In America today there are many signs of revolt against marriage, including high rates of divorce and infidelity, as well as a growing number of couples who are living together unwed. But this does not mean that marriage will become extinct, say the experts. To the contrary: Traditional patriarchal marriage may be dying, and along with it the notion that wedded harmony depends on a master-servant relationship, but meanwhile marriage is being reborn in new forms every day. Before our eyes it is changing its contours, shedding its standard but straitlaced shape to assume a wide variety of flexible forms that are better suited to the human needs of contemporary men and woman.

In the future, says author Morton Hunt, we will have an even greater need than we do now for love relationships that offer intimacy, warmth, and reliability. Thus he predicts that the marriage of the future will be a free and unconstrained union of a man and a woman who are companions, partners, and sexual lovers. It will exist only as long as it remains valid for both people, and it will rarely last a lifetime.

Clearly we are already heading in this direction, as couples of all ages struggle to discover what suits them best. Embarked on a bold new experiment that our society has not yet fully sanctioned, such couples have discarded the approved script on how to play husband and wife in order to design marital bargains that mesh with their personal preferences. We read about these novel arrangements, gossip about them with relish, and occasionally even meet friends or neighbors who have broken the old marital mold. But despite our assumption that such daring innovators are rare, more Americans than we might suspect are experimenting today with the myriad new ways of being married. The fact that over one million people have enrolled in marital enrichment programs or marital encounter groups, which are usually sponsored under conservative religious, auspices, is one indication of this revolutionary trend.

More flamboyant choices aimed at loosening the bonds of matrimony include those made by couples who decide on open marriage, or sexual “swinging” or communal living. Other, less radical innovations are being tried by the increasing number of husbands and wives who are commuting to work in separate cities during the week, while living together only on weekends. And then there are those couples who, having rejected the standard stereotypes, are choosing to reverse roles. According to their agreement, the woman goes off to the office each day while the man stays home to mind the kids. Or, in another version, both partners agree to divide the household chores, take turns with the children, and maybe even grant each other permission to enjoy separate vacations.

Different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes. These are but a few examples of the ways in which couples today are rewriting the marital contract to suit their own individual needs, ignoring traditional rules that hamper their relationship and hinder their growth. Which is not to say that revamping a marriage in mid-stream is easily accomplished.

The barriers to change, substantial enough when a single individual is concerned, are greater still when they involve two persons. Moreover, this generation of mid-life men and women, having been victimized by the masculine and feminine mystiques, are likely to experience some soul-shattering conflicts as they struggle to replace conventional roles with more fluid desires and demands.

But difficult does not mean impossible. Despite the obstacles that chain people to the past, couples now in their middle years who want to reinvent their own marriage have ample resources available to help them. In addition to the growing number of marital counselors and therapists now practicing nationwide, growth centers, couples groups, and weekend marathons are becoming more widespread. Such group experiences provide couples with a unique opportunity to explore new ways of getting in touch with themselves and their mate, new ways of communicating and relating. And in the process they help to open their imagination to other possibilities, other patterns of being married.

Even for couples who are not yet ready to risk exposing themselves, guidelines for change are available. Countless books on every aspect of married life, including the sexual, are now in print—and some of them are excellent. Moreover, the existence of books that deal candidly with the most intimate aspects of personal relationships is but part of a larger trend in our society whereby issues that were once considered taboo—too embarrassing, too private—are now being openly discussed, not only in the media but at social gatherings as well. Influenced by consciousness-raising sessions, women today are leveling with one another about their personal lives, including sex and love and marriage, with a candor that would have been considered shocking not long ago.

From all these sources—couples groups, books and articles, and more open discussions—men and women in their middle years are learning that there is not just one way to be married, but many. By itself such knowledge is not a solution, of course. But it can be a start, a stimulant, a way to initiate a thought-provoking dialogue between a husband and a wife who have discovered, after many years together, that their marriage has become deadly dull. Or just plain deadly. The next step, for those who still care enough to struggle with the impasse, is for a couple to embark on a series of experiments until they evolve a new relationship that preserves parts of the old pattern that are still viable, but also includes some changes. By trial and error they can then originate, in terms uniquely tailored to the two of them, a way of living married that is more pleasurable than the pattern they adopted automatically in their youth.

