How did you deal with your husband's midlife crisis?

[Startingoveragain1]

What are your experiences dealing with a man's (40 to 50 years old) midlife crisis? Did your relationship survive? Did they regret their actions at some point? I posted just 2 days ago. My partner has been depressed , irritable, fed up, a pain to be around. I have been thinking he is depressed and have been as supporting as possible. All of a sudden He is at the gym every evening . I do pretty much everything at home and with kids , been cooking him healthy food (he is gone into a health mania) changed all his routines . Goin to bed really really early, then cant sleep at night. Very stressed at work and wants to leave there as soon as he finds somerhing else. He is just always moody and no matter what i do he is just a different person. Now he wants to leave, "we have no future""we are doomed"" i dont wanna go visit your family every summer ""this is not the life i wanted" Im baffled af. He literally makes no sense , last week we were planning on moving closer to his family and now we are done. Wtf. Ive just been reading on mens midlife crisis and am pretty sure thats what this is. Any experiences ladies?

Is there an OW? Men so rarely leave their families if there isn't one

@chickenychick i actually dont think so atm. He goes gym and comea back home. Spends days off with me. We are always together if not workin. But then again, who tf knows anything anynore. I cant wreck my head trying to understand his reasoning. Apparently i am a single mom and single lady now. Thats so weird...

Mine didnt survive..he was always dour&kind of negative,cup is half empty type-but had a dark sense of humor&wonderfully practical&old fashioned romantic type.. throw a sudden unwillingness to do anything with kids,a humor bypass&obssession with order/quiet/accounting for every penny spent&trying to restrict/curtail when i saw my friends.Just general complaining,whinging &bitterness regarding everything from neighbours,tv shows,work colleagues&inane/belttling comments on anything dc ran by him.We all suffered it for over a year-i tried to reason with myself that at least he wasnt like 1st husband-very loud&physical&intimidating-pushing me around&trying to drag me by my hair etc and was tempted to offer up chance after chance but the minute he thought my guard was down the old-new him returned.Didnt want to talk,speak to GP..so in the end with DCs complete agreement he was asked to leave.Utterly bizarre.Ultimately there was no way id see my2Dc crushed&questioning or crying everytime they were stonewalled&me ignored.Oh&we hadnt had sex in 3years😨.We now live inOZ &only have vague-ish memories but im eternally grateful for the way things turned out.You need to put yourself&kids first if he cant..Incidentally i have been single by choice for over10years now &consider it empowering in the extreme to be completely self-reliant😊.

Hate the selfishness of these men!

If you have read my thread 4 and half years later, you will see how my ex dealt with the mid life crisis. It is a real thing and it causes so much pain that lasts for years. Thankfully I am on the other side of it and now happy. HIs OW who he left me for has just dumped him and I was his first port of call to get back into communicating with me and asking me to see him. It can be a very difficult episode to deal with and often is around the time us ladies suffer the menopause so its a perfect storm. If you can hang on, try and forgive the weirdness that goes on then you may have a shot at saving things, but sometimes we are the ones that bend too much and snap. You mentioned he goes to the gym a lot now. Thats where my problems started, he met the younger OW there. Keep your eyes peeled.

@litterbird i did read your thread and it made me very happy actually. That smirk... karma got him back. Im glad you're happy now and came through to the other side. Gives me hope. Im in the process of beginning to do that. Hoping to settle into my single life as soon as humanly possible. It hurts though, a lot.

@Startingoveragain1, keep strong, it’s a terribly painful process but for me it was worth the pain. I went to therapy which helped a lot. I still go once a month to help with any residual feelings that get triggered. My therapist is going to love what I have to say to her this time! I really wish you the best. Men really have no idea the damage they cause. Big hugs and love to you xx

He dealt with his mid life crisis by having an affair. I dealt with it by divorcing the cheating bastard. I spent years trying to make him happy, and working as part of a team that turned out only to have me in it! I am much happier now

Yes been there, done that. Mine basically followed the script to a tee. He was unhappy, it was all my fault. I bent over backwards to try and help him and to "fix" myself and re-engage with him physically and emotionally.
It made no difference as he left anyways and had an affair.
BUT, the changes I made were also good for me in many ways. I learned to stand up for myself and to take more risks.
Eighteen months after the split he is still miserable and admits it wasn't the marriage but doesn't understand himself any better. He and the OW didn't last. Surprise, surprise.
I have a wonderful new boyfriend and an exciting life but there is no sense of triumph. Just sadness that he destroyed what we had for nothing.
My only regret is not standing up for myself earlier.

