Debate: Am I Unhappy Because I'm Unmarried?
How to navigate a midlife crisis.
Today we have a debate about wanting, love, marriage, getting old … about life.
and are two writers who aren’t afraid of taking an unflinching look at their own lives. (For example, here’s Kristina on what it’s like to be a parent. And here’s Shadi on why he hasn’t become one.) It’s only natural that these two ended up arguing with each other in our pages. Kristina read Shadi’s recent provocation “Why Don’t I Have Kids?” and thinks that Shadi’s current restlessness and dissatisfaction has less to do with his lack of a family than with a more general existential need. She challenges Shadi to rethink his own wants. What follows is a dialogue that cuts to the bone of what life is, or should be, about.— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
Kristina Tabor Saccone: In your recent provocation, Shadi, you wrote: “For a long time, I wanted to want to get married and have kids. But I had trouble getting from ‘wanting to want’ to simply, well, wanting. And now I regret that it took me so long.” In this statement, I saw the crux of a midlife crisis.
This is in contrast to what, in my youth, amounted to a midlife crisis: men with receding hairlines, a penchant for younger women, and compulsively-purchased red sports cars. I didn’t recognize this in myself, when I didn’t crave a fast car or otherwise find a role model for a women’s midlife crisis.
I did recognize it — and myself — in your piece.
After five years of illness — in which I cared for her — my mother died earlier in 2024. A few months later, I separated from my husband of eleven years. Plenty of well-meaning friends looked at this situation and suggested I take a breath. But how could I take a breath when I finally realized what I truly wanted: to be on my own, independent and single — while still a committed mother — along with the trappings of a more solitary life?
Before my mother died, I did a really, really good job of wanting to want: wanting to want to be a doting and tireless mother to my son. Wanting to want to be an ambitious and successful professional. Wanting to want to be a good wife. Wanting to want to be a writer, a contemplative, and a lonely creative. I carefully curated my existence based on all these things that I thought I should want, rather than what I truly wanted. To use Oliver Traldi’s smart and simple analogy from his piece on wanting, I looked at the restaurant menu and decided I needed all the specials delivered at once.
My eyes were bigger than my stomach. I was deeply unhappy.
To change this, to move from wanting to want to truly wanting, I had to substantially shift my sense of normalcy and undergo what is, in essence, an existential crisis with deep implications for me, my ex, and my son.
Most people don’t take the existential path because it seems too treacherous. Self-reflection is difficult, but what I saw of this in your provocation felt deeply vulnerable. Does it feel that way for you?
Shadi Hamid: You’re right. I suppose it is a midlife crisis, but just the opposite of what a midlife crisis tends to look like in the popular imagination. And in that, I think you’re onto something important. In a society where a growing number of men aren’t married by the age of 40 — remarkably nearly 3 in 10 (and according to
’s numbers possibly even higher) — the nature of longing and yearning shifts.In the 1970s and 80s, when as many as 94 percent of men were married by 40, men rebelled against what they already had, which was a marriage and kids and often a house in the suburbs to boot. They didn’t realize how lucky they were. Or perhaps the better way to put it is that their wants had been forged and shaped differently, because they were reacting to their own lives, and their lives were different than my own.
The things we want are not innate or pre-experiential. We are social creatures, and so the things that we long for are longed for in a broader societal context, and there’s often something mimetic going on: it’s not so much that we want what we can’t have; it’s that we want what other people want. I can pretend all I want that my wants are “authentic” — that I’m being myself, living my truth, being myself, or whatever other self-help cliché. But in reality, I can’t help but be affected by that question of should. I “should” have been married and had kids by now, especially when I see that so many of my friends in Washington in their late 30s or early 40s are feeling the same way. There’s a sense that this can’t be it.1
So, yes, I do feel vulnerable. The thought that I made the wrong choices at the right times is a kind of shadow. I don’t need to think about it. And most of the time I don’t. But it’s there. I don’t love it, and I’ve found ways of managing it. Some of that is about letting go and giving up and not fighting time. I wrote recently that “religion, at its core, is about befriending reality rather than resisting it.” That’s a very good example of an author writing what he himself needs to hear, perhaps more than his reader. Throughout these varying levels of confusion, I feel a constant push and pull, pushed towards one set of wants and pulled toward wanting to want the things I think I need.
