On Sex, Anthony Weiner, and Treating the Midlife Crisis

A few years ago, when my husband was nearing his mid-forties and I was still in my late thirties, we began to have a recurring fight of a new and particularly demoralizing flavor. It began with his perception that he’d been sexually rejected. I would apologize and explain that I had just been exhausted/in a bad mood/distracted (we had two small children when this fight first materialized), and hadn’t intended to hurt him. He would generalize the incident into an indictment of our marriage, informing me that I obviously didn’t love him anymore and only insisted on keeping him around because he was useful. My efforts to counter this accusation while feeling furious and wronged never sounded very convincing. He would descend into a mood that almost visibly surrounded him as a heavy, black fog, and stay there for a couple of days until we managed to overcome our respective resentments enough to have sex. Then we’d return to functionality until the next time.

After a while, I noticed that this fight happened very predictably when we’d gone a while — maybe five days to a week — without having sex, and that sex was the only thing that ever cleared the post-fight funk. Even exceedingly unfriendly sex, the kind in which foreplay came down to my saying, “Look, damnit, let’s just get this over so you’ll stop being an asshole,” still functioned to noticeably improve my husband’s mood. The situation began to remind me of something.

When I was nineteen, I spent a semester in the Italian Alps. It wasn’t a perfect four months — I’d left my boyfriend behind and I was cold a lot — but on the whole, it was pretty idyllic. Everywhere I looked was stunning beauty. I became quite close to the other students in my program. I traveled to Florence and Venice, saw amazing things, met fascinating people, and learned a lot. It was, in many ways, a peak experience. So I was at a loss to explain why I frequently plunged into deep, dark wells of sadness. I cried often, for reasons I felt helpless to identify. Clearly I was deeply distressed about something, but what? I missed my boyfriend, but not unbearably. Being cold and having an itchy scalp (there wasn’t enough hot water for daily showers) was irritating, but hardly a source of bottomless grief. The only explanation I could think of involved the decision I had made not to go home that summer, but to live with friends in the city where my boyfriend lived. I had also decided to graduate a year early, which meant I might never live at home again. Could I, unbeknownst to my conscious mind, be grieving about this? The explanation didn’t feel quite right, but it was the best I could do. Having to grow up and strike out on my own seemed a plausible excuse for existential sadness, and if I couldn’t manage to feel consciously terrible about it — well, the mind has mysterious ways. The bouts of sadness continued over the summer after I left Italy, and several months into the fall semester. It was my last year of college and my boyfriend and I were applying to grad schools, so my grieving-over-growing-up theory still fit. Kind of. Finally, in a phone conversation, my mother asked, “Do you think it could be your birth control pills?” Our family physician, when consulted, thought indeed it could and switched me to a different pill. Like magic, the profound, mysterious sadness vanished from my life.

Since then, I have retained a deep respect for the power of body chemistry to affect or even generate mood. Even more importantly, I’ve become aware that not all internal states have an external cause, let alone an external cause of corresponding significance. That semester in Italy, the pensiveness I could detect at the thought of leaving home was truly all I felt. I convinced myself that a blameless fact of my life was a large problem, because I was certain that I could not feel so terrible unless something equally terrible was happening to me. It was an understandable mistake, but it was also a massive misconception.

I believed my husband was making a similar mistake. I’m the kind of finicky introvert who quickly snaps when asked to pay attention to multiple things at once. Consequently, snuggling me suggestively from behind while I’m trying to cook dinner (especially if underfoot children are making the case that they will die on the spot if not given a snack) is an excellent way to get shrugged off, possibly without my even noticing that I have been so rude. It’s not a charming trait, but it’s well established. My husband — who, tragically, loves nothing better than to snuggle me from behind while I am cooking — knows it well. In kinder and more rational eras of our marriage, my husband snuggles, I shrug, he says, unrepentantly, “Sorry — I can’t help it,” and life sails on. But at the time of the fight, my husband experienced this quirk as damning evidence that my love for him was dead and gone. He seemed to elicit it on purpose to provoke the fight. He felt terrible, he incorrectly identified my shrugging as the cause, then magnified its significance to something terrible enough to explain how awful he felt. Meanwhile, all the evidence pointed to his unhappiness being bodily, chemical — the fact that his mood crashed when we neglected sex, and that only sex seemed to have the power to lift it.

My husband didn’t dismiss my theory, but it didn’t help us much. The solution still looked like a matter of more frequent sex. But we had jobs, small children, busy schedules, sleep deprived nights, and little privacy. My dread that he would turn into a raging asshole if I didn’t put out was not — strangely enough — an aid to my flagging libido.

What eventually did help was an article in The Atlantic that a friend pointed out to me: “The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis,” by Jonathan Rauch. According to this article, many longitudinal studies measuring happiness over a lifespan show a U-shaped curve, with general life satisfaction declining gradually for participants beginning in their 20s, reaching the lowest point during their 40s, and beginning to climb again in their early to mid 50s. This finding appears in disciplines from anthropology to psychology to economics, and even in studies of non-human primates. Midlife unhappiness appears without reference to life events, often when people are at the peaks of their careers and have stable families, secure finances, and tragedy-free lives. In other words, people in their 40s are often unhappy for reasons seemingly not of circumstance but of biology. They are unhappy, not because of their lives, but because of their bodies.

