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Millions of readers defined their lives through Gail Sheehy's landmark work, Passages, and through its bestselling sequel, New Passages. Among her twelve books is the huge international bestseller that broke the taboo around menopause, The Silent Passage. Ms. Sheehy is also a political journalist and contributing editor to Vanity Fair. The mother of two daughters, she divides her time between New York City and Berkeley, California, where she lives with her husband, editor and lecturer Clay Felker.

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bestsellers Passages and New Passages brilliantly mapped the changes we live through from youth to maturity. Now Gail Sheehy guides contemporary men through the turbulent challenges and surprising pleasures that begin at forty. As a man crosses that threshold, he is bound to ask midlife's most troubling question: Now what? Work anxieties, concerns over sexual potency, marital and family stress, issues of power, all take on new urgency as men contemplate the decades ahead. But as Gail Sheehy reveals in this major new book, midlife is precisely the period when men are most likely to reinvent themselves and become masters of their fate. In Understanding Men's Passages, Sheehy offers all men--and the women in their lives--an essential guide to self-discovery.

Hundreds of bold, imaginative men--celebrities as well as everyday heroes--share here their most intimate desires, deepest fears, and most fervent cravings for renewal. Decade by decade, Sheehy uncovers the real issues facing men today:

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Her stunning bestsellers Passages and New Passages brilliantly mapped the changes we live through from youth to maturity. Now Gail Sheehy guides contemporary men through the turbulent challenges and surprising pleasures that begin at forty. As a man crosses that threshold, he is bound to ask midlife's most troubling question: Now what? Work anxieties, concerns over sexual potency, marital and family stress, issues of power, all take on new urgency as men contemplate the decades ahead. But as Gail Sheehy reveals in this major new book, midlife is precisely the period when men are most likely to reinvent themselves and become masters of their fate. In Understanding Men's Passages, Sheehy offers all men--and the women in their lives--an essential guide to self-discovery.
Hundreds of bold, imaginative men--celebrities as well as everyday heroes--share here their most intimate desires, deepest fears, and most fervent cravings for renewal. Decade by decade, Sheehy uncovers the real issues facing men today: finding new passion and purpose to invigorate the second half of their lives, dealing with "manopause," surviving job change, enjoying post-nesting zest, defeating depression, and learning what keeps a man young.
Informative and inspiring, grounded in fact and full of fascinating life stories, Understanding Men's Passages is a landmark that will take its place beside Gail Sheehy's epoch-making Passages and New Passages.

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Understanding Men's Passages

Ballantine Books

Chapter One

IT'S A GUY THING

    It has traditionally been assumed that age is kinder to men than to women.My research over the past eight years has revealed a surprising reversal:many men 40 and over are having a harder time today making a satisfyingpassage into the second half of their lives than are most women. Why?

    Women feel pangs over losing their youth.

    Men feel dread.

    "It's the dread of losing potency!" says my friend Fitzgerald. "It'simagining yourself as an actor onstage who has lost his voice."

    There are some inevitable changes as we tramp the journey of life. Menusually hit them as they would a brick wall--and then may fall apart. If theyknew what to expect in advance, it could help them to master thosechanges and profit from them.

    The point of this book is to help men and their partners to outwit theinevitable changes ahead. Today, particularly for men under 50, the timingof marker events--finishing school, first grown-up job, marriage,parenthood, empty nest, retirement, golden years--has turned out to beunpredictable. What a man is supposed to do, and when, is not clear. Itis both exciting and disorienting, like sailing for a new world butwondering if you will drop off the edge of the old one first. The maps andcharts are all out-of-date. Any man who feels a little lost is hardly alone.

    The first step is to understand the passages that men go through afterage 40, and then to discover, within the new map of men's lives, how youcan travel these new passages for yourself with greater awareness and apassport to renewal. Even on a subject as threatening as "malemenopause," the news is good and getting better. It is gradually becomingrecognized as a mindbody syndrome that is perfectly normal, widespread,treatable, and often reversible. Pharmaceutical companies are racing tooffer men perpetual virility--by popping a pill. As immediate and compellingas is the concern most men have with how their sexual performance mightbe affected by getting older, there is much more involved in restoringvitality and virility than putting more lead back in the pencil. Mind-setmatters at least as much as bodily changes. The whole gamut of causesand the impressive armamentarium for fighting male menopause are spelledout later in the book.