You drew a distinction above between what you thought you should want and what you “truly” wanted, but it’s not clear to me that these can be made separate. How does one know what one truly wants? Maybe it’s a matter of instinct — you know when you know. But the things we want change over time: is it really possible that we truly wanted something a year ago but a year later we truly want something else? Because what we feel we want varies — sometimes wildly — I think we can’t help but conclude that our wants are more often contingent than “true.”
Our desires can’t always be trusted. And even if we find that we “truly” want something, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for us. Which brings us back to the should. To live in a chaotic, confused world is to require some guidance for ordering our desires, and this is where “society,” community, family and religion come in. In the absence of true knowledge of our wants, they can give us structure. And in that structure, we can find that our wants were more like whims, rootless and easily knocked over by the more substantive foundations of faith. And what’s wrong with that? We moderns recoil at the thought of external systems that ask something of us, that ask us to subordinate our desires in the name of something greater. But that’s ultimately the point of religion (and not just Islam): to submit and perhaps even to find some liberation in that submission.
Hopefully that helps clarify some of my own thinking on “wanting.” Will be very curious to hear what of this resonated for you but also which parts you found deeply troubling!
Kristina: I like that you root the problem in data. Let’s not ignore, though, how marriage trends are shifting for women, too, when these days more than one in five aren’t married by the age of 40. Whatever way we look at it, marriage is waning; and yet the mid-life crisis continues to hold captive this period of our lives. Perhaps the correlation between the institution and, as you put it, the shifting “nature of longing and yearning” are not as tight as one might think?
You talk about how you “should” have gotten married and had kids by now, which I think is a fairly common urge among never-married people in mid life. Heteronormative society tells us that, to be productive citizens, we need to pair up with someone of the opposite sex and procreate. Many of our systems are built on this assumption: in the United States, at least, there are financial incentives for being married, which include a tax cut, cheaper insurance, and more buying power for a mortgage. When you subscribe to a religion, there are further benefits for following these norms.
Wanting these things — the financial benefits, the social acceptance – are certainly experiential, and we learn these urges early on. In the simplest terms, we are immersed in positive examples of normativity from popular media to our friends and family, who offer a healthy dose of confirmation bias. If we never consume different media, understand other societies, get outside of our “bubble,” then we remain in this experiential phase of wanting.
Harvard psychologist Robert Keegan calls this stage of adult cognitive development “the Socialized Mind,” wherein “external sources shape our sense of self and understanding of the world.”2 The majority of adults don’t mature beyond this stage of self.
But for those of us who want and yearn for more, there’s a fourth and a fifth stage of cognitive development. The next tier, called the Self Authoring Mind, is where “we can define who we are, and not be defined by other people, our relationships or the environment.” We think independently, informed but no longer constrained by our belief systems. Without those limitations, our minds see a constant churn of change (does that sound like a mid-life crisis?).3
So, when you say “our desires can’t always be trusted,” I hear you speaking with a Socialized Mind. You find security in structures and order, solace in feeling “that our wants were more like whims, rootless and easily knocked over by the more substantive foundations of faith.” But I’d challenge you to wonder: when you “made the wrong choices at the right time” was that actually because your brain — cognition — was growing beyond the bounds of these structures? And is that, perhaps, a natural progression of human nature, rather than being something we should resist?
Personally, I don’t think that socialization and self authorship are mutually exclusive concepts. Perhaps we can build lives that are rooted in the foundations of systems and society while also yearning for more. Does any of that resonate with you?
Shadi: I very much take your point about the powers of socialization, that from an early age we are — or were — pushed to see marriage as the only acceptable option. (I want to say: what’s so bad about that?) Norms exist for a reason, and it’s good to have some barometer of what “normal” people do. Not all of us want to be different, not all of us want to author our own selves and be creative with the trajectories of our own lives, especially considering we only have one to live. Risk-taking makes more sense when you can just keep starting over, but at some point in one’s life, we become prisoners of our past choices.
But the broader point I want to make here is a bit different. Those pro-marriage norms that you and I grew up with are no longer as strong or operable. Now there are different norms, which are more in line with what you referred to as the “Self Authoring Mind,” i.e. to live your own truth regardless of what sources of authority, family or faith, tell you to do. In her suggestively-titled essay “How millennials learned to dread motherhood,”
argues, correctly I think, that in certain left-learning circles you’re bombarded with narratives that make marriage and parenthood seem unappealing, exhausting, limiting and otherwise onerous.In other words, now people are being socialized against marriage. The new sources of cultural authority are telling us that we don’t need to get married, and so unsurprisingly less people are getting married. So if we want to rebel and “self-author,” maybe the best way to do that is by resisting this new normal and “trying” harder to get married.