Being able to make such a creative choice is one of the joys of becoming middle-aged. Popular wisdom notwithstanding, it is only those over forty who really know who they are, what they want, and how to get it. In contrast to the young and innocent, whose idealism is often impotent, men and women in their middle years have sufficient experience, sound judgment, and financial resources to translate their desires into deeds. Maturity, it turns out, does have special rewards: It means possessing the courage and confidence to redesign one’s life, and one’s marriage, to suit personal proclivities. Society be damned.

*65\93\2*

At mid-life this feeling of being constrained within the corporate structure, which Sam Greenawalt complains about, is normal and natural. Having outgrown certain dependency needs that they once had for the security of a paternal organization, many men begin to yearn or a new kind of independence.

Such yearnings are so common that the Yale group call this the BOOM period, a time of Becoming One’s Own Man. Not a separate life stage, it is actually a peaking of the “settling down” period and generally occurs in the middle to late thirties. A key element in this period is a man’s feeling that no matter how successful he has been thus far, he is not sufficiently his own man.

This new urge for independence usually comes as a surprise. One of the myths of our culture is that people are finished with the business of growing up in their twenties. However, this expectation ignores the fact that the life structure created in early adulthood cannot possibly reflect all parts of the self—and must therefore be enlarged later.

Another reason why this life structure must change is that it is based, to some degree, on illusions. One common illusion in the early thirties, for example, is for a man to regard himself as highly autonomous because he is now making his own way and his parents are no longer telling him what to do. In fact, however, his ambitions and goals are very much tied to what the Yale group call “tribal influences”—the institutions and groups that are important to him. And, despite being free from parental influence, he is likely to have found other authority figures to guide and protect him.

During the BOOM period a man finally begins to realize that he is not really as independent as he once imagined. He now craves more authority and wants to speak with his own voice. He also feels uncomfortably dependent on those with power over him. The writer feels unduly intimidated by his critics or publisher; the middle manager thinks his superiors control too much, and delegate too little; and the professional man chafes under senior colleagues.

This is the time when many men feel compelled to leave the corporate organization and strike out on their own, a desire that, as we shall sec later, often leads to a second career. This same sense of being constrained can spread to other areas as well, however. And the man who now begins to resent his boss may also start complaining that his wife treats him like a little boy.

Breaking with a mentor is an extremely significant event during this period, the Yale group discovered. The person who was formerly so loved and admired, and seen as giving so much, is now felt to be heavily controlling. The mentor begins to appear to the younger man like a tyrannical and egocentric father, rather than as someone who fosters independence and individuality. Because the relationship has served its purpose, however, it can now be terminated—sometimes slowly and peacefully, sometimes abruptly and bitterly. After the separation a process of internalization occurs, whereby the younger man’s personality is enriched as he makes the valued qualities of the mentor more fully a part of himself.

Having dispensed with this tie, a man is ready to BOOM: He is ready to give up being a son in the little-boy sense, and a young man in the apprentice sense. He is ready to assume more fully himself the responsibility of being a mentor, father, and friend to other adults. This sort of developmental achievement is the essence of adulthood, say the Yale group.

Relationships of this kind are also necessary to work through Erikson’s stage of generativity vs. stagnation. The issue now is caring for future generations. A man cannot get very far with this task before forty, say the Yale group, but his breaking off with former mentors is the beginning. (They caution, however, that it is probably impossible to become a mentor without first having had one. The presence or absence of mentors was found to be of great importance during the twenties and thirties; and the absence of a mentor is often associated with developmental impairments at mid-life.)

This BOOM time marks the end of a man’s battle to conquer his external environment, and sets the stage for the in; ternal struggle of the mid-life crisis.

*51\93\2*

Applied to sexual matters, numbers have caused much needless misery. Most of us are familiar with the statistics which show that the male attains his sexual peak at eighteen, and declines steadily thereafter. But does this mean that a man’s sexual functioning is really impaired by the time he is in his forties?

