Men behaving sadly
When Matt Rudd was having a midlife crisis, he sought advice from successful, apparently happy men to see how he might live better. That was when he discovered that virtually all of them were struggling. The issue – and how to help deal with it – is the s
Iwas fine when I turned 40. Still married. No red sportscar. No obvious signs of a midlife crisis. I was alright at 41 too but 42 wasn’t great and 43 was closer to 45 than 40. And now, in the blink of an increasingly unfocused eye, I am 45 and the midlife doldrums are well and truly upon me. Instead of sleeping, I lie awake worrying, not about my own mortality (I save that for those times I’m trying to get through to my broadband provider’s customer services), but about everything else. The bills. The job. The children. The lack of sleep. The bloody broadband. The strange lump on my hand that I should probably get checked out.
It’s not a cool midlife crisis like in the movies. No one’s shooting up a fastfood joint because breakfast is no longer available at 10.33am. Mine is just a creeping sense that this is it. I’m set. I’m stuck. The path ahead is all downhill. Eat. Sleep. Work. Repeat. Until someone hands me a gold watch or I drop dead or I finally pay off the mortgage. Like that last one’s ever going to happen.
Recently, I decided to do something about my midlife doldrums. I could have taken up yoga or cycling or philandering but instead, I started asking other men how they felt. I deliberately sought out those who are, by most definitions, doing fine. Not the full-on one percenters – don’t worry, they’re miserable too – but certainly ‘successful’. They are all earning decent salaries in decent jobs. They are paying off unfeasible mortgages on overpriced family homes. They are (mostly) happily married fathers of 2.4 children. I decided to focus on them because, if they aren’t happy, who is? I thought I would discover their secrets to success, adopt their tips for happiness and stop being such a grump. The problem is that, with one or two exceptions – who may or may not be living in denial – these successful men are not happy. More striking still, most of them admit that they very rarely think about their own happiness.
‘I can’t,’ says one. ‘If I start worrying about the meaning of life, I’ll go mad. I just have to keep going.’
The stereotype that men don’t talk about their feelings is true only up to a point. If you sit them down and explain that you want to have a proper conversation about happiness, it is remarkable how quickly the defences come down. Take the 50-year-old oil industry consultant who, when asked how much he loves his job, says, ‘I don’t love it; I tolerate it. It is a means to an end.’ Would he still do it if money were no object? ‘F**k no,’ he replies. ‘I spend long, stressful days working for people I don’t always like. My main goal now is survival rather than success. Yes, I have benefited from working in a male-dominated industry, but I am the provider. I have to provide. I definitely live for the weekends.’
Another classic commuter, a 43-year-old with three daughters, explains that his priorities changed when he became a father. Previously, he had cared about his career – the next promotion, the next bonus, impressing his boss. But, ‘as soon as my first daughter was born, I was looking for ways to get through the day quicker. I was no longer first one in, last one out of the office. It just wasn’t important.’
Absolutely no surprise there, of course. Fatherhood does rather change your perspective. But ten years on, his attempts to find a better balance between work and life have failed. ‘I leave the house before the kids are awake,’ he says. ‘I get home after the two youngest have gone to bed. Sometimes I’m home in time to see my eldest, but I’ve noticed that “daddy time” – in the evenings and at the weekends – has this special pressure. I have expectations and my daughters have expectations, too. Those expectations nearly always clash, then they feel disappointed and I feel like a failure.’
His problems pale in comparison to the 40-yearold financial consultant who describes his fourhour commute as ‘like being psychologically waterboarded’. He points out that he avoids subjects such as personal happiness because ‘I worry I might implode. Superficially, my job is high-profile and rewarding. My family doesn’t want for anything. My job is valuable and valued. My competitive drive, paired with a crippling anxiety that everything will implode on Thursday and I will be fired, keeps my feet firmly anchored to the floor.’
Crippling anxiety aside, so far so good. Then, inevitably, comes the but.
‘Most working days are long and the stress is relentless. I never take lunch and regularly forget to eat anything until four in the afternoon. Most worryingly, the demands of my particular job now encroach into my consciousness during evenings and weekends. I’ve stopped seeing my friends, I hardly speak to my family – I have a powerful aversion to the phone at home now – and I simply don’t plan anything. I do the most ridiculous things to carve out some quiet time. I hide in the bath and go to the cinema on my own.’
On paper, these men have done everything right. They’ve ticked all the boxes young men are told to tick: they’ve established careers, settled down, had kids, accumulated all the stuff to which we are indoctrinated to aspire. House. Car. Nespresso machine. Most importantly, they are not women. That is quite the advantage. They are men in a man’s world. They are dads. Imagine if they had been mums.
The implication, spoken and unspoken, is that working fathers have the best of both worlds. And, on the surface, that’s true. Life is easier for men. We still get paid more for doing the same jobs. We are still 40 per cent more likely than women to be promoted to management roles. Hurrah! Even in families where both parents work, most of the emotional labour – supporting the children, organising the diary, scheduling play dates and parties, the vipers’ nest that is the PTA – is still done by women. Men do washingup and petrol, wine and bins. Women do everything else. It’s all very 1950s.
Scrape beneath the surface, though, and the myth of the easy male life starts to unravel. The most recent Samaritans Suicide Statistics Report shows that men in the UK are three times more likely to take their own lives than women. And those aged between 45 and 49 have the highest rate of all – nearly four times that of women of the same age. Analysis by the Office for National Statistics shows that middle-aged people have the lowest levels of personal wellbeing, reporting high levels of anxiety and low levels of happiness and life satisfaction. And middle-aged men are even less happy and less satisfied than their unhappy, unsatisfied female counterparts. The evidence is clear and deeply ironic: the system set up by men, for men, isn’t working for the vast majority of men.
I think we have reached the point where it’s worth exploring and stress-testing the male experience. We need to stop assuming that everything is fine just because, superficially, men have the cards stacked in our favour. We need to understand how the structures of society and the conditioning of men lead to the existential angst of midlife. Is it treatable? Is it curable? Can we develop – cough – herd immunity?
The most recent Samaritans Suicide Statistics Report shows that men in the UK are three times more likely to take their own lives than women. And those aged between 45 and 49 have the highest rate of all – nearly four times that of women of the same age.