Midlife is a very interesting time and filled with transformative realizations. I’ve written directly to husbands in the past about what their wives yearn for at midlifeand it resonated with a lot of women. Now I want to add to it from the perspective of women directly.
Here are five realizations that women have at midlife, drawn from my clinical experience as a psychologist as well as my personal experience having of being a woman who is 45.
Women who actually enjoy their lives after 40 have these midlife revelations:
1. Externalities don’t matter as much as you used to think
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For years, women worry about how everything looks, including their bodies, their homes, their clothes, and their personalities. The ideal is to look productive but not rushed, be friendly without being a try-hard, and be effortlessly competent at work and parenting while also seeming cute and/or alluring to your partner.
This image management is onerous, and at midlife, you finally realize that nobody (at least nobody worth being close to) is judging you or even thinking about you even a tenth as much as you had envisioned.
2. Your body deserves some compassion
In our younger years, many of us struggled with outright hatred of our bodies even in women who don’t meet criteria for eating disorders. Midlife brings peace to many women.
You realize you aren’t going to be the most attractive woman in the room anymore, and that it deeply doesn’t matter. You worry about physical health instead of waging a war against weight or skin issues. Ironically, the “worse” you look by conventional standards of beauty (e.g., young and perfect), the better and freer you may feel.
3. Physical intimacy doesn’t feel as urgent or as important to your self-esteem
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For women who were using physical intimacy as a reassurance-seeking mechanism, which is relevant to many preoccupied attachment women, there is less impetus to connect physically when you feel more secure in your own skin. If you were thinking of it as a way that you could feel confident about your partner’s interest, the whole idea of using your body when you aren’t into it in order to reassure yourself of a partner’s love sours as you get older.
You recognize that it is a nice way to connect, but shouldn’t be the only way that you convince your partner to show interest in you.
Additionally, even the highest libido women tend to notice a biological decrease in how often they think about physical intimacy (if they are married; as I always discuss, if you are single or in the honeymoon stage, there is an uptick in drive until partnered for a while again).
This is biological, as all drives drop with age, including appetite for food and physical connection, along with sensation-seeking behavior overall. Of course, drive drops in men as well, unless they are using T.
4. ‘Good enough’ becomes enough
Midlife feels like a respite for those of us who wasted precious time worrying and ruminating when younger. If your goal was perfection at work or at home, you finally recognize that perfection is not real, and, further, that every minute you spend on trying to attain it is a minute you will never get back.
If you don’t have the perfect outfit for an occasion, it doesn’t matter, you grab something out of your closet. You don’t have the same standards for work output, from yourself or from others. You become aware that striving for perfect is a fool’s errand, and people will tend to be happy with you if they are happy people, and unhappy with you if they are unhappy people. Speaking of which…
5. You realize that other people’s issues with you aren’t usually about you
When you interact with other people, you can impact them on the margins, but overall, the interaction is a Rorschach test of how they tend to interact with others in general. People who find you offensive are those who feel offended frequently, and people who like you tend to be those who have pleasant and positive expectations with other people overall. This more objective outlook allows you to see the man behind the Wizard of Oz, so to speak.
Yes, you can and should try to be kind and empathic, but when people have issues with you, midlife women tend to see this correctly as more about the person with the issue than about you. Pattern recognition is a core part of wisdom, and those who have issues with one person usually have a pattern of finding fault with myriad others.
I hope you saw yourself in this post if you’re a woman at this stage! It is a very interesting time and filled with transformative realizations. Therapy can also help you think about how to best maximize your midlife realizations and use them to shape a more fulfilling life overall!
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.