The answer is No. This somber emphasis continually placed on the male’s inevitable “decline” has been extremely misleading. It is more accurate to talk about the sexual changes that occur with aging, and it is vital that they not be misinterpreted.

What are these changes? First, a man’s energy and vigor normally diminish as he ages. Therefore just as he does not expect to run as fast now, so he should not expect his sexual performance to be characterized by the same physical energy as it was earlier. Once a man is past forty his erection will take longer to achieve—minutes perhaps, as compared to seconds in his youth. It may not be as full or firm as when he was younger, and at the end of intercourse his penis will return to a relaxed state much more quickly than it used to. Also, it will probably take him considerably longer than in the past to obtain another erection. There will be a reduction in seminal fluid, and some men may notice that they ejaculate with less force.

All these changes are quite natural, and none should be cause for concern. True, the force and frequency of the male orgasm is affected by aging, but the erective response is not. A man should know that he need never lose his ability to attain an erection. Equally important, he must understand that his responses now resemble those traditionally considered feminine: After forty his sexual pleasure changes from a strongly genital sensation to a more sensuously diffused experience, and he will require greater and more prolonged stimulation to achieve an erection.

Kaplan points out that cultural conditioning plays a role in the way both male and female sexual patterns shift over time. A woman’s responses have generally been determined primarily by psychic factors, a man’s by physical ones. Thus, while the double standard victimizes both sexes, it does so at different times of life. Women are scarred most severely in their youth, when they are more strongly prohibited than men from obtaining sexual satisfaction. Their apparent sexual flowering around forty merely reflects a long process of shaking off old inhibitions. Men, on the other hand, were allowed more sexual freedom in their youth—but only on the condition that they regard sex as a strictly physical urge.

Therefore, just when women are recuperating from the double standard, men begin to feel its devastating effects: At mid-life they must adjust to the fact that their sexuality is becoming more dependent on psychic factors and that they now need more erotic stimulation, more emotional reassurance.

If a man suffers from penis angst when he can no longer perform like “an all-time fucking machine,” it is not because aging has destroyed his sexual ability or caused a “decline.” It is because he has been taught to value performance over pleasure and to detach sexuality from self—which handicaps him severely at this stage of life when he must rely increasingly on fantasy and feelings to excite his sexual desire.

Ask an American male what turns him on, and he might say, “big tits, long legs, a well-rounded ass.” Or “a fresh young face, a firm body, a braless bounce.” But unguarded emotions? Few men would cali that sexy. At mid-life, however, adjustments should be made. Those men who continue to regard sex as genital combat will be grief-stricken by their physical losses. They may even arrange their own erotic death, by gradually withdrawing from sex or retreating into impotence. Others, even those determined to enjoy their sexuality in full, must learn to break down the barrier of emotional constriction. One man candidly describes the difficulties:

I think in our day we have promoted fucking from a dirty and sort of secret pastime to a publicly endorsed indoor sport or health exercise, but we haven’t accompanied this with any particular release to the fantasies.

Most men are just too embarrassed to do it. To take out your cock and stick it in somebody, that’s not too hard to do. But to go through this whole thing where you insist the girl has a blindfold on, you tie her up, put her in weird clothes, or whatever the fantasy demands, it’s embarrassing. It’s idiotic. It’s crazy. See, it doesn’t belong to this sophisticated, conscious, moral good guy. You feel vulnerable. You don’t want to expose it.

That’s typically what they did in whorehouses. They went in and made all these crazy demands, right? Because you couldn’t face it with anybody you “respected.” In quotes. It’s that whole thing of the girl you respect and the girl you want to fuck. The girl you respect, you can’t imagine putting her through the paces of your fantasy life—that’s all. In a whorehouse you never see them again, and even if they didn’t like it, who the hell are they to complain?