    Why single out men? It's not as radical a departure as it might seem; Ihave been writing about the predictable and unpredictable changes ofadult life for both sexes since the publication of Passages in 1976. Butafter twenty years of probing the psyche and interpreting the impact of culturalshifts on both sexes, I faced a humbling admission:

    Men don't understand women, but at least they know it. Women don'tunderstand men, but they don't know it. Does the following dialoguesound at all familiar?

    "What's wrong?"

    "Nothing."

    "Why won't you talk to me?"

    "What about?"

    "About why you seem so down."

    "I'm just tired."

    "But you just sit around watching TV. Sometimes, you can get the mosttired from doing nothing."

    "I'm not doing nothing! There are things I have to think about."

    "It seems like you've come to a point in your life where things arechanging for you. How does that make you feel?"

    "It's just something you have to go through."

    "I'd like to help. Won't you talk to me about it?"

    "What is there to say?"

    "What is it you want out of life? Just make up your mind and be straightwith me."

    "I don't know what I want."

    Most of us have had such conversations. I know I have survived a fewof those trying-to-help-but-only-making-it-worse dialogues. Thepresumption among women is that they know what's wrong with their men,and that they could fix it if only men would listen. But do many womenreally know what it's like for a man today?

    Milton Glaser, a legendary graphic artist and a wise and cherishedfriend, made this observation of the cultural lag between the genders:"Women are developing a new belief system; a new way of viewing life iscoalescing. Most men don't know what's happening to them. They don'thave any idea what to believe in. For a lot of us, the values we grew upwith have been subverted and changed. Men are astonished at thischange; they haven't formulated a response to it. It's a time when men arevery, very uncertain."

    Men may not equate change with growth. Generally speaking, theyassociate change with loss, giving up, being overtaken, failing. It is notseen as a positive part of inner growth and the road to a new kind ofpower. Particularly in the first half of their lives, men are rewarded forputting blinders on and pursuing their narrow career path: life seemsstraightforward.

    "In my corporate life, I'm always telling company leaders how importantit is to step back, look at trends, see what the future might bring, andplan ahead for it," says a New York public relations man, "but in my personaland career life, forget it." He expresses a male view as old as time: "Ijust keep moving forward in a kind of dumb-beast way, seeing the nextopportunity and throwing my spear at it, taking my lumps and hopingeverything will work out for me. Whether as men we are hardwired to thinkthat way or it's the steady process of socialization, we just don't like tochange."

    You may have been speeding along the route you set in your twentieswhen, suddenly, the road turns bumpy. Or you hit a washed-out patch andcannot move forward. Or the juice simply drains out of your batteries. Howdo you recharge yourself? Change gears? Who do you turn to for help?

    It has become a cliche to say that men don't like to ask questions.Obviously, this is not always true. (My husband has stopped at the nearestgas station to ask for directions at least once.) But men have not beentaught to ask questions about their sexual life cycle or their health orpsychological well-being. They don't think they have the time or need forsuch consultations--unless disaster strikes. Studies show that men make farfewer visits to doctors than women, and when they do go, they generallydon't ask any questions. Beneath the silence and stoicism, however, mostmen over 40 sense that the playing field of life is radically different fromthe world of their fathers.

    An economic revolution equivalent to the Industrial Revolution ispitting mature men against younger, computer-savvy digerati. Experiencemay no longer count for as much in marketplaces focused on the now. Notonly are new skills demanded, for which several generations--older babyboomers, the "Silent Generation," the World War II generation--are notprepared, but a different attitude is required. The rules of the gamebetween employer and employee have changed. You used to be able tocount on the corporate father--the farseeing, benevolent giver of rewardsand reprimands. Now the corporation is a virtual father--amorphous,nonhierarchical--and you can never be clear where you stand.

    The ground of relations between men and women has also undergonean earthquake of change. Men of the baby-boom and earlier generationswere socialized, as boys, to assume a clearly prescribed role in the benignpatriarchy portrayed in popular culture by shows such as Ozzie & Harrietand Leave It to Beaver. As young adults they were thrown off balance,ridiculed by the women's movement, and later dismissed by some academicactivists as belonging to a continuum of "dead white men." In middle lifethey find themselves competing with a newly confident species of youngerprofessional women. Add the pressure to remain youthful and demonstrateperpetual virility, and many of today's men over 40 are in trouble. If a mankeeps playing by the old scoreboard and the old timetable, he is likely tostrike out.

