The Rough Patch 1 The Rough Patch: An Introduction You are forty-three. You have been married twelve years. You didn''t marry too young. You had your adventures and your choices. You now have two little girls (ten and seven), or two little boys, or one of each. You were in love when you married. That''s what you''ve always believed, at least, although now sometimes you wonder. You knew you were different from each other, but at the beginning that was fine--it helped you feel stable, or it helped you grow, and it was even exciting, as you noticed how much you wanted to reach out and understand and even indulge each other''s differences.

Yet now you feel too different. Sometimes you drive each other crazy. Or leave each other feeling deeply hurt. Or kind of neutral. Or each of these, at different times. A lot of advice is out there to help you deal with the problem. Social scientists tell you that people are happier at sixty-five than forty-five, so if you wait it out another twenty years, you might feel better. The couple specialists, the work-family balance people, the sex and intimacy experts, all have something to say that almost fits.

But somehow they don''t get at the crux of the problem. The crux is that you feel lost, or lonely, or at times almost blindingly miserable. Sometimes you feel you can''t breathe. It''s true that you''re exhausted at work, or your mother''s ill, or your hormones are out of whack. But it''s hard to believe that that''s the whole story. You didn''t always feel this stuck in your relationship. There was a time when the marriage made sense. What changed? And why? Perhaps you felt fine about your marriage, until you surprised yourself by becoming infatuated with someone else.

Or maybe you were absorbed by the care of your kids when they were small and didn''t give much thought to your personal satisfaction. But now your older daughter/son spends time texting her/his friends (how did that happen so quickly?) and doesn''t seem interested in being around you on the weekends. Even if the child-centered marriage didn''t foster much passion, at least it provided a meaningful framework. Now things are shifting. What felt tolerable before doesn''t anymore. You are left wondering, where am I in all this? Who have I become? It''s not quite fair, but you can''t help blaming your partner for how dissatisfied you sometimes feel. It''s hard to imagine putting up with her/his workaholism/drama/withdrawal/insensitivity for another few decades. Yet you know feeling this way is wrong somehow.

Marriage takes work. Immature people think relationships should be easy or fun; selfish people leave when the going gets rough. You''ve always been a good worker; you''re great at work. But it''s not clear what you are working for. Deep down, you aren''t sure things can change. And the truth (shameful and hard to utter) is that sometimes you feel you''re not sure you want things to change anymore. You don''t want to have to work so hard for whatever incremental satisfactions you might gain. Occasionally you feel a whiff of freedom, and it is shockingly exhilarating.

You feel guilty about it, but on the other hand, you are still youngish. You deserve to have some intimacy and passion and real connection in your life. You won''t have your energy or looks forever. How long is it reasonable to go on like this? But you don''t want to make any destructive decisions. That''s the path your sister/uncle/best friend took, and look where it left them. The kids, let''s face it, suffered. Shuttling back and forth between houses, forced to witness their parents'' heartaches at way too close a range, and no money saved for college. And the adults imported their same old problems into the next relationship.

Lately, though, you find yourself calling to mind the success stories: the kids who seem to have emerged unscathed, and the parents who seem so much happier, like new people. Still, you don''t want to divorce. It would be easier, better, if you could find a way not to be so unhappy in your marriage. Or maybe not to be so unhappy, period. * * * THE ROUGH PATCH. "Lonely." "Confused." "Stuck.

" "Stirred up." "Going through the motions." "Falling apart." I see a hitting-the-wall unhappiness in the middle slice of life, when people struggle, alone or in pairs, to figure out why their marriages don''t feel right. In my work as a therapist, I am reminded every day of people''s conundrums: * Is my problem that I need to find a way to resuscitate some loving feeling toward my partner? Or is it my own harsh insistence that I shouldn''t give up? * I know I should think about my predicament, but I''m so sick of thinking. I just want to feel for a change. * I know my infatuation with my coworker is a "fantasy," but why does it feel like the most real thing in my life? * Reminding myself how grateful I should be for what I have just makes me feel worse. * Can I, or should I, spend the rest of my life with minimal affection or sex? * Can I, or should I, keep living with my partner''s substance use/spending habit/mental illness? * My partner is withdrawing from me but I don''t know if I can, or want to, change in the ways (s)he wants me to.