Anyway, a fantasy doesn’t want simply to be Indulged, because that’s childish—which is why a whorehouse wouldn’t appeal to me. The goal is to find someone who wants the same thing you want. It’s the locking together of these mutually entertained fantasies where the real satisfaction and excitement lies, I think. It isn’t in frequency or technique. What’s that? Nonsense. I think it’s the image. And when you hit that erotic image, just thinking about it can get you excited.

Like when women lose control and go completely out of their head, it’s very exciting to a man because he feels he’s produced that effect in her—and it can also help release some of his inhibitions. But men don’t lose control like that very often. It’s happened to me very rarely, and it’s frightening. Definitely frightening.

I remember one time I was with a girl who said, “Well, what do you want?” And I said, “Well, I guess what I really want you to do is suck me off.” And she said, “That’s the simplest thing in the world,” and she got down and put her mouth on my penis and started sucking me. And suddenly I began to feel this unprecedented sexual sensation. Like a tremendous stirring that started down in my feet, and it seemed to be rising up my legs, up my diaphragm, up my whole body. Like a tremendous foree, a tremendous energy. It was just . . . it was alarming. It was loss of control, and I remem ber I began screaming. I was just panicking.

It only happens, I think, when defenses aren’t up. Like with this girl the fact that we hadn’t taken our clothes off was very significant. I’m much more relaxed in my clothes, and when I get naked I get clothed on an emotionally defensive level. So it was a combination of being dressed, and it was in the morning—which is the “wrong” time!—and there was no preparation. It was to- j tally spontaneous. There hadn’t been a chance to get the whole context of “Now we’re going to screw” into play. And so before I could get all my emotional rivets in the holes, the sensation got too strong for the restraints. It was a fantastic thing, a very strong sensation. But it was also a fantasy. An image. Here was this girl kneeling down sucking me off!

There’s no question that women are much more abandoned than men. That’s the most impressive thing, sexually, about women. They get much more out of screwing than men do. I believe that. They experience it deeper, longer, and are much better able to deal with it. You don’t see a lot of men moaning and raving and flailing, you know what I mean? I know a lot of guys who have tapes of women they’re screwing, and the women are screaming and talking and babbling, but you don’t hear one word from the guy. You don’t hear one sound. They’re just busy grinding away there—the little pile-drivers at work!

My feeling about most men is that they have a very impoverished emotional life. And their sexual life is basically a lot of physical rubbing and grunting and fucking away—but they’re not getting off at all. On the intellectual and achievement level, I think they’re quite formidable. But when it comes to the sensual and the emotional, they’re cripples.

People confuse the fact that most men can easily attain an orgasm with potency. But just being able to ejaculate—that’s no measure of any emotional thing, you know? You can pop off and hardly feel anything.

A carry-over from the work ethic, the idea of the sex act as a disciplined performance is destructive. Controlled efficiency in corporate boardrooms produces cold-blooded fucking in suburban bedrooms. It can even lead to impotence.

Despite some liberating changes in our society, Masters and Johnson confirm that our sex lives remain contaminated by the principle that work is virtuous, whereas play is wasteful and sinful. The consequences vary. Religious persons tend to view work as redemptive while regarding sex as intended more for procreation than pleasure. Others, less religious, may claim to value sex as an important dimension of their life, but actually treat it like work—as a task in which performance can be measured and mastered.

Contrary to popular belief, these researchers claim that a couple’s sex life improves during vacations not simply because they have more time and energy, or are less distracted by routine worries, but because they are freed temporarily from our culture’s demand to put productivity before pleasure. It is the spontaneous expression of feelings—doing whatever they feel like at any given moment—that dramatically changes the erotic atmosphere.

The toll taken by excessive self-discipline is “the most insidious element carried over from the work ethic to the sexual relationship,” say Masters and Johnson: “Let a man at the office keep his emotions under tight rein eight hours a day while he concentrates on getting his work done . . . and the transition to becoming an individual who acts according to spontaneous and authentic feeling becomes difficult. For some persons it becomes impossible.”

But in their view it is precisely the part of themselves that men are conditioned to control at work—”their true emotions at any given moment”—which must be free of discipline for a sexual relationship to flourish. This conviction is shared by other authorities, Kaplan among them. Speaking of her work as a sex therapist, she comments, “It is heartbreaking to see the unnecessary pain and constriction suffered by couples who cannot shed their defensive armors.”

