Middle-aged women are blowing up their lives. This is what’s behind the boom

In my experience, happiness is that lovely, warm, toasty feeling you get just before you fall flat on your face. At my age I expected to be as content as a canary-filled cat. But KAPOW! I suddenly find myself tip-toeing through an exploding minefield. Nearly every middle-aged woman I know is in a state of upheaval, either due to romantic trauma, career implosion, life epiphanies or family meltdown.

Take Fiona. The worst sentence in the English language must be: “Whose knickers are these and why are they in our marital bed?” This is how my girlfriend greeted her husband of 30 years when she came home early from a work trip to find him leaping naked into the shower and a dishevelled woman running out the patio door. Needless to say, they’re now fighting over custody of the designer dog and the espresso machine. “I don’t know what went wrong between me and my husband – or that two-timing worm as I prefer to call him,” Fiona sobbed over cocktails. “But I did not see it coming.”

My friend Jodie left her husband similarly blindsided. Aged 67, she’s just walked out on her marriage to hike the Camino trail. Basically, she thought she’d married Mr Right, only to discover 40 years later that she’d got hitched to a sofa that farts. “Once Garry retired, he was home all the time and expecting three meals a day,” she whined. “I want to be put on a pedestal, not under it.”

Which could be why my spin-class pal has also just swapped her retired hubby for her tennis coach and is enjoying a sexual epiphany. “I’m doing things in bed that I can’t even pronounce!” she confessed. A recently divorced pal from the same class then begged me to be her plus one on a swingers night. (I’ll be the one wearing the hazmat suit and clutching hand sanitiser.)

Everywhere I turn is a female friend in a state of flux. They’re like teenagers, except with wrinkles instead of pimples. One pal in her early 70s has just joined the grey nomads. Not to escape an unhappy marriage (she’s widowed) but to avoid relentless grandmother duties: she was expected to babysit at a moment’s notice and was starting to feel like a doormat in a world of muddy galoshes.

So, what’s going on with midlife women? A mix of increased longevity, financial independence and the rocket fuel of HRT, I’d say.

KATHY LETTE

My lawyer pal is the opposite. Always happily childless, she’s suddenly forsaken her mantra of “I can’t have kids; I have white sofas” and applied to be a foster parent. She recently lost both parents and there’s nothing like mortality to make you look for more meaning in life. Which is possibly why my banker chum Kim has thrown in a high-powered city job to work in the charity sector and why Penny has left her GP practice in the ’burbs for a Nepalese ashram.

Another seismic change for many women my age is Late Onset Lesbianism. “We were Pilates pals … so sympatico,” Anne explained. “Then we got drunk one night and it just happened.”

The judgmental response of her three daughters surprised her. “Why the big fuss? Didn’t you try lesbianism at school?” she asked them.

Um … no, they didn’t. Apparently, they tried touch football and lacrosse.

So, what’s going on with midlife women? A mix of increased longevity, financial independence and the rocket fuel of HRT, I’d say. But perhaps women in midlife aren’t having a crisis – they’re just waking up? Post menopause, you realise that you can’t give your life more time, so why not give the time you have, more life?

And is change such a bad thing? It definitely keeps you on your toes. Hell, since leaving my own long marriage of 28 years, I’m on my toes more often than a prima ballerina in the Bolshoi.

But then I think of Trish from my book club, who recently died of ovarian cancer. Her last words to me were that she wished she’d let herself be happier. “Happiness is a choice, Kath. People think they’ll be happy when they get a holiday house or a handbag or whatever … But you’ll be happy when you’re laughing with a friend or having an orgasm … or 10!”

So, midlifers, don’t panic if you feel lost; just listen to your psychological sat nav, sit back and enjoy the scenic detour.

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