    In this climate of uncertainty, hundreds of men have talked to mecandidly about all kinds of forbidden subjects: their concerns about aging,the ebbing of physical strength and athletic prowess, their fears of losingtheir jobs and their fathers, the meaning crisis they face at the midpointof their lives, their envy of empowered working wives, their wish to be closerto their children before they lose them, their preretirement anxieties, andthe whole question of potency in all areas of their lives.

    Perhaps you never thought these questions would concern you. You'venever thought about not being young. A well-known entertainer wasshocked the first time lie went through the supermarket line and hecheckout girl looked right through him. Still handsome, though his jawlineis now somewhat softened, he is less cocky and less confrontational; heseems to have calmed down and warmed up--qualities that wouldpresumably enhance his powers of attraction. Yet when we talked, hecould focus only on the negative aspects of these changes: "You feelseparated from youth at the same time you're feeling diminished inphysical strength and stamina; you start being passed over by youngermen; the sex isn't as great as it was; an incredible desire to be youngagain comes over you."

    When I ask men if they ever talk over these questions with their malefriends, they almost always shake their heads: "No."

    Why not?

    "It's a guy thing."

    Most of the time they don't even discuss these matters with their wives,who are often preoccupied with their own midlife changes. After a lecturein Pennsylvania, I was stopped by an energetic-looking woman with abook bag slung over her shoulder. I started back to school in my latethirties," she said. "I'll celebrate my forty-second birthday by getting mydiploma as a clinical social worker. My husband kept complaining, 'You'rechanging. Why? I'm the same man you married twenty years ago.' Bingo!That's the reason we're getting divorced."

    The husband probably thinks that remaining the same, and hiding hisfeelings and frustration, is being manly. He may feel stuck, even trapped,by his financial responsibilities. He expects himself to be the sameprovider, the same aggressive competitor he always was, expecting hisbody to take punishment and burn fat and attract women the way it alwaysdid. But beneath the bravado he probably doesn't feel the same thrill of thechase he did in his twenties. His whole identity is tied up with the statushe has achieved so far. If he lets go even a little, what else is there?

    He cannot imagine how to change. Why should he?

    When women in midlife go back to school, start new careers, or leavestifling marriages, for the most part they are exhilarated. Even if theirsalary and status is not as great as a man's, they derive greatersatisfaction--because they started with so much less. The men they leave behindare often resentful, even jealous, having likely helped to finance a formerwife's emergence into the status of "being my own person" at the expenseof their own revamping.

    Linear reasoning is likely to lead a man to think, "Once I achieve certainthings, then I'll be happy." But it is not only titles and materialaccomplishments that matter. And when those external achievements fallto provide meaning and joyfulness on schedule, men become frustrated.Confused. Angry. And ashamed to admit it.

    This male malaise has no name. It is a dark continent. Most men don'trecognize--or refuse to accept--that they continue to go through differentstages throughout their adult lives. And few men I have studied are evenaware that important new passages still lie ahead--after 40. Thesecrossroads demand a full stop and a pause to look inward. They present aman with a chance to stretch and progress, or to lock in and regress. It isnecessary to let go of a little control during these times of passage sothat an old shell can be sloughed off and space made for a yeasty,multidimensional "new self" to grow.

    Transitional periods are always unsettling, for anybody. But a lack ofawareness makes it more likely that a man may slide into depression and doall sorts of self-destructive things. More often than not, men are not evenconscious of being depressed. They begin slipping down the cliff, inch byinch, while clutching frantically for anything to hold on to or simplynumbing themselves to what feels like an inevitable descent down the backside of life.

    This book presents a brighter outlook, based on research with today'snew men. It is men in middle life who have the best chance to becomemasters of their fate--better lovers, better fathers, truer to themselves andtheir own values, freer to express their feelings and exercise their creativity,more influential, more collaborative, more spiritual. They need only knowledgeand a mind open enough to receive it.

    But time is running out! Not nearly as fast as you think. In fact, themiddle years are the stage of potential highest well-being in the lives of healthyeducated people today. You don't believe it? Consider some facts:

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR ANOTHER LIFE?

