dominated field. She said most of the time in her career, she was discriminated against for being female, not for being too young or too old.

“So you never had anything like a midlife crisis?” I asked, dangling the dirty words in front of her. 

“Man, I frickin’ loved my 40s!” she said. She reminded me that she worked in the police force in the homicide unit for most of her career and has a very different relationship to death and mortality than other people. But of everyone I talked to, she seemed to have thought the least about aging. Sure, she had made a decision to let her hair go gray and she did try out a new career in the Foreign Service for a few years after that sweet early retirement deal from law enforcement, but she never got hung up on her age (her partner thinks the new job was a sign of midlife crisis, though she says no).

I’ll never be this young again

I’ve certainly heard people say that when you’re 55, you’d give anything to be 45 again, and some of the things my friend in her late 50s said to me reminded me that I will never be as young as I am today.

I wish I could say that I found commonality among my peers about what defines a female midlife crisis, or that I came to peace with whatever it is I’m going through. Some of my friends, or at least the ones over 40, have taken more ownership of something in their lives as part of getting older. For me, it’s been more of a reckoning about what is left to do and who I want to be in the second half of my life.

And while my own changes are still unfolding, the truth is I got sick of talking about it. The more I asked my friends whether they were having a midlife crisis too, the more I got bored with my own questions and wanted to talk about something different. It was too much navel-gazing. I’m ready to move on from the introspection and be engaged in things outside myself again—or is not dwelling on ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our desires, yet another way women are taught to behave?