That’s still a narrow way of looking at it, though, because here we’re still either observing existing norms or reacting against them. What we probably should be doing is looking at the data and asking ourselves, on average, what makes for a better life? What has a greater likelihood of leading us to happiness? I take the point that
made recently that happiness isn’t necessarily the goal of life, but I strongly disagree. I think there are basically just two things that matter in life: one is enjoying your life in the deeper sense, not in the fleeting sense of momentary pleasures that come and go, like a drug, but in the sense of fulfillment and flourishing and generally being able to look back at a stretch of several years in your life and think, “well, that was a good run.”The second goal, I think, is pleasing, serving and otherwise submitting to God, which is not unrelated to goal #1. If you believe in God but you insist in acting against what you believe God wished for you, then your happiness is likely to be tenuous. You will always be torn between who you are and who you would like to be (or who you think you “should” be). This cognitive dissonance is something that we can tolerate, but we can only tolerate it for so long. At some point it has to be resolved one way or another.
As it happens, here the data and, well, God are aligned, insofar as we’re part of religions that put a premium on marriage and having children! Being married with children strongly correlates with happiness. 35 percent of men who are married with children say they are “very happy,” compared with 14 percent of unmarried, childless men. Meanwhile, around 40 percent of women who are married with children report being “very happy,” while it’s just 25 percent for those who are married without children and even lower for those who are unmarried either with or without children.
At the same time, it would probably be somewhat odd to orient your life around data dumps. But if you’re already inclined in the direction of marriage and children and the data confirms your inclination, then that seems a somewhat better bet than trying to de-socialize yourself, which I’m not sure is even possible. I am a product of my circumstances, whether I like it or not. I guess I could try to fight all of that, but why would I want to enter into such a posture of resistance against reality?
Kristina: Since this conversation is coming to an end (on these pages at least), I’m going to recap a bit. I started by calling out your midlife crisis — and you admitting to it. We discussed the nature of wanting, and that turned to the merits of marriage. You’re very data-oriented, while I lean towards qualitative proof.
As I said above, I respect your desire for data, but I do question your sources. The data analysis quoted above comes from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), which “seeks to elevate the family to the top of the nation’s policy and cultural agenda where it can receive the recognition and response it deserves. Strong families make strong societies; fragile families make fragile societies.” I’m not surprised that a place with this ideology would manage to triangulate data and confirm its mission and existence.
The same piece argues “... it is important to note that unmarried mothers are the least likely to be very happy: with just 17% of them indicating they are very happy.” Perhaps shoring up society’s failed infrastructure — e.g., supporting mothers with robust childcare, closing the wage gap, and other gender parity — would boost the happiness of unmarried mothers more than … staying in a bad marriage or getting married again.
Alongside insisting that marriage makes people “very happy,” the IFS also emphasizes that the benefits of marriage come from a partnership between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, a father and a mother, in its one-pager “Marriage: Much More than a Piece of Paper.” This is backwards thinking in a day and age when family units often include two mothers or two fathers, nearly a decade after the Supreme Court granted marriage equality in the United States. I can’t agree with IFS’s approach to marriage, and I don’t want any part of it’s definition of being “very happy,” either.
Shifting gears, I’m beginning to wonder, Shadi, whether it’s really marriage that you’re wanting, or if you’re searching for something more basic: love. I don’t mean love as in simple affection but, rather, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as open and honest communications,” as bell hooks writes in All About Love: New Visions. Perhaps, in midlife, we realize our lives lack those qualities and go out into the world seeking depth, seeking more. I think it’s easy to look to marriage, as an institution, to fill that chasm of want. “Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all,” hooks writes. “What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.”
It’s been a pleasure writing back and forth with you. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, be it happiness or marriage, parenthood or love — or all four.
Shadi: While I highlight the Institute of Family Studies’ analysis of the data, the data itself is from the General Social Survey. That said, I’m not sure there’s much to quibble with in IFS’ mission, and maybe this gets to a deeper divergence between our approaches. Their mission, as you said, “seeks to elevate the family to the top of the nation’s policy and cultural agenda where it can receive the recognition and response it deserves. Strong families make strong societies.”