I dealt with it by trying and trying to make things work. He made me believe that he had withdrawn from our marriage/parenting because of my mental health problems (I had depression and anxiety). He didn't want to make it work, and eventually I realised that I was wasting my time. So I stopped trying and told him that I wanted to separate.

About three months after we'd separated, I discovered that he had most likely had an affair about three/four years earlier with someone that he'd been working with, at about the time he'd started withdrawing from the marriage. And funnily enough, since we split I've had absolutely no trouble with anxiety or depression. So it seems not to have been my fault after all.

Things have worked out well for me though. The kids are happy, although they only see their dad on one day per week (his choice, although if you look at his Facebook page you'd think he was dad of the century), and I have since met the love of my life

I’m still working through this with dh, not sure if we’ll come out the other side.

Dh started getting depressed about this time last year but he didn’t mention anything until January when he seemed to have some sort of a nervous breakdown. He would want to talk every evening for hours and hours about everything that was wrong - from brexit to our sex life and everything was rubbish and apparently it was all my fault. I went to visit my sister for a few nights to help with newborn and preschooler while her dh was away and returned to find my dh had gone through all my old diaries / photos / messenger and was accusing me of cheating on him in 2004. He was totally insane.

I said I couldn’t continue and he needed to see GP. He got anti-ds and some referrals for his bad back. He turned 40 in February. He found a good physio who has made a massive difference with his back, he was on the verge of needing emergency surgery.

He’s been a lot better since although he stopped the anti-ds after a few months as he was sleeping even worse than normal. He’s changed stuff round at work (he runs a medium sized company) but now things aren’t going so well again work wise and he’s not sleeping. I’m waiting to see how he copes. He hasn’t had any more weird evenings where he rants on and on. It’s horrible, good luck x

Sorry to hear this OP. Oersonally I rthink all you can do is let him get on with it.
My exH laughably decided he was now into fetish, started going around in rubber catsuits and high heels and photographing himself at all angles in the mirror all the time.
This graduated to fetish clubs and going out in town in all this shit.
He basically said if I'm staying vanilla he doesn't want to be with me anymore.
Well as an older large woman bottom heavy there is no way I'm squeezing my fat arse into a cat suit and going around on a collar and lead.
One day he told me he was bored with our vanilla lifestyle (actually not, we had a very alternative lifestyle) and was off to join his friends at fetlife.
He popped back back now and then to say he wanted to come home but I know he just wanted his massive new debts paid off so I said no and haven't seen him for ages.
Good riddance.
I don't think there is much you can do OP, they will either stop behaving like an ass or not. And if not they arerisking their marriage.
I was told I was coercively controlling him asking him asking him to please not go to town dressed like a rubber transvestite as I worked in town and everyone knows me and this is the problem now.
Anyone can be done for coercive control so it's best not to get involved. Just get a divorce or let them leave if it's too much.

I divorced mine! He only wanted to spend time in the pub playing music with his new friends and acted like a whiney adolescent when I didn't want to join in; 'You don't understand me or my music.' Of course the OW was right there, telling him he was wonderful and giving him advice on his marriage. There is only so much you can put up with and when he was driving to her house late at night 'to talk' or lying on the sofa all night texting her, I rediscovered my self-respect. Some of these men are low-level abusive, no matter how you try to 'fix' it you can't, because they immediately move the goal posts.

Mine lost weight went to the gym started dressing like a teenager at 45.Left for a 21 year old they now have 2 children.
The pain he caused our children is truly awful OW younger than our son and 4 years older than our daughter.
Followed the script completely, is he happy?I dont know I am not it destroyed me completely still alone too much damage done.

