"Pleasure and Desire in Mid Life" by Hadas Weiss

Pleasure and Desire in Midlife

In November of last year, I was bubbly with excitement about my life. By December, I was a weepy, barely functional mess. Nothing changed over that month. The excitement was over my recent move from Berlin to Lisbon to take up a six-year research fellowship. It came after fifteen odd years of zipping around between different countries for much shorter postdoctoral gigs and, most recently, a year of nerve-wracking unemployment in which my academic career looked to be over. I’d been so relieved to stay in academia – to experience it in Lisbon no less, a city everyone had nice things to say about. I would have all the freedom I longed for and more job security than I’d ever enjoyed. I could barely believe my luck. Until, virtually from one day to the next, it felt meaningless. 

Is there a non-cringe way to broach a midlife crisis? The term smacks of frivolity and self-indulgence, all divorced dad trading off family for sports car and stripper, or alcoholic housewife no longer needed by her children. I balked at the stereotypes, but the symptoms, boredom with things that once absorbed you, nostalgia for feelings long gone, wondering why you’re doing the things you do, what the point of them even is, but the symptoms – boredom by things that once absorbed, nostalgia for feelings long gone, wondering why you’re doing the things you do, what the point of them even is and how much longer you can keep doing them, hankering after a different life, were undeniable. 

It took me a while to utter the words “midlife crisis” but, as soon as I did, the floodgates opened. My friends – not even some of them, most of my friends – responded with versions of “welcome to the club.” One took quiet quitting to extremes: hiding behind the locked door of her campus office to read romance novels all day. Another lamented his dullness: in his twenties, he wrote poetry and made art and composed music and now all he did was work. Another, still, said her job felt pointless and her marriage beyond repair. She’d consulted a divorce lawyer and wished to take her kids and run, spending her days in political activism. 

“But you have everything you wanted,” said my mother quite reasonably over the phone. She’d prayed for me to get the fellowship and was almost as happy as I was when I did. She asked what a midlife crisis meant. “I never had a midlife crisis,” she said when I explained it, then she called out: “Moti! Have you ever had a midlife crisis?” muffled sounds and then: “Your your father never had one either.”

I somehow made it to middle age without a marriage to wreck or children to abandon but there was the job. Research had long lost its luster for me, though I appreciated the lifestyle. Research was the game I had to play to maintain this lifestyle. Exciting, it was not, but sometimes I’d enjoyed aspects of it. Now it felt insufferable. Six years,  – a godsend when I was awarded the fellowship – loomed ahead like a prison sentence. But like some lifers behind bars for their entire adulthoods, I didn’t know what to do with myself if released. A memoir I finished writing shortly after my move to Portugal represented my only escape route, but its failure to win over agents rendered this route delusional. 

I cut more and more corners at work. Experience taught me how to get decent mileage age out of scant fieldwork data, so I assembled the bare minimum. Instead of aiming for high-quality publications, I churned out inferior, low-effort ones. Even so, I was unable to carry out the most routine tasks without staring into space or dissolving into tears. I tried consulting the scholarship on midlife crisis but there wasn’t much to go by. Academics didn’t take it seriously. It is difficult to pin down. The age boundaries keep shifting and the symptoms are far from distinct. I found surveys indicating a U-shape in wellbeing across the lifespan, with middle age as its low point. Studies of great apes exhibiting the same nadir hinted at biological causes. Among humans, though, the low appeared more common in high-income countries, indicating a wholly different (dare I repeat self-indulgent) set of triggers.

Shit does tend to happen in midlife, though: marriages sour, careers stagnate, loved ones die or fall off. Calling it a midlife crisis lends it a certain gravitas. And I never could resist sensationalizing my life. Much of it homebound, I still romanticized the diminutive stirrings of my even-keeled disposition. Now that the stirrings have grown tempestuous, I needed them to mean something. I would stop worrying about the reality of the crisis, then, and mine it for insight as a trope. 

My first attempts were discouraging. Literature has typically glamorized a trite version (described by Mark Jackson in Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis) whereby middle-aged men break free of the stranglehold of occupational and marital conformity in a heroic reassertion of their individuality. Unable to flatter myself that much, I gravitated to the social sciences, my natural terrain. In The Normal Chaos of Love, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim identify the midlife crisis as a sociological rather than a psychological event. In pre-industrial times, there was little room for self-discovery but now, you were encouraged to test out motley identities and take responsibility for whatever meaning they helped you wrest out of an insecure existence. Realizing you probably had many years to live after establishing a home and career made you dream up a better life through personal reinvention. 

MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya opens es Midlife: A Philosophical Guide with his own midlife crisis which – relatable to me – involved academic work wearing thin. Setiya deals with his by doing what he knows best, namely delving into philosophy. It makes for an inspiring read, but I wasn’t swayed by the conclusion. Tracing the midlife crisis to the tyranny of projects that tend to plateau around midlife, Setiya espoused finding joy in the action: not the completed book but the writing itself and so forth. 

I’d have taken kindlier to it had the book included a how-to component. My life, too, revolved around projects. I wrote for the sake of publishing. Read for edification. Watched shows to improve my Portuguese. And those were enjoyablewere the enjoyable activities! I also worked out daily to keep my weight and mood in check, but it was distinctly unfun. My academic work, I was either bored by or actively hated. My self-care consisted of piercing my face back and forth with a needle roller because I associated beauty with pain. In fact, any accomplishment not associated with pain was suspect to me. Few things I did were genuinely pleasurable and next to none were pleasurable in their own right. 

It hadn’t bothered me before, but it did now. I learned that the midlife crisis afflicted people once their lives stabilized. Struggles behind, they took stock of gratifications delayed and responsibilities shouldered. Small wonder they’d want to let loose and prioritize pleasure. I wanted that too. Or rather, that’s what I thought I wanted. Maybe it’s what I thought I should want. I felt so discombobulated that I was never quite sure. I feared having become so repressed I’d lost sight of my true desires. 

The confusion led me to Michel Onfray’s A Hedonist Manifesto, advocating through thinkers ancient and modern for a life of pleasure. “Pleasure scares people,” Onfray writes, and I felt a pang of recognition. Pleasure certainly scared me, with its threat of derailing my Projects and Routines. Still, Onfray’s version was one I could live with. It was a carefully plotted out pleasure under tight rein. “We make a list of what delightful things could happen, what distresses could occur, what will be pleasant or disagreeable, and then we judge, doubt, and calculate before acting.” 

bunches under “hedonistic morality” attributes like thoughtfulness, commitment, generosity, and effort. Arguing against those who associate hedonism with egoism, he insists that “any kind of pleasure-arithmetic entails a concern for others… Others’ joy leads to my own joy; others’ discomfort produces my own discomfort.”

I didn’t buy it as a philosophy. Onfray’s hedonism evoked the generalized good will of a gated community – conditions unattainable for most of mankind. Still, I was captivated by his notion of pleasure for its own sake, especially when shared. It sounded like a nice way to live life. Even this tamed pleasure felt out of reach, though. Perhaps for that reason, I recognized it as a possible escape route from the rut I was in.

This, too, was no how-to book, so I had to work out for myself how to put hedonism into practice. Doing what, though? I contemplated the rejuvenating power of nature OKAY NO I thought about sex. Now, lest I stand accused of having contrived a convoluted path to the most clichéd of midlife-crisis excesses, allow me to clarify that this was not the place to which my mind would normally wander. At this point in my life, I had not had sex – not so much as kissed or even lusted after a man – in about ten years, for reasons. Nothing could be farther from my lackluster, passionless life. My libido, if it still existed, was dormant. Having sex again would be a sea change.

Feeling insecure about the next obvious step, I asked my friend John, who dated frequently a lot, for advice. He told me not to worry. At least in the first encounters, the men would do everything. “You could be completely passive and nonverbal,” he said: “honestly, you could be a corpse. But you do have to set boundaries. Girls these days like it rough and guys kind of expect that.” This was news to me. My usual porn search term was “tender” to which I defaulted after “sex with a man who cares deeply about his friends and family” yielded no result.

I took the leap and opened a profile on a dating app, opting for minimalism. Later, a man told me that what he liked about it was that it seemed to be saying “I don’t give a fuck.” One of my photos was posted sideways and I never bothered to rotate it. The entirety of the text read “New to Lisbon and to online dating. Looking only for something casual.” It turned out to be enough. In hindsight, I benefited from Portuguese women being on the conservative side, or so I’ve been told repeatedly by sexually frustrated Portuguese men. 

