How do you manage to grow old together?
There was a time when getting older was the best we could imagine. Not alone, alone was not up for debate: we were in love, it was our first holiday together. And while Luise and I ran across the Baltic Sea beach of Boltenhagen, we always found new ways to tell each other how unusually large our love was. I can not wait to show you to my parents, oh, that will be terribly beautiful! Do you want children? Yes, yes, yes, and that's the name. And at some point, when all was said, but the way back to the hotel was still wonderfully painful, one of us said the sentence that surpassed everything because it stretched our common future to infinity: I want to grow old with you.
Suddenly the question: how should we go on with it?
We hugged each other for a long time and kissed and dreamed of ourselves as a happy old couple. That was twelve years ago, and a lot has happened during that time (the children, a few apartments, the crises, the work, and all too short days).
So much that I hardly thought of one thing at the time: aging together. Or at all: getting older. Until I passed what happens to most in the so-called middle of life: I looked up and saw that I had less life left than I have spent.
Well, that's pure statistics, but it causes a deep feeling. Not just trepidation and doubt concerning my own path and the time I have left. But also the question: how should it continue with us?
The darn food
Because, quite honestly: The so-called midlife is a hard time for couples. We are in the midst of raising children, and at the same time we are seeing the first friends starting to organize the care of their elderly parents. I am no longer as carefree and resilient as ten years ago.
And as for us as a couple: It seems little to develop, the conflicts are always the same - I do not say how I'm doing, I'm in a bad mood and exhausted, Luise annoys me with plans and a spirit of optimism, behind which I have one threatening dissatisfaction with our lives.
Unresolved issues will eventually explode
But we rarely talk. Because there is never enough time and because we have both too often experienced that our talks end in reproaches. We are sneaking around our problems as if we were afraid to step on mines: the midlife is a time when unresolved problems in the partnership "explode", as the well-known psychologist Rosemarie Welter-Enderlin once put it.
Many of our friends and acquaintances separate. Also we have more than once "It's enough for me!" screamed or softly said: "I can not stand it here anymore."
But I do. Because I have the hope that things will be different. Because there must be ways to talk about harmony and happiness and closeness, that is what we dreamed of in the beginning, into the next few years and decades. Everything else would seem like a betrayal of the human being we were when we fell in love.
The decisive phase of life
Why is the time from 45 so crucial to whether we grow old together happily? The age researcher Hartmut Radebold and his wife Hildegard write in their book "To grow older wants to be learned" that the life stage from 45 for the partnership after the age of 60 has "crucial importance." Because after being in love, the relationship is shaped by who we are: our personalities and the conflicts that arise from them. In later years the relationship is shaped by our behavior, the way we have learned to deal with our conflicts.
Let's talk
So it's about time: if we finally find a good way to talk and accept each other after the age of 45, then we do not have to work together anymore.
I know older couples who have succeeded, and it is good to look for role models. The overflowing, energetic colleague with her silent, stoic man, in which we all thought at the beginning, opposites attract, is clear. And they have found over the years, apparently, a way not to constantly collide their opposites, but to compensate them:
"At some point we started to clear up any misunderstandings immediately," the colleague once said, "because I realized that if I always say that he is just like that, then we will not get any further."
But many studies show that couples are developing apart at the crucial stage rather than towards each other. Maybe because growing older throws everyone back on themselves: When I ask myself how much time I have left and what I do best with it, there is no talk of "we".
At worst, you end up like the parents of a good friend.After we said goodbye to them, I had to go back to the house because I had forgotten something. The mother sat in her room, smoking and watching television. The father was sitting in his room, two doors down, smoking and watching television. Both looked at the "crime scene".
Between independence and commonality
Swiss psychologist Pasqualina Perrig-Chiello, one of the leading researchers on the aging of couples, says we face "a difficult tightrope walk between independence and commonality": "We need to redefine our partnership over and over, and this re-definition is in place Mandatory in the middle of life, because of the many biographical and familial transitions at this time. "
A very sober formulation for the chaos of busy children, broken careers and illnesses that we call life. In the beginning, in love, we thought we would master all the challenges together. Now we find that solving these challenges makes it easy to just let things go.
We are getting older in different ways
Are women experiencing aging differently than men? We are getting older together but not at the same time and not the same way. That's another reason why we move away from each other. There are individual differences, but also fundamental ones: women and men experience their aging differently.
Individual is that I no longer feel young. The question of whether I am young or old concerns me. Luise, who is as old (or young) as I am, has never asked herself this question, she says there is plenty to do at the moment.
So we do not experience the same thing. And we will not continue to do that. When it comes to getting older, women have to deal with menopause, new career challenges (for example, late return), and double and triple family responsibilities.
Men often put more stress on aging
Because the children are in puberty, the parents are in need of care and the man may be a mourning dumpling. For an average man like me experiences aging as a time in which he loses importance at work and in private life. At work the boys move in, and at home we realize that most social contacts are about the woman and we do not have enough friends.
Where men are much more likely than women to break out: by seemingly starting over with a younger woman again. What the Forsaken feel not only as an injury, but also as an escape from the common task: the aging.
Most people become more emotionally stable as they get older
What can I contribute to the common aging process? I think every unfortunate old couple I see buying poplin jackets in the pedestrian precinct with their faces gone dead has gone the same way: growing old together as if it were a fate to endure.
Psychology distinguishes between people who believe that their lives are happening to them and those who believe that they can influence it themselves.