We are living through the greatest miracle 'in the history of our species--thedoubling of life expectancy since the Industrial Revolution. Back when theUnited States was founded, life expectancy at birth stood at onlyabout 35 years. By 1900, it reached 47 years. One of the most stunningdevelopments of the twentieth century has been to stretch the life cycle byan average of thirty years--more than the total gained over five thousandyears going back to the Bronze Age! Another shock of good news on lifeexpectancy appeared 'in September 1997 'in The New York Times:

In 1996 alone, American men added six months to their life
expectancy and reached a new high.

    That was according to an analysis of U.S. vital statistics by the Centersfor Disease Control. The average male life span is now 73 years. It is alsocatching up with the female life span (now an average of 79), as the numberof AIDS deaths and the *incidence of heart disease and cancer decline.Between now and the year 2030, the proportion of people over age 65will almost double. And this will be true, even sooner, all over Europe.

    Fine, you may say, but if an extended life span means spending yearswith my bulb dimming and my body falling apart, forget it. We all look toour fathers and mothers as mirrors of our own aging. Those are miscues inmany ways. When our parents turned 50, we thought they were old. Theythought they were old. Since 1950, unimagined advances have been madein medicine; and, more pertinent, public health education through the massmedia has prompted profound changes in personal behavior. People inmiddle life today have a very different life profile from that of theirparents, who were expected to turn off their mental engines in their fifties.They didn't dream of running marathons or gulping down hormones to keep themrandy until their eighties.

    People are maturing earlier, physically, but taking longer to grow upemotionally, and much, much longer to grow old. For the middle classes,adolescence is now prolonged until the end of the twenties. Our FirstAdulthood only begins at about age 30. Somewhere around the midfortieswe enter a major passage into what used to be a rather staid, if notstagnant, middle age.

    Yet we seem to be more reluctant to grow up than ever before. Of thehundreds of men over 40 whom I have interviewed, most believe they arefive to ten years younger than that imposter whose picture somehowslipped inside their passports. Today the midpoint of adulthood is nolonger necessarily 40--it's more like 50.

Fifty is what 40 used to be.

    If you are a man now in his thirties, forties, or early fifties, you canadjust your lens on aging. Beneficiaries of the boom in men's health,biotechnology, and brain research, you belong to a species unprecedentedon the planet, a species whose life span will routinely extend into youreighties and nineties. This means you must prepare for the possibility ofanother life--beyond the traditional roles and responsibilities--because theyears from 40 to 80 or 90 offer you a whole new playing field: what I callyour "Second Adulthood."

    In Second Adulthood you begin to learn that fulfillment In life is not ina result of simply racking up points on a single scoreboard. Rather, thereare a number of different scoreboards--as son, mate, father, friend,colleague, mentor, community wise man, benefactor. The crucial innings ofSecond Adulthood are neither played by the same rules nor scored in thesame way as a young man's game. But most men are so focused on winningin the first half, they usually miss the signals that can prepare them witha winning strategy for middle and later life.

    Gary Markovitz, for example, was a good soldier. Having served inVietnam and returned to college to train as a technocrat, he had definedhimself for seventeen years totally within the context of his company."When people asked me what I am, I was an IBMer," he admits. "Not Garywho worked at IBM, but an IBMer."

    By his midforties he began to wonder if his batteries were wearingdown, but it didn't occur to him to wonder what else he might enjoydoing. He heard about his company's buyout offer while on a businesstrip to San Francisco. At first he had no interest in it. But on the planeride home he found himself thinking about a friend's recent funeral. Theman had come up through the ranks at IBM with Gary and had suddenlypassed away from cancer.

    Gary found himself ticking off, finger by finger, just how many peoplecould be counted on to show up for his own funeral. He didn't get veryfar. What value did he have outside IBM? He thought about his oldestson, who was already 25. Before long, there would be a grandson sittingon his knee. Innocent and adoring, the boy would ask him, "Grandpa, whatdid you do that meant something?"

    I made money.

    "It didn't pass the grandfather test," Gary decided. "I could be doingbetter things."

BUT I'M NOT READY!

A man in his late forties in a Minneapolis audience expressed a commonconcern of men: "Give it to me straight. Do I have to lose power as I growolder?"

    On the contrary. The power of mind, rooted in experience, onlyincreases as we meet the predictable crises and accidents of life anddiscover our resilience. A whole new stage has opened up in the middle oflife: the "Age of Mastery," a bonus stage from ages 45 to 65. The passagefrom First to Second Adulthood and into the Age of Mastery actuallytransforms the idea of power.