* If my greatest goal is to give my children a happy childhood, how can I do that if I am unhappy in my marriage? Yet what if trying to find more happiness for myself comes at the expense of theirs? People who seek my help often feel they are caught between what they should do and what they feel. When I spoke with Lisa, a professional, she had just turned forty-seven, and she struggled with the sound of it. "I never felt middle-aged. Then I turned forty-seven. It''s a number that sticks in my mind. Forty-seven is a big deal. Fifty is a big deal." Why? "I feel like I should have figured it out by fifty.

" She hadn''t figured it out; she felt more confused than ever. Feeling exhausted from work, parenthood, and family life, and alienated from her husband of fifteen years, she found herself acting entirely against her values, embarking on an affair with a younger man. "I was shocked to be with someone I was excited about--texting and calling someone I can communicate with, without the burden of all the family stuff. My physical relationship with my husband is dismal, and I sort of chalked it up to the inevitable effect of aging. What''s funny is this guy reminds me of my husband--smart, professional--but ten years younger. Now I''ve really become a middle-aged cliché: almost fifty, in a rut in my marriage, finding someone young and exciting ." I am struck by how often people try to dismiss their marital distress as "cliché," embarrassed to have fallen prey to the "midlife crisis," a construct toward which they felt, until recently, comfortably disparaging. We''re voyeuristically critical toward middle-age flameouts--"She''s divorcing him and marrying their tenant!" "He ran off with a lap dancer and now he''s bringing her to the kids'' soccer games!"--partly to protect ourselves.

We feel vulnerable to life''s surprises and attempt to fortify ourselves through the communal conviction that people should be more grown-up. Finding ourselves susceptible to feelings that we so recently judged as selfish or immature in others is a rude awakening, especially destabilizing when we felt, not so long ago, pretty confident and successful about our choices. But humbled as we are by our lack of originality, we may privately feel something momentous is happening. We feel we are waking out of a stupor, and that we can''t bear to go back and re-anesthetize ourselves. Perhaps we had a strange sort of relief in plunging into the childrearing years, when our own desires were back-burnered. Serving our children''s needs allowed us to take a break from wanting things for ourselves, and all the complicated dilemmas it engendered. But somewhere inside we knew this wasn''t a tenable long-term solution. Kids grow up.

Statistically, we may be looking at another forty years of life. Unlike in the 1950s, it''s no longer realistic to wait for our two-pack-a-day habit to kill us at sixty-two. It''s obvious we can''t keep swallowing the vague adage that "marriage is compromise," if compromise means suppressing whole swaths of our personalities. Life is too long, and too short. We have to find some way to stay vital, engaged, desiring, and ourselves while being married, if married is what we want to be. When we trivialize the rough patch as a "middle-aged cliché," we are actually trying to find a way to disarm the intensity of the forces we are grappling with. We hope that if we can distance ourselves from others'' crises or minimize our own, we might escape their disruptiveness. But something important and meaningful is occurring in the rough patch--even if we don''t yet know exactly what that meaningful or important thing is.

We don''t call it a cliché when a two-year-old starts saying no, or when a teenager starts experimenting with sex; we consider these to be common expressions of what it means to be a two-year-old or a teenager. Both the toddler and the teenager are trying to grow, to become more complex and whole--the toddler''s task is striving for autonomy, the teenager''s is figuring out how to be a sexual person. Though the tasks are different, the challenges of the rough patch are in some sense the same. Like the toddler and the teenager, we are looking to discover and fully express who we are, while staying connected to others. We want to take risks and feel secure. We want.