Such selfish bastards. Mine had a mlc, we seemed to get over it, but then he had another one and left. On balance, it's the best thing that could've

Happened, I've got a lovely boyfriend, live with my amazing kids and ex is living in a tiny one bed flat trying (and failing) to pull younger women.

I went to the gigs for his band and surrendered a whole room in the house to kit. I even help with song suggestions.

I expect a similar level of support & understanding when the menopause drives me mental.

Obviously, chasing people half your age and becoming a bit of a twat is unacceptable but surely some of this is just attributable to the fact that the children are older and you have more time for yourself?

I've joined 2 bands in the past 2 years. My house is overrun with bass guitars, amps and pedals etc. I'm out practising 2/3 night a week and I gig etc most weekends.

I'm not having a mid life crisis, I just have the time to do it now.

A lot of the descriptions here strongly suggest that the man is not exactly having a whole lot of fun themselves. There is a reason the term is mid-life CRISIS. It is a disorientating and painful experience for them as much as it is for their spouses - and let’s not make any mistake here - women have them too. Sure, some people are just dicks and an MLC just magnifies that but a lot of people just stoically plough through life’s hardships, stresses and disappointments without much complaint only for 30yrs of carrying various burdens to suddenly cause them to snap. A sudden realisation that the best is behind them and all that struggle will go unrewarded. Unrewarded in the way you hoped anyway. Knowledge like that can hit you like a freight train and the dam bursts on all that pent up, unmet emotional need. You hear a lot of people say “I don’t t recognise them anymore”. I think this is because erstwhile selfless (repressed?) people suddenly feel the need to have the pendulum swing dramatically the other way - that sense of making up for lost time - lost to living according to other peoples needs.

For those who scream “Twat, kick him to the curb” ask whether you’d say the same about someone with a sudden onset of dementia or who had suffered a brain injury that made them verbally abusive or controlling. Nobody wants to go through the painful experience of an emotional crisis anymore than they want to be hit on the head with a hammer. I see a MLC as having quite a lot in common with an involuntary mental breakdown - a dissolution of your sense of identity and believe me, that is absolutely no picnic whatsoever.

My ex is still with his crisis, a much younger woman and she's welcome to him . Meanwhile my life has gone from strength to strength.

He's left. Common tale of having a great life but he "wants more"

Yep, mine came out as a transvestite and then got a hooker pregnant.
Divorced now. Thank fuck.

My ExH in the words of a therapist, had a doozy of a MLC.

We divorced, sadly.

THIS: "The one thing I regret not doing is telling him to leave as soon as he started the crap. He treated me horribly and eventually betrayed me."

Please, please, please please if you want to save your marriage, KICK HIM OUT NOW. That way, you save yourself from the horrible abuse which accompanies this sh, and you won't have his betrayal shoved in your face. Fcking strange makes them feel alive, apparently.

Get away from his toxic temper tantrum right now. It is the biggest mistake I made, staying around to be emotionally beaten up because he didn't think that life was treating him the way he thought it should. There were times he was honest. He would say "I think I am having a breakdown". Didn't stop him wrecking our lives though.

There is absolutely nothing you do to control this. There is nothing you can do, not do, say, not say - to stop this. It is just not in your control. So signal self respect, set a boundary and tell him to leave. If I had my time again that is what I should have done.

@GraffitiQueen I wish I'd stroked his ego, stroked other parts, told him how great he looks, pulled him in to me, pulled him into our family. There might have been a chance then that he wouldn't have looked elsewhere for the validation he needed.

I did all those things. I read up on MLC, male depression, I loved and understood him, I was a good wife. For years (whilst he was f*cking OW in OUR BED and despising me whilst infatuated with her)

But once they 'decide' that you are the Problem Holding Them Back? All you can do is set boundaries and protect yourself from the abuse. It is all going to pan out the way it was going to pan out anyway. You cannot control it. I don't think I wanted to live with a miserable joyless self absorbed man who would probably only stop cheating when his testosterone died down.

I think I cried solidly for 10 years, but now I have a great life. Gosh I cried over that man. I still can't quite believe he destroyed his family for the sake of strange, but he did. He is still miserable and joyless.

I did everything i could to keep things going but in the end divorce is the only answer. No regrets.