    Baby boomers need a guide to their middle life. Theirs will be abrand-new journey, full of surprises. Four out of every ten American adultsbelong to the baby-boom generation, which, based on my research withthe US. Census Bureau, must be divided into two subgenerations. Theleading edge can be called the "Vietnam Generation" (born 1946-1955).This is President Bin Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair'sgeneration, which they describe as being strong in ideals but indifferent tothe old ideologies. Boomers now in their early forties to early fifties cameof age expecting that everything would always get better, and for most ofthem, it did. The spirit of the sixties formed their utopian consciousness,and vestiges of that spirit are still with them, tempered by the cynicism ofthe times.

    The younger half of the boomers--the "Me Generation"--came of age inthe 1970s (born 1956-1965) and missed much of the idealism of the VietnamGeneration, but focused more on personal development. They dreamed ofachieving the perfectly balanced life and thus continue to postpone takingon many of the responsibilities of full adulthood. But they are far moretolerant of egalitarian marriages, gay partnerships, single parenthood, andother social experiments. Both halves of this dominant generation havealways been highly individualistic and thus irreconcilably divided. But onone issue they seem to be in total agreement:

Boomers do not accept middle age.

    Boomer men do not see themselves as getting older. And they certainlydon't anticipate any changes in their peak sexual performance--it mayhappen to other guys, but not to me. Yet secret doubts lurk, and a singleepisode of slackened sexual ardor can raise the question: Is this thebeginning of the dreaded falling off?

THE NEED TO KNOW
AND THE FEAR OF KNOWING

In lectures based on my last book, New Passages, one question is alwayscertain to come up: "Is there a male menopause?"

    There is a need to know and an equally weighty fear of knowing. WhenI first became aware of the phenomenon, the evidence from men was mainlyanecdotal. Six men sitting around a midtown Manhattan bar after work--virilesales managers and successful retailers--all of whom appear to bebacking up the hill from their midforties toward the great divide at 50.They have a couple of drinks, and, within my earshot, one brassy boyochallenges the rest: "Tell the truth. How many times have you faked beingasleep when your wife gets into bed with a glow in her eyes)"

    Every man laughs. Then a crevice falls open in the conversation. Theman in the power tie who posed the question reaches out for a lifeline: "Imean, doesn't that happen to you guys?"

    Sure, Mr. Winkle doesn't like to drink," another man says, chuckling.The rest chime in, putting off the problem on overwork, stress, having afew too many.

    But these occasional factors do not do much to illuminate the mysteryof why so many men in middle life gradually lose their vitality andvirility. They see slightly older friends change from being bullish, buoyant,and decisive into being down, depressed, listless, and lustless. They wonder:Will it happen to me? Of course, being men, they refuse to talk about it. Atmost, the subject is couched in jokes and jibes.

An older man is walking down the street when he hears a frog
talking. The frog says, "If you pick me up and kiss me, I'll turn
into a beautiful woman."

The man picks up the frog and puts It Into his pocket.

"Aren't you going to kiss me?" the frog complains. "I'll turn into a ravishing woman and you can have me all you want."

"I'd rather have a talking frog in my pocket."

What is happening? Are we talking simply about getting older? Yes, butalso about a larger challenge to a man's view of himself--an identifiablephenomenon with physical, hormonal, psychological, and sociologicalcomponents--that is now trendily referred to as "male menopause." "We donot yet have a term for this five- to twelve-year period of midlife in men,but we know it is shared by both genders," acknowledges Dr. Eliot Sorel,president of the World Association for Social Psychiatry and clinicalprofessor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George WashingtonUniversity School of Medicine.

    It soon became apparent to me that if menopause is the silent passage,male menopause is the unmentionable passage. It is Just as fundamental asthe ending of the fertile period of a woman's life, because it strikes atthe core of what it is to be a man--the thing a man has always counted on tobring him pleasure, the thing that has worked for him hundreds of times,mindlessly, like a machine, by himself or with any number of partners, thesource of his fantasies, the sword of his dominance, the very root of hisevolution as Homo sapiens--his youthful sexual drive and performance.