Although it is true that the quanity of a man’s orgasms is somewhat reduced by aging, it is also true that the quality of his sexual pleasure can be increased. Shedding his defensive armor is the most important task facing the mid-life male struggling to adjust to his changing sexuality. Now he must reclaim both the fantasies and the feelings that society has taught him to deny, and summon the courage to become emotionally vulnerable—for this is the key to his enriching his sexuality as he ages.

In other words, the way for a man to stop feeling penis angst is to start feeling other things. Sexual potency after forty depends on renouncing the need for conquest and surrendering the heart.

*37\93\2*

American men haven’t had as much opportunity to explore their lives as women have. But now, largely influenced by the feminist movement, men too are finally beginning to ask whether the role society places on them is valid.

When The Feminine Mystique was first published, Friedan’s insights exploded like a bomb in this country, dynamiting women out of their despair and inspiring them toward action. And though the feminist movement is but the beginning of a major humanist revolution that will radically alter America’s power structure and values, it has already started to change our definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman.

As a result, some men are beginning to realize that they have been victims of a distorted definition of masculinity. They are discovering that men pay a high price for their exclusive claim to power and Supremacy, and that they have been deprived of a basic human right—the right to reveal and express their feelings.

This new awareness has led to the publication of books like The Liberated Man and The Male Machine, and to the teaching of courses on the masculine mystique at colleges and universities. It has also led to the formation of a men’s liberation movement, which aims to free men from a dehumanizing sex role.

Members of this movement have been holding consciousness-raising sessions that focus on the ways in which they have felt oppressed in their own lives by society’s demands. And they have strongly criticized the standard male image, which insists they be aggressive and competitive breadwinners, but prohibits their being nurturing and vulnerable human beings. To correct this imbalance they advocate replacing obsolete sex roles with a fuller concept of humanity, a concept that recognizes that both men and women can be cither strong or weak, active or passive, cerebral or emotional; and that these qualities are not the province of one sex only.

To date the men’s liberation movement is still comparatively small and composed primarily of men under thirty. But they do not have an exclusive claim to critical awareness or to feelings of having been cheated. Some men in their middle years are also beginning to feel uncomfortably confined behind their male mask.

Not long ago, for example, a group of ten men in their forties enrolled in a course entitled “Communication Skills and Personal Growth Workshop for Men” at an adult education center in Michigan.” Their experience led to some startling new discoveries about their old ideals of masculinity. Here are two reactions:

•Dave B., forty-six, is a junior high school teacher who has been married seventeen years and has three children. Plagued by the feeling of being “stuck” at work, with nothing to look forward to except retirement, he joined the group because he was “looking for something”:

The sessions were an eye-opener to me. It was quite a revelation because I always suspected I had some of these walls around me—and that’s why I couldn’t relate to people.

My parents were very strict, very moralistic. No emotional feelings. I wasn’t allowed to cry if I got spanked. And I remember when I got drafted, one of my biggest concerns was whether I should give my mother a goodbye kiss or not! Because I never recall kissing her except as a very small boy. There was no close touch—it was all tight, traditional, controlled.

Well, anyway, this feeling of rigidity has been with me all my life and, in fact, it’s been getting worse as I’ve been getting older. I was unable to get out of it. My relationship with other teachers was always kind of aloof, and I found it difficult to be warm and close to the students. My discipline was always, “I’m the dictator. The boss!” That kind of thing. No warmth, and I couldn’t break through.

Now for the first time I can see daylight! I’m not saying I’ve resolved it, but I felt I was worse off than a lot of other people, and this kind of proved to me that I really wasn’t. Some of the guys really went through torture to be able to get out this expression of themselves.

Some cried, some got completely angry and stormed out. But afterwards there was even a physical change. Henry is a good example—he used to have such a tight fist. And; boy, he smiles so easily now and talks in a flowing, relaxed way.

But the thing that amazed me in the group was how everybody has this kind of problem: The wall. It’s not just myself.

