Have you - or someone you know - had a mid-life crisis? What was it like?

[TheEverlovingFork]

Just that really, as I get into my 40s I've really started noticing a sense that time is stacking against me and it keep spurring me on to make impulsive, slightly stupid (not dangerous) younger me kind of decisions . a couple of my friends I thought were happily settled - same sort of age group - are making the same noises and I wondered if it's just something everyone does?

Anyone had one? Seen one? I feel a bit like Shirley Valentine and want to fuck off to an island somewhere and have inadvisable but great sex with a local lothario and somehow magically lose all my peri weight and start life again as a nude model or something. One of my friends in particular is making really weird decisions and might be divorcing her seriously lovely DH which is something none of us saw coming in a hundred years. I guess it's called a crisis for a reason, right?

Yeah I don't buy that a women's mid life crisis is all bloody meditation and retreats and chanting and betterment.

It hasn't been for me. I wanted to fuck things up, get pissed, and do bad things with inappropriate men.

Let's not pretend that all women are seeking some sort of higher plane. I wanted dirty sex up against a wall with a 30 year old.

I am most definitely having a mid life crisis - I’m retraining in a mostly male trade and I’ve opened up my marriage and taken a lover.
I’m loving my 40’s more than any other decade of my life.

I'm in the middle of one I think but it's not fun filled or danger filled. I just feel a huge fear of the future. Illness, loneliness, too scared to do anything, death. I see my kids get older and feel so sad. I see small.kids at primary school and feel a physical ache and I dont even know why. It makes no sense at all to me and I'm hoping desperately that it passes.

This is interesting, as I always thought that deciding to have a baby at 40 was my midlife crisis! I’d always been one for partying and travelling and had put off having children thinking it wasn’t really for me, so that change of mind from “not a chance, it would be too much” to “actually it could be a real adventure, and I’d like to try” was quite a big one for me.

I was very lucky, no problems conceiving, and a very straightforward pregnancy and birth - then four years later we all moved to the other side of the world with work. I absolutely adore my child and am so glad we were so fortunate. Life now is so far removed from what it was, I’m not sure much else could be changed to have a crisis with - I’ve not had that feeling of “just throw all the cards in the air and let them
land how they will” since - though I am super jealous of all those who decided to be healthy/work out and lost loads of weight. That’s next on the list, if I can get round to it . . .

Now this sounds interesting 😁

I'm suppressing mine until my DC are adults, then world watch out! Or at least that's what I like to think will happen...probably more likely that I will carry on doing what I currently am 😂 but I do have a little rebel streak in me, so who knows 😉

My FIL is having one.

He's a moany, negative, stingy bastard who never has anything nice to say about anyone. But he wanders into the room playing the two chords he knows on the guitar expecting everyone to fall about like he's Brian May.

Interesting about the open marriage. I have seen that with friends in their 40s. The agreement seems to work for them, so I wish you luck. With the career shift, too.

FWB have been my way for almost a decade. When I turned 40, I was done with relationships.

This made me laugh. My dad was exactly like this.

😂

It does seem quite polarised, like people really are having a crisis or a reinvention (I don't what mine is yet) - I get what PPs mean about double standards, like if a man does it it's sad and pathetic but women are having a 'second wind'

I'm much more in the 'wants to have a lot of sex suddenly and go somewhere no one knows me and get a ton of tattoos' bit at the moment. Maybe it is hormones! ( the sex anyway)

In a weird way it feels like a second puberty where I want to do life 'right' this time?

I don't know if it counts as a mid life crisis, but I'm in my 40s and keep feeling panicky about how I'm running out of time to do things because my body is going to deteriorate. I've started hobbies that I always wanted to do yet never did and kicking myself that I didn't do it earlier.