- Missed part one in yesterday’s Mail? Read it here
What if you no longer want to be half of a couple, but your whole self instead? What if your time together just happens to be up?
‘I love my husband but sometimes I watch him through the prongs of my dinner fork and imagine him in jail.’ That anonymous online comment perfectly expresses the frustration – and love – that many of us struggle with in a decades-old marriage or relationship.
Couples therapist Dr Kalanit Ben-Ari has noticed that suddenly women are cutting their losses as they hit midlife. ‘Life is short. They don’t want to waste it,’ she says. ‘One of the things I see is that at around 49 or 50 there’s a huge jump in women asking for divorce. It’s like a switch has gone off.’
She sees men having more of a crisis around the age of 40, and women later. But she believes men in their fifties and sixties then often become more dependent on the woman, unless they have a relationship outside of the marriage.
‘It seems men mostly leave a marriage because they have another relationship, but women often leave just to have time for themselves. They want to find a partner eventually but don’t want to compromise.’
Many women seem to care less about what people think of them at this point in their lives. ‘They can let that go and think instead, what brings me joy?’
There is also that loss of sexual visibility, the end of heterosexual flirting when men subconsciously know you are no longer fertile, because previously their testosterone took a little leap when a fertile woman entered the room.
Whatever your wit or intellectual abilities, pheromones are pheromones and there’s nothing we can do to change that – and that invisibility might feel like a loss.
‘It seems men mostly leave a marriage because they have another relationship, but women often leave just to have time for themselves,’ says couples therapist Dr Kalanit Ben-Ari
Dr Ben-Ari has an interesting take on that: ‘I think that men also look for other things, and they’re looking for depth and an opportunity to be in touch with something else. They find something else inside of you. That makes it super attractive.’
As someone who met her new partner at the age of 54, and married him at 60, I get that. I ask her about the possibility of the relationship recovering from one – or even two – affairs.
‘An affair is, by definition, taking the energy out of the relationship,’ she says, ‘and you’re always closer to the person that you have a secret with. It’s exploring parts of yourself you may not want to bring into the relationship. It’s sex. It’s connection. It’s how you feel about yourself in the presence of someone new. It’s the glow of the secret.’
In the past few decades we have the possibility of secret lives online: texting, or just quietly pressing ‘like’ on an Instagram post. That might develop into a full-blown affair, or it might just be a bit of fun.
‘For some people, something online will feel really awful, a betrayal,’ says Dr Ben-Ari. ‘But this is for the couple to figure out their own boundaries. If you’re doing the equivalent of flirting with someone in the lift, and you won’t see them again, maybe it’s OK. So each couple needs to have that dialogue.’
In movies, and in real life, people discover secret affairs when they pick up their partner’s phone. It is at this point that couples often come to Dr Ben-Ari for counselling as they try to hold their relationship together, she says.
‘One party says, “I will do everything that is needed to bring that partner back.” And there is a way to work with that. It is my job to coach people on how to rebuild trust and exercise patience during the process. It’s so delicate.’
Couples who go to therapy after an affair can end up with a relationship that is much stronger and more intimate than it was before.
Author Kate Muir says time does heal, and has recently had drinks with her former husband and their respective new partners
‘While there are no quick fixes, I’ve repeatedly seen how healing, growth and a stronger bond are possible, she adds.
Of course, some couples decide at this midlife stage that sex is one thing and their long relationship and companionship quite another, and they can hold those two points of view simultaneously.
Midlife is a time when couples’ libidos become out of sync, be it decreased sex drive, or the perimenopausal sex surge, or lowered testosterone and erectile dysfunction. Or there’s the sheer boredom. Suddenly they are not satisfied with the sex that they are having. And they want to work on it and demand more, and their partner finds it shocking or upsetting on some level,’ says Dr Ben-Ari.
There are other reasons for an affair; obviously falling passionately in love is a good one, but some women just want to be seen again.
