"Ohh, I'm old, I have to buy a car beyond my means and sleep with 20 year old girls! I am a cliche! Help me!"

My father's midlife crisis, as I have stated before, was getting back into Star Wars.

It's how you handle your "crisis" that shows what kind of person you are, I suppose. My dad has shown us all that he is a nerd. An awesome, awesome nerd.

I have a hard time feeling bad for men. Even the men that I really love. Yes, I know, I am a feminazi. At least I own it.

I work with someone going through a midlife crisis. Divorce, snazy new condo, new red sports car, dating pool suddenly much younger...but she's a woman. And she got huge fake boobs instead of just dating someone with huge fake boobs.

@rhody: Yeah, I do too. It's a complex that has caused a lot of relationships too fail. So what? You're getting older. So are we. Nothing makes it okay for you, as a man, to act like a jackass. Even your "crisis." Do you see women who have gone through menopause freaking out and shacking up with 20 year old men and buying useless shit they don't need? Not really. It's life, bitches. Deal.

@meaghan2k: *to fail. Second damn time.

Women have midlife crises as well. Sort of like when my mum looked in the mirror one day and complained about how she couldn't recognize herself. She scheduled an appointment at the salon and cut her hair really really short, like how she used to wear it when I was young, and got highlights that didn't work so well with the color she had. She regretted it so badly. END of midlife crises.

@hortense: Aw! That warmed my cold heart.

@hortense: Always a good choice.

My dad was lucky, people assume my mother is the younger model. She looks about 10 years younger than her age, and my dad lost a lot of his hair early and used to look older. Thrill of flashing a young wife, with the joy of having a clever woman.

I always wonder about the younger women who fall for these losers? Why, ladies, why? I know most 20 year-old me are no prizes but why go right to the mid-45's jerk offs in crisis? What's the attraction?

Is there such thing as a mid-twenties crisis? Cuz I think I've got that.

@meaghan2k: Hhm. Actually, and I don't mean to quibble here, but I have, in fact, seen a lot of women going through menopause freaking out and buying shit they don't need. Not so much sleeping with 20-year-old men.

Being stupid and making terrible mistakes, being afraid of getting old, acting like a jackass...it's not just men that do that stuff.

Yeahhh, if waking up and realizing you're not 20 (um, duh?) causes you to abandon your family, spend thousands on toys and hairplugs, and generally lose the respect of many of your valued friends, that sounds like a meltdown. Which is sort of a crisis. But you go, boys! Embrace the crazy!

@meaghan2k: Yeah. If anything, middle age is tougher on women, seeing as how our bodies declare war on us. There's a lady in my office going through "the change" right now, and she had to douse her whole face and neck in ice water every few hours. Poor thing.

But... I guess men have prostate problems in middle age.

@mbprice: Quarter-life crisis.

It's got a lot more attention now that people don't start learning their trades at fourteen and keep at it until they die.

@hortense: how a person handles all of life's crises shows their true character, regardless of age or gender or income.
@meaghan2k: i am so with you. it never fails to amaze me how men live in this bubble thinking that they are permanently 18 years old forever. wake up and see the receding hairline, dude. we don't have the ability to travel on the space/time continuum, nor do we have a flux capacitor. the only direction is forward! it's either age or die, guys.

Ahhhh....the men described are douches, and everything the author says is true, yes, but a part of me is sympathetic to these guys. Perhaps because I'm a dude, although some 25 years away from the mid-life curse.

I've read that there's underlying hormonal reasons for this kind of behaviour. The body starts producing the same levels of hormones that were produced as a teenager, hence the similarly stoopid behaviour. That's no excuse, of course (we all choose how we act).

The rub is that these crisies don't hit at actual mid-life (unless men are planning on living to 100) but once it's clear that there's far less ahead than there has already been, and adventure has never come.

Why do only men seem to get to have "mid-Life Crisis"? I think I'm starting to have one and instead the world wants to call it "premenopausal". WTF!

Anyway, when my husband felt his midlife crisis coming on, I told him to find a new hobby, "challenge yourself, and not with your dick!". Bloody fool took flying lessons and bought a GD airplane. 10 years later and it really was the best thing for him...and us. Being a private/civil pilot has added a whole new dimension to our lives and we have fun flying places;Santa Barbara for lunch, weekend in Napa, 15 minutes and were from the south bay to the valley with no 405 traffic. Granted it took me years to get on that plane with him and even longer to allow him to take the kids...but eventually it happened.

I've always been sympathetic to midlife crisis men. I, too, am a narcissistic jerk who is more novelty seeking than most women.

The buying a sports car and bangin your secretary thing is kinda lame though.

@mbprice: @braak: i really think it should be renamed the "holy living SHIT i'm a grown up and i have no FUCKING idea what to do with myself" crisis. perhaps a little longer, but very apt, in my opinion.

@cardboardbelt: Perhaps? Definitely because you're a dude.

I think the women in The Real Housewives of Orange County are having mid-life crises that started at about 28 or so. Sad.

@cardboardbelt: You know, you make a lot of sense.

@Pinkosaurus: Oooh! Oooh! I can answer that one!

An acquaintance of mine married a much older man. She claimed she was doing it for love, and that he just "got" her better than any of the men her age (mid-to-upper twenties), when in reality, he got her things -- fixed her nose, enlarged her tits, filled up her closet with trashy logo gear -- and then got her a divorce nine months after the wedding because he missed his first wife. (Who wouldn't take him back. Hee!)