    In the April 1993 issue of Vanity Fair, with Sharon Stone on the coverstripped to the waist and cupping her naked breasts, my male editorsallowed me to publish one of the first full discussions of the subject: "TheUnspeakable Passage: Is There a Male Menopause?" Ever since, men andwomen have been talking privately to me about this problem without aproper name. Interviews with more than a hundred men between the agesof 40 and 70 about this subject revealed that most have been shunted fromthe urologist to the psychiatrist to the surgeon and ended up totallyconfused. I have also observed the work of some two dozen medicalexperts in this narrow field who study and treat men over 40 suffering fromsome degree of sexual dysfunction *in mid- to later life. While the broadermedical establishment still by and large ducks the subject, the mass mediaalso remain wary of touching the subject, and I found out why.

THE EIGHT-HUNDRED-POUND GORILLA

One day in the fall of 1996 I got a call from a dynamic young producer onthe serious CBS magazine show 48 Hours. Chuck Stevenson had read mywork on male menopause and interviewed some medical experts, andhe wanted to put together a piece about men in middle life in sexual crisis.Chuck was only 41. A little young to be thinking about male menopause?

    "Actually, I'm finding the subject fascinating," he said. As he saw it,"The precursor to men's midlife crisis is reduced sexual ability, which thentriggers all these various psychological feelings."

    I was delighted with Chuck's enlightened approach. He andcorrespondent Erin Moriarty came out to do the interview in the garden ofmy home in Berkeley, along with a three-man production crew.

    For the interview, Chuck wanted to touch on "technical menopause--thatsmall percentage of guys who really don't have the testosterone."

    What I really wanted to talk about was not the small percentage of menwho are already so incapacitated they might seek surgical relief Myconcern is the whole middle range of men who don't know what is normaland who, when their sexual habits or performance changes, become soembarrassed or ashamed that they pull away from any intimacy. On camera,I described the most common scenario:

The longer this problem remains unspoken between a couple,
the more monstrous it grows, until there is an eight-hundred-pound
gorilla in the bedroom. Nobody mentions it for six
months, two years, five years; meanwhile, the pair stops
hugging, stops holding hands, stops touching altogether,
moves to separate beds, to separate rooms, and ultimately
separate lives. They become estranged in all forms of intimacy
because of this sexual shutdown.

When the shoot was over, I asked the producer how the piece would betitled and promoted. "That's going to be the hardest thing for us," ChuckStevenson admitted. "How do we make this segment move without scaringoff men? We can't say 'midlife crisis' or 'change of life.'" Ultimately, thesegment was titled "Undercover," which was inoffensive but meaningless.Nothing was left in about the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Chuckacknowledged that the piece did not work. The reason, he told me withregret, was the enormous sensitivity of senior network executives to lettingus talk about impotence.

    But it was the reaction of the TV production crew that proved the mostintriguing. Ordinarily, a camera crew tunes out while filming and justfocuses on doing its job. While we discussed the male menopause,these three men blanched and reddened, but they hung on to every word.After the shooting they stuck around to talk.

    I wanted to hear about it," one of the cameramen said candidly, "but Idon't want to talk about it."

    "It was hitting too close to home for me," admitted another crewmember. He was in his forties and living through divorce hell. She was theone who left. "What really needs to be said is the fact that when a man hasa midlife sexual crisis, people often say, 'It's all in your mind, snap out ofit.'

    "But it's really part of the natural course of events," one of thecameramen tried to reassure him.

    "That's right," said his colleague. "I can see now where you could getthat rhinoceros in your bedroom, or whatever you called it-"

    "An eight-hundred-pound gorilla."

    "Yeah, and blocks could form."

    "That made sense to me, too," said the cameraman, "because whencommunication breaks down in a marriage, it's all gone." All at once hiscolleague had an Aha! Moment--one of those little epiphanies thatsuddenly throws a floodlight on what one's life is really about.

    "That's what happened in our marriage! Nobody really talked about thegorilla. We just grew more and more apart. I don't feel like it was my fault.I was doing my duty, doing what I was supposed to do. I was just waiting itout. She got tired of waiting, and it happened all of a sudden--the marriagefell apart."

    Doing one's duty and not talking about the inner collapse of one'swhole idea of oneself is an all-too-common "manly" stance at midlife. Thisbook is meant as a friendly guide out of such dead ends. No man shouldsquander his precious life "just waiting it out." And once he discovers theexciting new map of men's lives, laid out here in facts as well as manyliving examples, he should be lured to explore new continents of imaginationand experience never before dreamt of by past generations.

Continues...

Excerpted from Understanding Men's Passagesby Gail Sheehy Copyright © 1999 by Gail Sheehy. Excerpted by permission.
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