Therapists and relationship researchers share six questions that can bring couples closer in middle age. Midlife can be a weird time. Maybe you’re grappling with new aches and pains or brain fog.
Perhaps you’re one of the 2.5 million sandwich generation caregivers simultaneously caring for children and aging parents. Maybe you’re having an identity crisis, maybe not.
Middle age lands somewhere between 36 and 64 , or maybe 40 to 60 , depending on whom you ask. It is also an inflection point in relationships, experts say, a time when many couples emerge from the daily grind of building careers and a family, and find that they’re in a union they no longer fully recognise. Rates of “grey divorce” among adults over 50 have doubled in the United States since the 1990s.
“If you have children, your children are typically launching,” said Linda Hershman, the author of Gray Divorce and a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Pennsylvania. “Couples are suddenly turning around and looking at each other and thinking: What is this marriage about, and what is this marriage going to be about?” We asked Hershman and other relationship experts to offer some big-picture questions that middle-aged couples can discuss — or can ask themselves — to help them better understand their relationships, and what they want..
