“There is a spirit that exists between women that really kicks in when they are in difficulties. “I find women are motivated, eager, easy to deal with and naturally empathetic towards each other,” Morley says. He runs courses for women at The Camp, a weight-loss and fitness boot camp based in Scotland. “They are either super-competitive or massively defeatist.” “I find them hard to deal with,” he says. Sebastian Morley, a former commander in the SAS who has seen tours in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, agrees that men have lost their way. In divorce, for instance, women typically come out marginally happier even though they often suffer a bigger financial hit the Economica survey showed that men tend to be especially badly knocked by unemployment, an effect that persists for up to five years. And psychological studies (such as a 2013 survey of 10,000 people published in the journal Economica which examined the way in which we adjust to new circumstances) show that women are better able to adjust in the wake of a major life change. It is certainly true that changes in the economy in recent decades, with a shift away from manufacturing, have removed a source of male pride, identity and companionship. Many of us have lost our self-confidence and self-respect, and become insular and inward-looking.” I feel my generation of men inhabit a place that I call neutered uselessness. Men lost their way when they stopped going out and killing the food or bringing in the bacon. “The immediate reaction to divorce is to sink into a slump of despair, but then you turn into a teenager again – it’s the false paradise of endless encounters with new women. Unless you really are able to look back at what happened, you can’t move on. “We are caught between the old model of being the breadwinner and the new model of being the co-washer-upper and feeder, and the truth is we never really mastered either of these roles – old or new – and this has led to a profound sense of crisis in men. This became a pattern, a shifting life with seemingly no purpose. So he had left that job and retrained as a landscape gardener, and that hadn’t suited him either, although he had liked the outdoors element of it. He had worked for a bank but never felt he fitted in. He had flitted from one job to another, never quite finding the “thing” he wanted to do. He had found it hard to commit – and not just, as the cliché goes, in his relationships. He then explained that “it” just hadn’t happened for him. It occurred to me that, for a man aged 52, this was quite an odd situation to be in, no wife or kids or money or even a house to call his own. One of them – never married, no kids – hadn’t had a job for the past five years and was working unpaid as a carer. It was great fun but most of the men I talked to were in some form of meltdown. Take this as an example: a few weeks ago I was at a friend’s 50th birthday party. Obviously not all men are like this, but there does seem to be a preponderance of men over the age of 45 who feel as if they are on the scrap-heap. “I just don’t know what I want in my life anymore.” He says he really does want to buy a Harley-Davidson and head off down Route 66. Then there is Steve, 49, a travel agent, long-time married, who has hit a midlife crisis. “I don’t see myself as that type of man,” he says, “but I feel so lonely and I don’t know what to do with my life.” There is Ryan, aged 53, who has never married and is in crisis about why he hasn’t. There is 45-year-old Lee, who has just “gotten divorced” and has, in the course of a month, slept with 15 women. READ: FIVE WAYS TO AVOID A MIDLIFE CRISIS
#Why do i feel pressure in the middle of my forehead full#
The classes here are full of men – men with great big identity issues. But this resort is not brimming with stressed-out women, worn thin and ragged by juggling motherhood, wifedom and being the heads of companies. I am sitting by the swimming pool at the Canyon Ranch resort in Tucson, Arizona, only it is not really a resort, it is a fitness/wellness/life-enhancing centre where people who are very stressed come to detox and, as I am discovering, “find” themselves.
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