"Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature" Gets Midlife Crisis Wrong

Writing in the latest issue of Psychology Today, academics Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa propose a provocative theory of the cause of midlife crisis:

Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are.

From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife's imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman. It's not his midlife that matters; it's hers. When he buys a shiny-red sports car, he's not trying to regain his youth; he's trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

Evolutionary psychology proposes -- in often intriguing ways -- that most human behavior can be traced to the need to procreate and pass one's genes along to the next generation.

But in this case Miller and Kanazawa overreached. The problem: there's no such thing as a crisis stage that most, or even many, people go through in midlife.

In the book Middle Adulthood: A Lifespan Perspective, Hans-Werner Wahl & Andreas Kruse write that midlife crisis is a mirage:

The concept of midlife crisis does not receive strong support from the current literature. In summarizing new thoughts and new directions of research on middle age, Reid and Willis (1999) concluded that the midlife crisis has been overdramatized.

Some individuals, it is true, find the reality of faded youth and lost opportunities to be distressing. In addition, the growing realization of the inevitability of one’s own mortality may lead to a sense of hopelessness and despair. However, for many individuals, the beauty of development during midlife involves an emerging sense of perspective regarding one’s own place within the life cycle. (p. 277)

As early as 1978, Lehr noted that theoretical accounts of crises in midlife do not regularly rely on empirical data nor are they supported by them. (pdf available here)

Dr. Jutta Heckhausen of the University of California, Irvine, writes that midlife crisis is a "public myth:"

Although the notion of a midlife crisis attracted much acclaim in both the scientific and public debate, it has continually failed to receive empirical support. Empirical investigations have shown the existence of midlife developmental patterns of continuous development, maintained well-being, and adaptivity and resilience throughout midlife; and they have not uncovered a midlife mental health crisis as a universal, or even a common developmental, experience.

That's not to say that midlife crises don't exist, but the "classic" crisis brought about by fear of growing older is only experienced by 5% - 12% of middle aged people. Many people use the term "midlife crisis" to describe turmoil brought on by as divorce, separation, death of a loved one, or career setbacks, when they would have experienced those problems whatever their age.

Our own model for midlife crisis proposes that there are many different issues under the "midlife crisis" umbrella. Some are normal developmental phases, some are the result of external events, and some are caused by one's psychological makeup.

Since "real" midlife crisis is relatively rare, Miller and Kanazawa's explanation seems to cover very few men married to middle-aged women. Most get through their spouse's menopause with marriage and credit score intact.

For that subset, could the spouse's menopause trigger what we call a "men behaving badly" midlife crisis? Sure, but absent supporting evidence, Miller and Kanazawa's idea is just a debate topic.

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Miller and Kanazawa's intentionally provocative Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, from which the Psychology Today article is excerpted, will be published in September 2007.

For a counterpoint, the newly released "Over the Hill and Between the Sheets" includes many stories by writers who -- gasp -- find their middle-aged spouse attractive.