I’m not sure why this would be controversial. Or, to put it differently, I see why it might be controversial, but I don’t think it should be. For the last 1500 years or so, including in the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and most other religious traditions, the prioritization of family was just the way of things and for good reason. The past isn’t always better than the future, but sometimes it is. Of course, alternative approaches to family can and should be accepted — as alternatives — but this doesn’t change the fact that even in an increasingly secular age, marriage between a man and a woman (and the traditional family structure that results) is still the norm. So if we’re speaking to the vast swath of Americans, this structure is still the most relevant one.
On average, marriage and having children is better. But individual results will of course vary. Marriage isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s the better option for most people.
As for whether what I really want is marriage or love. I don’t believe that a lasting, healthy, and fulfilling love (if we’re talking about romantic love) is all that likely outside of the institution of marriage. Yes, I think bell hooks is right: “Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all.” Again, I don’t see why this is a bad thing. Presumably, most of us prefer it for a reason. By definition, all partners are “lacking,” because we live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. To love and be loved is to love and be loved despite great faults.
Thank you, Kristina, for taking part in this conversation with me. I really enjoyed it and I hope readers have too.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
A successful career is great, but there’s only so many essays and books one can write. And when what you do for a job depends at least in part on external validation, well, that’s not always going to be a healthy dynamic.
Keegan wrote about this in his The Evolving Self (1982), but I’m quoting here from an aptly named summary on Medium titled “How to Be An Adult.”
I’m not going to delve into the fifth stage of adult cognitive development here because it’s so rare and, I fear, might plunge us into a different kind of debate. The curious can read more about it here.
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Thanks for this enlightening discussion. It really resonated with me personally as unlike Shadi I have found a partner but I still have that feeling where unhappiness looms over me not unlike a shadow ready and waiting to grab me at any moment. I tend to believe happiness is a rare state- something that can be felt only for intermittent periods, necessarily transient even if it can be transcendent.
I do also think arguably the decline in marriage is a result of shifting social norms. We are now told family is insufficient or even 'heteronormative' which is essentially a code word for a problematic idea. Instead, we should all 'rock out with our cocks out' as the fictional Marcy Runkle said from the show Californication. Yet, the end result has been a dearth in intimacy, trust, sex, and love. Replaced with a culture where we consume a lot and put great emphasis on 'living our best lives' while being extremely scared in the process. If late stage liberalism has told us anything it's that this type of living is not in the long run sustainable without significant shift changes.
Finally, I think to be loved, as in the bell hooks definition, is an important part of life and ourselves. It's also why I have rarely been convinced about polyamorous relationships in the long run, at least from my own perspective if not others. It strikes me that kind of love is especially rare and I'm not sure if you can fully possess it for more than a singular being.
I really enjoyed this discussion, and would love to hear a podcast episode where you think through your agreements and disagreements out loud together. By most metrics, I myself am a leftist or liberal: I am a writer who works in philanthropy and was shaped by "elite" academic spaces during the rise of the DEI / social justice regimes. More and more, however (and I sense I am not alone in this), I am drawn to those external structures like religion, family and community that impose boundaries on my individual freedom and require that I take responsibility for some collective and higher good.
Why? I have simply found in adulthood that the default modern liberal pathways of orienting my life around my own pleasures -- and even my own pursuit of higher meaning -- were staircases to nowhere, and that the deeper sense of freedom and fulfillment I was after comes not through removing constraints, but by choosing the right ones.
The ultimate emptiness of life under late stage liberal capitalism explains, I think, why so many young men were captivated by pseudo-philosophers like Jordan Peterson (is he still popular? no idea...) who say, "no, actually, there are some hard, unchangeable truths about the world, and the good life starts by imposing some boundaries and discipline upon yourself." What is at stake is not just your happiness, but your soul (if you believe in such a thing.)
I am finally reading Patrick Deneen's book "Why Liberalism Failed," and I would love to hear you take on some of his claims about liberalism and human nature. I.e. "as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule." How do you think each of your views (and your souls, if you don't mind?) have been shaped by liberalism? And to what extent do you consciously push against it?
And to Kristina, you use the term "existential" a few times, but I'm not sure what you mean. I adore Camus and often quote him, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy"...do you see yourself as a descendant of some particular strand of existentialism? If so, do you find that it affords you some kind of useful map for the terrain you're navigating now at midlife with so much change around you?