68 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
so presciently referred to as “a Passage” to something new and
different.
Thus, men at middle life probably face the roughest patch of all
in mapping their new adult lives across time. Generally, it is a much
harder passage for men than for women. The psychic compensa-
tion is also greater for women because they started with so much
less. Men already had the good jobs and the greater authority in
the family. To make a passage to what Ms. Sheehy calls the Age of
Mastery often means, for men, giving up being the master.
Especially nowadays, and for the first time since World War
II, men in their late forties and early fifties are suffering a steep
decline in wages. Today men in their fifties in corporate life are
in a precarious position. They are a high-ticket item in a era of
downsizing. Ever since the mid-1980s, layers of middle manage-
ment have been stripped away in company after company. In
fact, current studies clearly indicate that nowadays once a man
hits age forty—not even fifty—getting a job in the business world
becomes immeasurably more difficult.
It doesn’t take all that enormous an extrapolation of these
trends to realize that men in middle or late-middle life today may
become increasingly dependent on their wives for financial help.
Consider the fact that as men continue to drop out of the work
force at ever earlier ages (fewer than 40 percent of all American
men age fifty and over are still salaried job holders nowadays),
women are meanwhile toiling longer and later. By the mid 1990s,
almost half of all American women age fifty-five to sixty-four
were still in the work force, compared to 41 percent fifteen years
before.
As they take up the slack in household income, women are also
exerting greater control over the purse strings. Amazingly, by the
mid-1990s almost a third of those American women who worked
full-time earned more than their working spouses, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics... and one would have to be
awfully naïve to think that fact alone doesn’t change the very
nature of modern interspousal relations.
In my lectures, I often talk about the phenomenon of the quote
“Save-Your-Life Wife.” It turns out that men, almost invariably,
need a partner. When it comes to romance, men tend to be first