‘They like someone that sees them as a sexual being. It’s an identity issue: women are often looking for something in themselves, whereas – and it’s a bit of a cliche– I have sometimes found for men that affairs are often with people who admire them, look up to them.’
There is still some shame around these social norms that the man wants more sex and the woman doesn’t. ‘It’s a very old story. We think that we’ve progressed but it’s still there. You know, a woman might find she’s not so tired, and doesn’t have a three-year-old, and wants more sex, has more energy.
‘In middle age, I hear about woman reading more erotica, fantasising more or having more dreams. Things that they didn’t explore. Some women never even masturbated. And then midlife, they are open to exploring.’
But does that exploration take place at home, or away?
For the whole relationship, not just sex, the magnificent and terrifying question in midlife is whether you are going to start that journey of discovery together – or separately.
Divorce changes everything, and it is particularly profound if you have children.
It is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and it doesn’t ever turn out the way you expect it to. The past decade of my life has been the worst and the best, but it’s taken a while to realise that.
Women who take the first step in separation have to deal with overwhelming levels of guilt at exploding the family unit, and I was horrified to realise I had left my three children and former husband with permanent scars, inflicted by me.
When people say ‘heartbroken’, they can’t imagine the carnage or the anger. I assumed we would be two parallel families, with my sons on a gap year or at university and my 15-year-old daughter passing back and forth each week, but it turned out to be much harder than that. There was never going to be a family again, and I suppose I didn’t really grasp that properly.
I was slashed apart by a deep, aching love for my children and an instinctive, animal need to escape and be alone, with an affair hopelessly pasted across the cracks.
It took me years to atone and heal, and I have very different, more adult and honest relationships with my children than I might have had. I know it’s cliched but time (and therapy) does heal and my children, my former husband and our new partners have recently all had drinks together. Gracefully and gratefully.
As a London divorce lawyer, Farhana Shahzady is a frequent witness to the upending of marriages. A failure to share parenting is one part of the divorce grenade but another major player, she believes, is the menopause.
Farhana started to understand her work differently when she had an early menopause in her forties and began to notice the effect of hormonal dysregulation and brain fog on her menopausal clients’ divorce outcomes, emotionally and monetarily.
Divorce and dealing with the custody arrangements around children is tough enough at any time, but this seemed worse.
‘I realised some of my clients were struggling to give a witness statement in court. Clients panicked over the hostile correspondence and completing lengthy and complex documents,’ she says.
‘They were tearful and unable to cope with or process all the procedures which they could have handled before.
‘The onset of perimenopause often mirrored the onset of difficulties in their relationship.’
Even if women (or men) want to walk out of the door, childcare and economics sometimes leave them trapped: you cannot run two households for the price of one.
As a director of the Family Law Menopause Project, launched in 2022, Farhana has named the intersection of hormones and divorce ‘moneypause’.
She explains: ‘For years women have been reporting feeling short-changed as they go through financial remedy proceedings or financial negotiations. Although moneypause is not an inevitable symptom of hormonal transition, it’s all part of the cultural, structural, health and institutional inequalities women face at this time.’
As part of her research into moneypause, Farhana carried out an online survey of around 100 family law practitioners, finding that nearly 70 per cent of their divorce clients were in the 40 to 55 age group.
‘Many of the women I see are incredibly worried about their finances and don’t know how to cope,’ she says.
‘They often have abdicated financial responsibility to the husbands, who are taking care of things while women raise the family.
‘So when they come to see me they don’t have a handle on their finances. They don’t know how they’re going survive and very often they are still responsible for older children living at home.’
While a ‘clean break’ final settlement, often 50/50 depending on childcare needs, works well for some couples, many women are already on the back foot financially, having worked part-time or taken a career pause to care for children or sick parents.
This means they have often lost out on promotions and building up a pension, so they need more than half of the capital, as well as maintenance, in a settlement.