I didn't feel sorry for either of them.

About damn time.

@PICKLES_IN_MY_TUNA:
Beautiful story!

@braak: Well, unfortunately, I am still doing the same thing I was doing at 14, more or less. Maybe that's the problem, after all...

@Leiakat: My dad occasionally turns to me, with a look of pure wonderment and joy and says, "do you KNOW what a babe your mom is? I got so lucky."

This is almost enough to make me consider getting married myself one day. Maybe I could get lucky too.

Katastic's quarter-life crisis? Going swimmingly, thanx, and yet I manage not to bang secretaries/ other people's spouses/ buy a sports car.

'Course I can't afford a sports car.

@onthecornerofparkerandwoolf: Hm, yes, I could see that. What, a grown-up? Me? Surely you jest.

@cardboardbelt: Seems to really come around 40. Trust. You'll be there in a flash and won't know what hit you or how you got there so quickly. Good luck.

@PICKLES_IN_MY_TUNA: Aww. Yay!

@mbprice: Yes, it's called a quarter-life crisis.

@katastic: I read that first as "going swimming" and I wondered, what, is she going skinny-dipping all the damn time or something? But then I read it again.

My dad took my boyfriend and I out to dinner and for a drink one night. He had more than one drink, and he started ranting about how he has always felt like he's still in his 20s and that it is difficult to look in the mirror sometimes.

Then he got sentimental, and he said that when he sees my mom or spends time with us or his grandkids-- he realizes that he's glad that he's not 20 anymore. Because his life may not be as fun, but it is much more fulfilling. Then he started telling the guy next to him at the bar that my mom is hot, and we decided that it was time to take him home.

@Pinkosaurus: I just heard that they're making a Real Housewives of New York: The Real Sex And The City. Frightening!

@tailfeather: aw! All these tellings of the sweetness of you guy's dads is making me really emotional! Or it could be my period coming on....

@Leiakat: D-A-D-D-Y-I-S-S-U-E-S.

@mbprice: Um, yeah. I think that I have been in quarter life crisis since I graduated college. My parents are all, oh, to be 25 again. And I am all, this is scary! I don't know what to do with my life! Somebody give me some direction!

I will probably ride this wave until I get to my midlife crisis.

@mocksun:
Furthermore, sports cars in general are a big turn off. Unless it's Daniel Craig in an Aston Martin.

@hortense: That's the most amazing mid-life crisis I've ever heard of. I'm pretty sure most of my friends went through that crisis in their mid-twenties.

My father hit his crisis at 59, and bless his little pot-bellied soul, he made a whole bunch of mistakes, but when I called him on them three weeks into his newly rediscovered bachelor lifestyle, he had perfectly justifiable reasons for his seemingly insane actions. It lasted not much longer but it occurred at the expense of the trust in his relationship with his partner of 12 years.

Aging, no matter the gender experiencing it, is hard. Accepting that you are getting old and with this acceptance must come the awareness of your mortality. Also, wrinkles = ew.

Whoops. Meant that to answer Pinkasaurus's question.

@braak: Yeah, but I guess we should thank our lucky stars that women are constantly pegged as shopaholics!!!111 So who cares if we do that at any time!!1111 Just leave the men to their beer and football. At least that's what beer commercials and According to Jim tell me.

@rhody: I feel ya. This yuppie shit sucks.

God, I want a mid-life crisis like that woman from Fried Green Tomatoes (Saran wrap dress, yes, bloated, inattentive hubby, no; hell, I just want to smash up a house).

@Pinkosaurus: As someone who has once or twice fancied an older man (though nothing ever happened), I have a few ideas...but I actually I agree with Maureen Dowd (I know, I know) that older men are often nicer to and more appreciative of younger women, whereas men our own age are too cool for school. She described it as a balancing of power, with the equation being, "You are a man, so you have higher status; I am young so I have higher status." It evens out.

@tailfeather: My Dad does the same thing. It's sweet.

I can't help but think that this psychiatrist must have a lot of time on his hands.

"True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women"

Really? Are we sure this is true? I mean, of course we all know that women just LOVE to be banging the same dude for 20 years - it actually makes sex MORE exciting for us for some biological reason (kind of like how we crave affection rather than sex and aren't visually stimulated like men), but men, poor things, just crave difference.

*cough*bullshit*cough*

@Macloserboy: Ok, because I had no clue where that was coming from.

@Susan B.: Eh, makes sense.

I sit next to a woman at work who is early/mid-20's and living with-engaged to the biggest asshat lawyer. He's 50-ish and a complete and total douchenozzle to the wife he's divorcing. I sense bad things in this poor woman's future...

@Pinkosaurus: I'm in my late 20's and if Alec Baldwin came a-calling I'd be all over his Schwetty Balls.

@cardboardbelt: "adventure hasn't come"...you mean the nagging feeling that they won't be indiana jones? we bemoan the sterotypical fairytales sold to women, but what about the tales sold to men? you mean, comic book stories aren't true?!

@PICKLES_IN_MY_TUNA: yes, some start feeling it as 40 approaches. i love your quote to your husband "challenge yourself, and NOT with your dick". that should be a tattoo. seriously.