The Dynamics of Divorce 65
last chance to “change the course” of their lives as they transition
from being desirable young ladies toward becoming middle-age
matrons. If the first tick of their biological clock occurred for these
women during their primary childbearing years in their twenties
and early thirties, then it appears that a second tick nowadays
seems to occur around age forty. Perhaps these young ladies are
pursuing one last hope or dream of obtaining the better life they
somehow vaguely felt they deserved. The midlife crisis used to be
the prerogative of men, but for the modern working woman, the
approach of age 40 seems to have turned the midlife crisis into a
woman’s issue as well.
My own observations concerning this discombobulating sce-
nario in which midlife crises seem to hit women as they head
into their forties (thereby often upending their marriages) have
been borne out by recent studies which found that both men
and women in their forties are generally more likely to struggle
with depression. Two prominent economists, Andrew Oswald
and David Blanchflower, conducted an extensive international
study of two million people from eighty nations. They concluded
that middle age (i.e., midlife per se) is such a low point for well-
being that it’s in fact at the very bottom of a U-shaped curve
where greater happiness exists among both the younger and the
older ends of the spectrum. Mr. Oswald theorizes that the for-
ties is the time when people tend to become depressed as they
reluctantly realize that the path of their life’s actual achievements
hasn’t measured up to their youthful aspirations/expectations
(i.e., shouldn’t I have a better life, better husband, better wife
... by now?). For both genders, the probability of depression
peaks around age 44... right about when I notice so many of
my young and vaguely dissatisfied female clients wanting to bail
out of their marriages—what a coincidence! Rather than getting
divorced, however, perhaps a more realistic approach would be
to follow Mr. Oswald’s advice when he says, “If you are finding
life tough in your forties, maybe it’s useful to know that this is
completely normal.”
One bit of good news for divorcing women of any age per-
tains to a potentially fulfilling maternal role as a divorced mom.
My experience has been that the relationship between a custodial