How Old We Are Determines When We Think Middle Age Begins

A year ago, when I had just turned 36, I posed a question at a dinner party that was intended as a casual query, a trifle that slipped off my tongue with the buttery smoothness of the evening’s chardonnay.

“So, when do you think middle age begins?” I asked after the youthful dew of the gathering had faded and the first awkward silence appeared. “Thirty-five,” said a 41-year-old man without a moment’s hesitation.

“Thirty-five?” I repeated with disbelief. Had I already turned middle-aged without even knowing it? A month or so later, I raised the topic again. But this time I detected a note of stress in my voice, as if I had already anticipated an answer that I didn’t want to hear.

“By 38, there’s no promise left,” a 35-year-old Wall Street trader responded.

Soon I found myself slipping the “m” word into most of my conversations, urgently grilling friends and acquaintances, capturing people’s attention long enough to demand an answer.

“I’m middle-aged because when I was a teen-ager I thought 43 was middle-aged. I’m not going to change the rules of the game now that I’m 43,” said a friend who is a sportswriter.

My dinner-party question, posed to soothe my fears, was producing the opposite effect. To be called middle-aged in your 30s was like discovering that your alarm clock rang an hour earlier each morning until sleep was forever lost, attainable only as a sweet memory.

I was hoping to find a doctor with an authoritative voice who could pinpoint that magic moment when youth ends and middle age starts. Once I knew the diagnosis, I could write my life’s prescription.

Instead, I discovered that there was no clear consensus among doctors, psychologists and sociologists. Middle age has been placed on the back burner of gerontological and developmental studies. Like a middle child trying to find a place in between, all the attention has been given to the younger and older siblings.

“It’s an uncharted, almost unidentified professional field,” said Dr. Orville Brim, an expert in human development and the director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development in Vero Beach, Fla. Brim and 12 other scholars are nearing the end of an eight-year research project on midlife - one of a series of MacArthur Foundation studies on the stages of human development.

“Many cultures don’t have any concept of middle age; the idea does not exist,” Brim said. “So you can see it was constructed. And then when you get into societies where they do have the concept of middle age, the definitions of beginning and ending vary.”

While Brim could not yet release any details from the project, his initial research revealed a basic truism: The older you are, the later you say middle age begins. Twenty-year-olds, for example, claimed that 35 was middle-aged. The 40-and-over crowd, on average, believed that middle age began at 40, but many extended its start by another 5 to 15 years to match their own perceptions of themselves.

Middle age is also perceived differently according to socio-economic status. Brim found that lower-income respondents, who have less access to decent health care and who often lead more physically difficult lives, usually say they reach midlife at an earlier point than do middle-class respondents.

Brim, who is in his 70s, said his studies covered people from 30 to 70, but he considers 40 to 60 as the core middle-age years.

As it turned out, the wrong person to ask for a neat pigeonhole for the middle-aged state was Betty Friedan, whose most recent book was “The Fountain of Age.”

“Honey, don’t bother me with this middle-age nonsense,” she said grumpily. “It is obsolete. I am not for any kind of denial. I am not for an obsessive holding on to youth. I am for being fully where you are, but I think that all those terms about age have been pejorative terms and they don’t apply anymore.

“Somehow middle age has the concept of big rolls of fat around your middle,” she continued. “People don’t use that term anymore. People don’t feel that term anymore. They are grown-up now - they’re not kids, that’s all, but they continue to grow old. OK?”

But Dr. Robert Butler, a gerontologist and the director of the International Longevity Center at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, believes it is misleading to say that middle age is just a matter of mind over body. “In my definition of medicine, the concept of middle age is very real, because I see it as having physiological and biological representations,” he said. He added that he considers middle age to occur roughly between 37 and 60. Between those years, he said, some profound realizations occur that are worthy of the term middle age.

“The British in centuries past called it the ‘period of gravity,”’ he said. “That’s when people get more serious, a time when people reassess their commitments and what they want to make of them. It’s the time when changes occur if there are going to be significant changes.”

The term middle age had grave connotations to the Victorians, as well. In “Jane Eyre,” which Charlotte Bronte wrote nearly 150 years ago, when a person’s life expectancy was the early 40s, Jane describes Rochester as a man who was “past youth, but had not reached middle age; perhaps he might be 35.” Obviously, Bronte wasn’t suggesting that middle age correlated to a chronological midpoint in life, but the words “past youth,” compared to the drearier term “middle age,” created a more desirable portrait of the heroine’s future husband.

Carol Ryff, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s research team, said: “At some point you have got to come to grips with what your own definition of midlife is. And I think coming to grips with it is one of those important developmental challenges of life.”

A difficulty in thinking about middle age - that point in time, as Schopenhauer defined it, when you begin to count backward from death rather than forward from birth - is acknowledging that one must let go of youth, with its unlimited promises and sense of immortality.

A friend who has turned 40 and who has a 2-year-old daughter sees age symbolized by a drawing she can’t forget: In it, a young woman heads up a staircase while an older woman helps her. The older woman is, in effect, passing the torch to the younger one, leading her up the metaphorical stairway to the future. “I once fiercely resisted the notion that I could be that older woman,” she said. “Now, I think I’ve reached that point when I can allow myself to be her.”

Since I first posed my dinner party question, I still vacillate between a hard-won acceptance of middle age and the more commonplace desire of wanting to be young. At times I pretend that the period of youth lasts longer today than ever before. But then I spend time with college students and realize that the years I thought were right behind me are merely dusty memories, an antiquated record album permanently packed away.

Or I listen to an exhausted 24-year-old tell me how he danced at a club until 4 a.m. and understand that I am happily, thankfully, no longer that young. So if I am not that young, what am I?

For the moment, 37, and approaching what some might call middle age.