I was overwhelmed by the attention I received. Shocked, really. I knew in theory that this was how dating apps worked but I never expected it to apply to women of, ahem, a certain age. “I can’t believe how easy this is,” I told friends, and the men among them set me straight. “Congratulations on being a woman” said one.

The following weeks were revelatory. Take the men. All of them younger, sometimes scandalously younger. Nice, too: they paid me compliments and I ate it up. Contrary to John’s warnings, they were not at all rough (one asked politely if he could pull on my hair and then gave it a gentle little tug). 

And they had something to teach me. After filtering for appearance on account of I am shallow, I selected men who described themselves as hedonists, bon vivants, free spirits, and living life to its fullest. It was a calculated departure. Past Me would have gone for smart, arguably at odds with “I wake up every day with a smile.” But if I was to turn pleasure into the pivot of my new life, I needed adept guides. 

Adept they were, and I was a keen apprentice. Onfray’s principle of taking and giving pleasure became my moral compass. If it didn’t come naturally at first, I was getting better at it. My libido, too, had stirred back to life. A milestone was one Sunday early afternoon when I felt horny. It took me a minute to recognize it because horniness in the abstract was something I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted sex right away and the particulars hardly mattered. I opened the app and chatted with several men at once in search of the first available, cutting off those who mentioned “tonight” or “this week.” An Italian expat finally rose to the occasion, inviting me over to his place, in convenient walking distance from mine. I accepted and, not two hours later, I was back home with an afterglow.

I also aspired to get out my head and give myself over fully to the experience. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped it would be. “Have a glass of wine before” suggested my friend Pedro. “I usually do” I said. “Then have two.” But I didn’t want to be intoxicated on alcohol. I wanted to be intoxicated on life! What a delightful conclusion to my midlife crisis that would be. Alas, my pleasure was mediated by self-discovery and growth. Yet again, I had a project. The most pleasurable aspect of even the good sex was having it count towards the realization of this project. Seeing as my ultimate goal was pleasure for its own sake, it felt self-defeating in a way I couldn’t untangle. 

Then came Rui. He wanted to meet on the same day we matched but I was on my period. He suggested we wait, then, as the things he was best at were incompatible. He went into titillating detail, intoning that his greatest pleasure was giving pleasure. We made plans for later that week and I wrote back “looking forward!!” which is the extent of my sexting capacity. 

We met at the bar near my house. Rui oozed masculinity and not of the toxic, macho kind. Of the easily confident, greatest-pleasure-is-giving-pleasure kind. A private chef, he described an elaborate dish he cooked for his client, taking two hours to prepare. “What do you cook for yourself?” I asked. “The same,” he replied, “I also like to eat.” 

I couldn’t wait to touch him and, as soon as we stepped into my apartment, I did. Specifically, I ran my fingers through his hair. He had an irresistible thicket of black curls, and I loved that I had to reach way up to touch them. He loved that I was “so small.” Rui was not lying about his skills: I came quick and hard. “What can I do for you?” I asked after catching my breath. “You can let me give you another orgasm,” he said as a chorus hummed and angels flapped their wings. 

Rui would’ve been the lover to end all lovers, but he was noncommittal. I accepted it with magnanimity in the Onfray persuasion. Every woman – especially every middle-aged woman – could use a Rui in her life, and I was happy for my sisters to experience the pleasure I had.

Finally feeling myself something of a hedonist, I turned to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. I read the book with skepticism back in graduate school, but now I was feeling more receptive. Its point is to challenge Sigmund Freud's proposition that the struggle for existence in the face of scarcity required the libido’s deflection towards socially useful activity like work and procreation. Freud held that you had to give up “destructive” pleasure for the more restrained, expedient sort. For Marcuse, this was nothing other than a symptom of domination. The very word “productivity” implied, to him, internalized repression or its philistine glorification (ouch, I thought as I read it: I evaluated most days by how productive I was). Obsessing over work was neurotic: an attempt to make yourself feel important, even when there was no particular need for your work (ouch again). 

Marcuse envisioned a non-repressive society whose members would be re-sexualized away from “genital supremacy” and towards “polymorphous perversity” – deriving erotic pleasure out of every part of the body. Such pleasure would incessantly build up and intensify. To me, it sounded exhausting, and it only got worse: the pleasure orientation would doubtlessly engender fresh pains, frustrations and conflicts, even as these, too, would be infused with value.