It’s not easy to catch up when re-entering the midlife employment market. Ageism is still a barrier and one in 10 women leave their jobs due to menopause symptoms, so in some cases spousal maintenance can be a lifeline.
‘But it’s legally unpopular and offered begrudgingly for the shortest possible term, if at all, because the legal system simply has no concept of menopause or the related problem of moneypause,’ says Farhana.
When she carried out a survey on LinkedIn and social media of 400 midlife women who had been through divorce, more than 70 per cent felt their menopausal or perimenopausal symptoms played a role in their relationship breakdown, but 86 per cent who had used a lawyer did not even raise the issue.
The great screenwriter Nora Ephron once observed: ‘You should never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from,’ and that’s worth bearing in mind. Perhaps this seems cynical but divorce is also a result of some very positive changes.
When you think about the aeons we stay together in marriages or partnerships these days, remaining in the same equanimity and balance as two ever-changing humans is nearly impossible.
I met my former husband aged 25 and was in a relationship with him for 25 years, and who is fully formed at 25-years-old? Not me.
Unless you do the work along the way and consider questioning your relationship and giving it regular maintenance, it will rust.
There’s a word for this disconnect in midlife: the ‘couplepause’ – and that’s giving a nod to the hormonal, mental and physical changes in both genders.
Of course, much like the menopause, some lucky couples will
sail through the couplepause untroubled and many more will hit its turbulent waters but want to make it through, together. And the only way to do this is to work at it – constantly.
Maintenance isn’t only needed around menopause. Relationships, like cars, should have regular MOTs and constant room for improvement as we grow up (and I wish someone had told me that).
Dr Ben-Ari emphasises how worthwhile it is to see a therapist early on, to get the tools to strengthen love and understanding, when you can still put energy back into the relationship.
‘Unfortunately, people are waiting for too long before getting therapy. So the conflict escalates until it really cannot be bearable,’ she says.
She also underlines the importance of consciously putting yourself in your partner’s shoes. Therapy is not about apportioning blame but about coming to an understanding.
‘As a therapist you are not there to be a judge,’ she says.
‘What we want to do is help you to see each other and yourselves more clearly, to bring the unspoken into the spoken, to put the unconscious into the conscious, thereby increasing empathy, connection and intimacy.’
She gives me an inkling of a different point of view.
‘If only women knew what went on in the heads of their husbands,’ she says. (She works with many men as individual clients too.)
‘The fact that your husband goes calmly to sleep in bed five minutes after you’ve had a terrible fight doesn’t mean that when he wakes up, and is doing other things, that he is not thinking about how upset you are, or is feeling shamed or blamed or not good enough for you.’
And the only way to know what someone else is thinking is to communicate. As we say to angry toddlers throwing toys – you need to use your words. And, often, men and women don’t.
While women feel the domestic and emotional burden, Dr Ben-Ari points out that men have their own burdens. ‘It’s in their DNA to worry about finance, and that’s a mental load too.’
Also, as women we often don’t appreciate how a simple statement can be devastating.
‘When women say to men, “I don’t trust you,” for some reason, which just could be, say, about a one-off incident when they are unable to pick up the kids, it feels like a huge statement,’ says Dr Ben-Ari.
‘It’s basically saying, “I cannot trust you emotionally that you will be there for me.”
‘Men often hear and internalise this as, “You are not trustworthy; you are not enough,” or “I cannot trust you – emotionally, financially, or in being present – that you will truly be there for me.” And we women don’t appreciate how painful it is for men to hear that.’
A vicious cycle dominates childcare for men and women: women bear the bulk of the work, so men get less practice at childcare and more criticism for their failings, so women don’t trust them.
And without an intentional change, this is how it will continue.
© Kate Muir, 2025. Adapted from How To Have A Magnificent Midlife Crisis, by Kate Muir (Gallery UK, £16.99), to be published on June 5. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid to 31/05/25; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Follow Kate Muir on Instagram @menoscandal