In the second case one speaks of people who have a high "self-responsibility". They are people who "know, it depends on oneself, one can improve oneself and the respective situation, form and accept", so the psychologist Perrig-Chiello. It has been proven that self-responsible people are much happier, especially in old age. And if self-responsibility is the key to satisfaction, you also have to face the partnership in your 45s and up, knowing that you can shape and improve it. It is not true that the older they become, the more inflexible and defined they become.
"Most people become more compatible, more conscientious and emotionally more stable as they grow older," says aging researcher Hans-Werner Wahl. That sounds wonderful, but I can only succeed if I change my mindset. If I accept that it is up to me and to us as a couple, whether in ten years' time we will continue to argue about the same things as today, if we become lonely in pairs or if we take responsibility for making it better with us than ever.
Our grandparents still regarded the relationship as immutable
Maybe we are too influenced by the generation of our grandparents. She seemed to see her relationship as something invariable: they came to terms with each other, they called each other, and it would have been laughable if they had not been able to do that after two world wars.
Meanwhile, experts see the "promoting the relationship" as a human development task, especially at an advanced age. Actually, psychology understands "development tasks" as those that every human being has to solve for themselves in order to grow up. For example, to accept that one can no longer protect the parents, or give up illusions about themselves. It is a new and exciting perspective to have a relationship as a couple growing up by promoting a relationship throughout your life.
How to promote a partnership that has existed for many years? Yes, it's about "trust, tolerance, openness, and tacit understanding," as psychologist Perrig-Chiello says; it is about the change of sexuality to a "whole new tenderness", it is about creative solutions in living together, maybe even to separate apartments; everything that helps to balance commonality and independence.
The marriage counselor Hans Jellouschek speaks of the importance of having a new "third party" when the children are out of the house. To look in a common direction by engaging together, in the garden, as grandparents or - an example that comes to my mind - against "Stuttgart 21".
Jellouschek also describes the importance of reconciling oneself with the common past, of forgiving one another and of leaving unfinished affairs behind at some point.
Where is the desire for a new beginning when you need it?
All that sounds nice and familiar, because we thought in the beginning that nothing would be easier than that: be open, listen to each other, be forgiving, take care of yourself. Lovers are unbeatable in it.
Now, in the beginning, in the mid-forties, we have forgotten all about it. We do not listen because we already know what the other one will say. We forget to schedule time for us as a couple, and supersede what there is to forgive.
Where is the desire for a new beginning when you need it? Because close to each other again right now, since everyone is busy with himself, break out of deadlocked roles and behaviors: That would be a real departure. It would be a bigger start than the small gallery that Luise dreams about, or the dizzy marathon, which I rejuvenate every year and for which I do not train.
Why is it so important that we become more similar? "Those who stereotypically cling to gender roles will have a hard time," says psychologist Perrig-Chiello, talking about the need for "androgynislation," that is, balancing feminine and masculine traits with age.
There is scientific evidence that men become "more feminine" in their old age, that is, above all, more emotional and women "more masculine", more active, more assertive. However, this does not happen automatically, but our cooperation is required: by breaking out of old role models. There are good reasons for this. On the one hand, studies show that androgynous people not only have longer life expectancies, but are more attractive in old age and that an "androgynous role orientation" makes aging easier. "Anyone who is still a female as a woman in her old age makes a fool of himself, and who as an aging man is still limited to the role of the maker is doomed to failure," says Pasqualina Perrig-Chiello.
It may be a coincidence, but the most likable couple in my mid-50s that I know has swapped roles some years ago. Now he is doing a yoga education and taking care of the children while working full-time. Of course, both have their problems; but because everyone has come to know different worlds over time, they now live together.
In the end, after all, I'm happier when I spend more time with the kids than at the office.
Why can we relax despite all the challenges? The fact that saying goodbye to defined roles is so important for aging together makes me hope.
At the beginning of 40 we are at a low point - then it goes uphill
At just under 43, I belong to a transitional generation: I believe that we are the first to try more or less successfully for years to break away from the old roles. Partly because we have to: Which family can still live on a salary today? Partly because we want to: In the end, I'm happier after all, when I spend more time with the kids than at the office.
It's nice to hear that we're well on the way to the future together. Because this way costs a lot of strength, which sometimes I do not know from where I should still take it.
A relatively new study has shown that life satisfaction of men and women is at its lowest in Germany at 42.9 years. Exactly my age. With 20 we are extremely satisfied, then it goes down to 42.9 and from then on only uphill.
The reasons are speculated: Presumably, it is because in our lives we are learning to deal better with defeats and starting to set more realistic goals.
Aging seems to be a time of inequality
I admit that I've tacitly assumed that, as you get older, you have to bravely respond to growing sadness. Satisfaction gives strength, and after I realized that getting older together is work, I can now imagine where the strength for this work should come from.
As I said, since Boltenhagen twelve years have passed. So far, we have experienced the big things at the same time, no wonder: we were in love at the same time, we got married the same day, were at the same time young parents.
However, aging seems to be a phase of non-simultaneity, we do not even retire on the same date. It will take patience, we will have to wait for each other after years.
I recently surprised Luise in the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror and counted the gray ones in her dark brown hair. And because she was already there, she immediately showed me her wrinkles. No, they had not noticed me yet. Then she examined my wrinkles.
And I thought, how good, how nice, because why not look at us, that we spent quite a lot of years together and have experienced a lot together? And I thought how much it terrifies me that my wife does not look as young as she did when I was 30 because I see that I'm not alone on the way to the future. "We're getting old," she said. "That's right," I said. I'm not sure if that was the right answer from her point of view; if not, hopefully I will have many more years to make amends.
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