The article made a real difference to my husband for two reasons. The first was the excellent news that mid-life unhappiness is temporary. Make it into your 50s, and satisfaction swings up again, on average continuing to increase into old age and generally exceeding the previous highs of early adulthood. The second reason was that he felt, in a real and important way, absolved of blame. His malaise was normal. It wasn’t his fault, my fault, our children’s fault, his job’s fault. It was not a sign that his life was badly flawed or that he was doing anything wrong. No dramatic response — such as quitting his job, his family, his marriage, or his country — was called for. He was just going through a normal slump, and it would get better by itself. This understanding improved my husband’s point of view considerably. If he felt a bit down, that was normal. No need to cast about for a reason. Instead, he began to focus on things he enjoys, and to make more room for them in his life: going to the gym, cooking, a regular night with guy friends, obsessing about cars. The sex situation improved, too, with less pressure.

It’s been quite a while since my husband and I had the fight. I had all but forgotten about it until Anthony Weiner’s third sexting scandal reminded me. “Sex addiction; very sad; it’s an illness with him,” went the predictable responses, but as Joye Swan noted in Psychology Today, sex addiction does not exist. Pleasure in sex does not wain into physical dependency — the hallmark of addiction — but rather just keeps right on being a pleasure. That Anthony Weiner is strongly compelled to engage in activities that make his dick hard is no evidence of illness. The oddity in Weiner’s case is not the impulse but the apparent inability to control it. Still, how much must Anthony Weiner’s life have sucked recently? He’s a public laughingstock with a botched career, staying home with the kid while his wife advises an even-more-historic-than-usual presidential campaign. Add a touch of midlife crisis, and in all compassion — who is more in need of some alleviating pleasure?

Put all these things together and shake: the old fight with my husband, Anthony Weiner’s risky extramarital sexting, mid-life malaise, the mood-lifting power of sex. This is what emerges. In our forties, we are prone to a mysterious, interior unhappiness that has no external cause. We seek outside ourselves for justification and, tragically often, locate a spouse to blame. Where our unhappiness is wide and deep, we mound our spouse’s crimes correspondingly high, a pile of dirt large enough to explain such a crater. At the same time, we are desperate to lift our low moods. The small pleasures haven’t been cutting it lately — we need something big, transformative. We remember that long ago and far away we used to flirt with strangers, have exciting new sex with exciting new people, fall madly, crazily in love. We need this now. And since we are married — to a spouse we already blame for the whole situation! — we are not allowed to have it.

Oh, what to do? Now that I, too, have reached my 40s, I look around and everyone I see is struggling. There is the divorcing friend whose wife cheated, the divorcing friend whose husband sexted, the friend who bandages the wounds caused by her blaming husband with the flirty kindness of other handsome men. There is the friend whose wife accommodates his taste for swinging because novel, exciting sex is the one relief he’s known from what he only recently learned is manic depression. There is the friend whose husband left because he came to find her inexplicably unbearable; she was sure, sure he was cheating, but then again, maybe he left so he wouldn’t.

And me? I wouldn’t say I’m depressed. But when I think about it, perhaps a sense that life is slightly flatter than usual explains my recent interest in extra specially sexy sex. Mostly, I channel it by writing erotica. But to be honest, I also tried to convince my husband that an explicit correspondence with an old flame would be harmless. He didn’t agree.

I can’t blame him. I can’t think of a single story from art or life that would reassure him of something I believe in my heart to be true, that a little extra specially sexy sex on the side, if you’re in a bit of a slump, can make everyone involved feel better, even the spouse to whom you come home in a good mood, for once. What if we lived in a world where Anthony Weiner sexted and nobody cared? What if stay-at-home parents improved their attitudes with flirty texts to people who weren’t appraised of the toddler snot on their pajamas or the Cheerio powder on the bottoms of their socks — and it didn’t make them lying, cheating sleaze-balls or rotten parents? What if office workers — married but not to each other — sometimes slipped off to empty conference rooms and swept away the Monday blues with an orgasm or two, and no one considered it grounds for divorce? I’m pretty sure the first halves of these scenarios are common enough among people who, far from wanting out of their marriages, hide and lie precisely in order to preserve them. Certainly not everyone does it — the price for getting caught is very high, and plenty of us have better impulse control than Anthony Weiner. But consider this possibility: The people who pull it off without getting caught really are happier and better adjusted, more content in their marriages and kinder to their families, less inclined to walk around in a black mood in search of someone to blame. Consider the possibility that a little extra specially sexy sex can do all this as long as nobody knows.

I can think of no better example of the way that belief shapes our reality. If something is harmless or even beneficial if it’s a secret protected by a lie, but a tragic betrayal if it comes to light, is the thing itself at fault, or our belief about it? What do we have to gain from clinging to this belief? When I look around at the wreckage of my friends’ marriages — the blame, the fury, the hurt, the betrayal, the dismal finances and the grieving children — what we have to lose seems abundantly clear.