•Ray W., forty-one, is a manager in a General Motors printing plant, who has been married eight years and has two children. He joined the group hoping to improve his relations with co-workers:

What really impressed me was how when wc first started everybody in the group seemed so cool and calm and collected. But as it progressed I began to see that most of us had some sort of problem where we couldn’t get any sort of feeling out. It had never dawned on me how important it is to get some of these feelings out.

Everyone was completely different after just one episode of opening themselves up. You remember how Bob was—very stoic and stone-like? His facial expressions never changed. And yet inwardly he was just being torn apart. But of course, we didn’t know that. Later, after he had quite an emotional experience, he would sit in on the sessions and his whole face was just glowing. Just one quick glance, and you knew he was a different person. He had sort of a glow from inside.

There was this release of emotion. I think we all got in touch with some feelings we aren’t afraid to show anymore. I think men have a tendency to hold back a show of exuberance—or a show of sadness. But after the course I don’t think any of us is so afraid to show a happy feeling or a sad feeling, or even an angry feeling. I think you can see it on our faces now, whereas before there was a mask there.

And none of us was aware of how much under control these things arc. There was one incident where T was furious. T was so worked up I thought anybody could see it—but they could barely tell. And the same thing happened with the other fellows. Our controls were so tight that although we thought our feelings were showing, the controls hid them.

Before I would have thought it was an admirable trait—keeping this coolness under pressure. But I’m not so sure it’s admirable anymore. I think it’s a mistake.

These Michigan men are not alone. Other mid-life men are also beginning to perceive, if only dimly, the anguish caused by their own emotional constriction. Some make the discovery in a similar way, by attending a sensitivity or encounter group; by embarking on psychotherapy, analysis, or marital counseling; or by joining a human-potential organization like EST, Arica, or Scientology. In other cases a man is nudged toward a new awareness by a barrage of accusations: when his colleagues insist he is arrogant and remote; when his children denounce him as cold and critical; or when his wife berates—or abandons—him for being incapable of love.

In these and other ways men in their middle years are discovering that the masculine imperative to keep cool has chilling consequences. And they arc beginning to question whether keeping a stiff upper lip is a mark of manhood after all.

*21\93\2*

Enrico Banducci is not alone in his reactions. “You hear so much about deaths that seem premature,” one man comments soberly. “Time is now a two-edged sword,” another observes. “To some of my friends it acts as a prod; to others, a brake.”1

These comments reflect a painful reality: The realization that one is mortal is at the core of the mid-life crisis and frequently its catalyst as well.

“The simple fact of the situation is the arrival at the midpoint of life,” says British psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques. “What is simple from the point of view of chronology, however, is not simple psychologically.”2 The most disturbing paradox, he explains, is that just when a man reaches the prime of life he is also forced to recognize that this time of fulfillment is limited—beyond it is death.

“The awareness that time is finite is a particularly conspicuous feature of middle age,” states Bernice L. Neugarten, who chairs the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, where more than two thousand adults have participated in extensive studies. “Life is restructured in terms of time-left-to-live rather than time-since-birth,”3 she says.

Significantly, Neugarten found than men talk about this changing time perspective more often than women do, and experience it differently. The onset of middle age is usually perceived by women in terms of events within the family circle, most commonly children leaving home. For men, however, the cues are picked up from the outside world. The first signal often comes, as it did to Enrico Banducci, from the deferential behavior of younger people at work—the door suddenly held open, the package suddenly carried.

Men generally respond to this new awareness of fleeting time by becoming more concerned with their body. They refer to biological changes and health concerns far more frequently than women do, says Neugarten, and regard them as important “age markers.” Too, they express their fear of aging by giving anxious attention to their physical functioning—”body monitoring.” Women, on the other hand, become more preoccupied with their husband’s health than with their own.

“While these issues take the form of a new sense of physical vulnerability in men, they take the form of ‘rehearsal for widowhood’ in women,” Neugarten says bluntly. “Women are more concerned over the body-monitoring of their husbands than of themselves.”

*8\93\2*