I still had a way to go. Even post-Rui, I related so much more to the productivity Marcuse mocked than to the pleasure he championed. Grad school muscle memory made me pick up the ultimate anti-Marcuse book next: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I remembered the argument in broad strokes: don’t think that by saying yes to sex you’re saying no to power because nowhere are we more deeply controlled than through our sexuality itself. I was having laborious sex that night when it came to mind. Not the argument, just the fact that I could be at home making headway with the book. Preferring Foucault over sex cast quite the shadow over my personal reinvention.  

A few days later, I hopped into bed with a charming artist – at least he charmed me by speaking intelligently about art – and then he couldn’t get an erection. He was flustered, I waved it off, but, after he left, I was crestfallen. He was in his thirties, a non-smoker, and we had not been drinking. I could think of no reason for why this should have happened other than that I was a decrepit old hag. I glared at my body in the mirror. My sex-appeal defunct, I would have to sublimate through strolls in the park. 

It weighed on me heavily for most of the following day. Then, the Italian within walking distance asked if I felt like coming over again for a quicky. Giddy with relief, I texted back that I was busy. I wasn’t, but he had already granted me the validation I needed: sex was redundant. 

So much for hedonism. 

My Berlin friend Andreas was not surprised. All of his one-time acid dropping, gay sex-club patronizing friends were now walking their dogs, doing home repairs, and growing fat. What they realized was that hedonism distracted you from your goals. No, there was no balance to be had: you ended up on Grindr every half hour because it took over. “I know you, Hadas, you want security.” Hedonism was its opposite, it destabilized you. All of the hedonists Andreas knew proved the rule. You didn’t behave that way if you were happy. 

Another Berlin friend, Alina, also saw it coming. Open the door to pleasure and the psychic tumult comes flooding along with it. You couldn’t pick and choose. But in contrast to Andreas, she was all for it. For years, she’d been claiming that I had too little pleasure in my (admittedly sedate) life and that, as a result, I was confusing contentment with happiness. I didn’t think I was, and now I missed the contentment, even if that’s all it was. I had already gotten my share of tumult with the midlife crisis. My feelings were swinging wild and loose for months now: pleasure was supposed to restabilize me.  

But in pushing her agenda, Alina was conflating two things. What she was referring to, what I had precious little of before, and what knocked me right off balance now, was not pleasure but desire. Pleasure was nothing: quick to satisfy, it was also easier to control.

Desire, gushing out of darker reaches of the psyche, was more chaotic, hijacking your brain until you couldn’t think straight, keeping you up at night pining and plotting intrigue, making you do unwise and regrettable things. 

Desire played no part in my hookups. With the men I met, sex was a foregone conclusion unless I pulled the stops. My pleasure in these encounters lasted for exactly as long as the sex had. As soon as it was over, I would leave or send them off. And since there was usually someone else lined up, I barely gave them a second thought.

And yet I was consumed by desire throughout this time, a scorching, ravenous desire. It wasn’t about sex, but about my memoir. It was the first I’d written and I knew it to be flawed. I yearned pitifully for it to be chosen, recognized, and taken up by an agent or an editor with a “hands on approach” (their webpages were more arousing to me than any dating profile). 

The desire was infantile, as desires go: to be seen for the person I could be, the person I believed I inherently was, to be nurtured into becoming that person. Virtually begging for it left me more threadbare and exposed than sex ever had, like laying naked, my middle-aged limbs asplay, facing a flaccid penis. 

Was I trying to use pleasure to distract myself from desire? If so, it was no match. I did enjoy the sex, but my attention wasn’t devoured by it, and it was a far cry from polymorphous perversity. Kissing, for example, did nothing for me, a mere prelude to sex, like a book’s preface I didn’t mind skimming but could do without. I recalled the weak-in-the-knees ecstasy the French Kiss used to unleash in me. At ages 14 to18, when it was as far as I got, I thought I might die every time I had one. I wanted to relive that feeling! But then, why should I? Do we get to relive any of our firsts? I certainly didn’t immerse myself in novels the way I used to, when the worlds they conjured up were more real to me than the one I lived in. But chemistry couldn’t fix that. Pleasure might be different. 

“I’m going to say something very un-feminist,” said a friend. I knew where she was headed because I’d read about it on the Internet. A diminished sex-drive was a common enough symptom of perimenopause. This was the same friend whose marriage was dead and whose job felt pointless. A couple of months after that confession, she reported that she was putting minimal effort into her job. As for the marriage, the children were still young. You didn’t break up a family just like that. She was taking estrogen supplements, though, and they helped: sex was better and the moodiness was gone. 

