5 Realizations Women Have at Midlife

It is a very interesting time and filled with transformative realizations.

My post 5 Things Your Wife Yearns For At Midlife resonated with many women, so I wanted to add to it from the perspective of women directly, rather than primarily helping husbands understand their wives. Here are five realizations that women have at midlife, drawn from my clinical experience as well as my personal experience having of being a woman who is 45!

1. Externalities don’t matter as much as you used to think.

For years, women worry about how everything looks, including their bodies, their homes, their clothes, and their personalities. The ideal is to look productive but not rushed, be friendly without being a try-hard, and be effortlessly competent at work and parenting while also seeming cute and/or sexy to your partner. This image management is onerous, and at midlife, you finally realize that nobody (at least nobody worth being close to) is judging you or even thinking about you even a tenth as much as you had envisioned.

2. Your body deserves some compassion.

In our younger years, many of us struggled with outright hatred of our bodies even in women who don’t meet criteria for eating disorders. Midlife brings peace to many women. You realize you…