A new study provides further proof that the period between robust youth and advanced age is especially difficult for men.
About 1,600 men and women were asked to score their level of well-being and contentment on a 1-10 scale. Men ages 35-44 scored far lower than any other group. Women, while bottoming out nowhere near men, said their most difficult years were between ages 25-34. Both groups said the college-age years were best, and both perk up as they amble through their 60s.
Some observations:
* While it was no surprise that others rated highly the relatively care-free years before career, marriage and children, I didn’t expect contentment to return so strongly so late in life.
* Researchers attribute the timing of least contentment for women to the fact that many women have their children during those years, and that the period as a result is very stressful.
* Men bottom out when they do, said the story in This is London, because they perceive they have passed the zenith (my paraphrase) of their lives. Once the mourning is over, contentment predicated on acquiescence returns.
As a 43-year-old male, I relate to the survey respondents who report malaise associated with this period. There is a sense that I will never be as energetic as I was just a few years ago. Nor as virile. It’s clear my wife is less interested in the physical aspect of our relationship, and judged even from the safe harbor of a monogamous relationship, there is less interest from other women. My children are fathered and at most need just a few more years of my influence. Nature is done with me.
The limitations of my career as a journalist are becoming clearer, and the hopes of my younger self show themselves more every day as mere fancies: If I were going to write a novel, wouldn’t I have written it? If I were going to be a comedian, wouldn’t I be on stage?
I have flown home from an adventure, so it feels, and sit in an airplane that has taxied to its gate, and there is nothing to do but flip once more through the airline magazine while I wait for the door to open and let me out to baggage claim.
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1 comments:
I know of no anecdote more encouraging than this: Julia Child was 37 years old when she first learned how to cook.
Note that I did not say "when she wrote her first cookbook" or "when she got her first television show." No, until the age of 37, she did not cook at all.
In the decades that followed, she revolutionized the cooking world, invented an entire genre of broadcasting and elevated the cookbook to high, yet approachable, art.
Let the good times roll!
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