After I got off the phone with her, I searched online for a gynecologist and booked an appointment with a certain Dr. Costa. She was receiving patients at a nearby clinic called Hospital de Jesus, which I immediately took to calling The Jesus Hospital. Dr. Costa was in her sixties, and she insisted on running me through a series tests. A pap smear on the spot (which took a while because she fumbled for instruments and dropped them on the floor with a loud rattle before inserting them into my vagina) and referrals for a mammogram, an ultrasound and blood work. 

I didn’t mind the tests so long as I left her office with a prescription. But she refused to give me one before receiving the results. Like everything else in Portugal, it would take time. Possibly a month. A month! “Mas, mas,” I panted. Dr. Costa spoke no English, and I had to convey the urgency in my halting Portuguese. “The sex is bad!” I cried: “One month is muito tempo for bad sex!” Dr. Costa was not swayed.

My pursuit of pleasure was in fact losing steam. Far from driving me to delirium, I engaged in it with the same no-nonsense sobriety I approached every project I’ve ever taken up. My phone now included contacts like “Hugo (the other one).” I’d meet them on a bad hair day with an air of “let’s get this over with.” Instead of putting out fresh sheets, I turned the pillow I drooled on to the other side. I scheduled hookups for 4pm specifically to pry myself away from my inbox. Some men, I felt no attraction to but told myself they might be otherwise useful. “Did this help you with your midlife crisis?” asked a 27-year-old after sex. “I’m not sure,” I said. 

“It’s like the crisis I went through last year,” said my friend Dan. I remembered it well: a miserable episode that estranged him from his brother and lost him his house. “But it would be too presumptuous to call mine a midlife crisis.” Dan had terminal cancer, under control but doctors weren’t sanguine about the time he had left. Commenting on my sexcapades, Dan said that his own sex life was over: cancer was a turnoff to women. He wasn’t sad about it, not outwardly: just making the most of the time he had left.

Our conversation gave me pause. Preoccupied with my crisis, I never questioned “midlife.” My reinvention took for granted a life long enough for New Me to unfurl. Even in my sorry state, I recoiled from the alternative. There would be no crisis if I didn’t fret so much about a vast, open-ended future. Bracketing it, though, would also dilute the fantasy, however vague, of the delights that lay ahead. 

And I was addicted to fantasy. When not succumbing to panic attacks I was lost in reverie. On good days, it made writing and reading more fun than sex. It’s also what made Sex more fun than sex. Without fantasy, there’d be nothing to keep me going.

Marcuse loved fantasy too. He considered it a refusal to accept any limitation on freedom. This refusal peeled away your skin, though. In projecting a future image of a yet unformed self, its realization was inextricable from present deficiencies. Magnified them, really. I thought about it while heading back home from The Jesus Hospital, a month after my first visit. Going over my test results, Dr. Costa said that she would not prescribe me any hormones because no hormones were lacking. I’d admitted that I did find sex pleasurable, and she did not see the problem. 

“Not pleasurable enough, though,” I could have told her. Not enough to reconcile me with the life I now disdained. Not enough to assuage my dread of a murky future. Not enough resolve the mystery of how to inhabit it. Even in midlife, it impended with formidable immensity. 

I didn’t argue with Dr. Costa this time because my mind was elsewhere. On the day before our appointment, I had a video call with an agent. She liked my memoir but asked for changes. Evasive about what would happen if I made them, she did dangle the possibility of matching me up with a publishing house whose editor would “share [my] vision.” My heart nearly leaped out of my chest.

It was the first warm weekend after a month of incessant rain, and yet I never left my desk, not for a minute. Everyone was out and about, soaking up the sun: the sounds of merriment carried through my window. I also kept getting pesky texts from men I’d connected with, all the Hugos and Brunos and Alexandres, asking if I was available. There were pleasures to be had, immediate and polymorphously perverse. But I was single minded. Old habits reasserting themselves, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Pleasure suspended, crisis deferred, I wrote and rewrote, my body contorted with desire, my mind abuzz with fear.

Hadas Weiss is an anthropologist living in Lisbon. She is the author of We Have Never Been Middle Class (Verso) and of a still unpublished memoir/humor/anthropology crossover.