Wondering after years, what can I do for fun?

I'm going to come at the issue you raised (relationship with your wife), from a slightly different direction and share with you a tip that might be applicable.

The basic premise is that a good way to get someone interested in the things you are doing is to make sure you are doing interesting things. So you take the lead on doing things in your life that are new and notable. Give your spouse the opportunity to participate but not the obligation. If they aren't all that interested in your new thing encourage them to come up with something that they really like. (At a minimum this will dispel the notion that you 'don't know how to have fun').

I think one big problem is that by midlife we've gotten in a rut. As you noted, we've put childrearing in the forefront and that reduces both the ability and the need to do interesting things. (I'm going to do a post on exactly this point based on a recent story in the Wall Street Journal and will link it from here).

While in that rut, we do the same things with the same people. I remember as a teenager lying around the house one summer and my mom would come in and ask me if there wasn't something else, pretty much anything else, that I'd rather be doing? I'd respond that there was nothing to do--so there I lay watching TV thinking how boring everything was. I believed it and could not muster up any motivation to do something about it. Of course, in reality there were hundreds of thing to do but when you are caught in that rut (or in adolescence) you don't always see it that way. I think that tendency to inertia never leaves us and is always lurking if we give it the chance. Midlife is that chance.

One thing you might want to do is create a "100 Things To Do Before I Die" list. LifeTwo is going to focus on this in the future and you can still find several posts on it in our "Living Life To The Fullest" section or by searching on "Before I Die" keyword or in the search box.

11 years ago I realized (rather suddenly) that my job was not challenging (but stressful), I wasn't doing the kinds of things I liked, and that life was passing me by in a way that just didn't seem right. A friend told me to create a "Before I Die" list and then to start knocking them off. I did and I have never looked back. This site, LifeTwo, was one of the things on the list in that I had listed starting a new company.

As I noted at the beginning, you raised several issues and this a simplistic approach to just one but you might want to give it a try and let us know how it works. Maybe even help us craft an approach for covering it on this site.

By the way, you might enjoy this series of posts on happiness. It had a series of exercises that I think everyone should do.

As I noted at the top, none of this really addresses your primary issue, which is the relationship with your life. But I think first things first. People are naturally attracted to happy and productive people. If you are in a rut it's easy to imagine your wife feeling some of the things listed. By you taking the lead on tackling your own midlife blues, you both set and example and make your self more appealing. Without a doubt you will want to also address the communication issues you've noted with your wife but as I'm sure you know, it is a lot easier to change your own behavior that someone else's so why not start there?

Hope this has helped.

Wesley Hein
Wesley [at] lifetwo [dot] com
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