Alumni Review Point

Midlife Crisis at 30

Why does a life that’s “on track” leave so many women feeling “out of control”? By Kerry Rubin ’93

A few weeks before graduation—while a strong spring sun thankfully thawed campus out from a stubborn May snowstorm—I was across town in the WHEC-TV newsroom, listening to police scanners and looking for a lead for the 6 p.m. newscast. The internship I had taken to avoid writing a senior thesis for my political science degree had led to an actual job. As reporters and cameramen buzzed around me, I daydreamed about becoming an independent, glamorous career woman with a perfect husband, perfect home, and perfect genius children. Broadcast News meets The Brady Bunch. I could not wait to graduate.

Fast-forward 10 years. Things were not going as planned. To be honest, initially I didn’t realize there was a problem, and I certainly didn’t realize its scope. When life becomes a haze of empty Diet Coke cans, bad Chinese food takeout, and 12-hour workdays, it’s not easy to have deep thoughts.

I was confused about why things felt so wrong, because on paper, things looked so right. At 30, I had worked my way up the newsroom food chain and was a CNN producer. I was also a newlywed, head over heels in love. And though I hadn’t made it home from work in time for dinner in weeks, my life was “on track,” according to the rest of the world. So why, then, did everything feel so completely out of control? Why couldn’t I keep up anymore?

And I soon discovered that I was not alone.

Over the past two years, Lia Macko and I interviewed more than 100 college-educated women, ages 25 to 37, across the boundaries of salary, race, geography, and experience. At first we were looking for context for our own lives, but as a strikingly similar theme emerged during those conversations, we quickly realized we were onto a much bigger story.

Every generation has its own story, and ours is no exception. Over the last 30 years, somewhere between Joan Baez and Lil’ Kim, what it means to be a successful woman has changed completely. Our mothers lit the fuse by battling workplace discrimination and gender politics. They burned their bras, took on Washington, and won women unprecedented opportunity for professional advancement. In order to take full advantage of the doors they kicked open, the women behind our mothers and in front of us—women now in their mid-40s—took on their “ticking clocks,” setting new timetables for child rearing, while attaining new heights of achievement among working women. Our generation’s story is fueled by both the progress and unfinished business of the women who came before us. It has unfolded but has yet to be told.

All the women we interviewed came of age during or after the women’s movement, and all were raised to believe that their futures were defined by options rather than limitations. Yet despite how much these women may have accomplished, they each described feeling trapped in one-dimensional lives very different from those they expected to be living by now. From stockbrokers to teachers to engineers to stay-at-home mothers—these women shared a sense of bewilderment about why their lives felt so out of sync with their expectations, as well as a deep fear that the paths they had chosen were leading them in the wrong direction.

We discovered a generation of women having their midlife crises—at 30. But unlike your father’s midlife crisis, today’s young women aren’t asking “Where has all the time gone?” Instead, they’re wondering, “Where is all the time going? Where is my life heading?” And specifically, “How am I going to have a career and a life?”

Studies show fully 75 percent of 25- to 35-year-old women say their professional lives interfere with their personal lives, and more than a third say the clash is very severe. While working women have always struggled to navigate the emotional minefield of love and power, career and family, daughters of baby boomers are experiencing the conflict differently. For a generation that came of age at a time defined by options and opportunities rather than brick walls and glass ceilings, the juggling act has morphed.

Our mothers described the stress of balancing work and kids as a slow steady burn; in contrast, the 17 million women of generation X are reaching boiling points very early on in their careers, often even before children or marriage are part of the equation.

Just what is driving this “crunch”?

First, the timetable of events defining adulthood has completely transformed over the course of just one generation. In the past, the major milestones in a woman’s adult life—marriage, motherhood, and decisions about career—stretched out over the course of a lifetime in fairly predictable ways. Most women married in their early 20s and expected careers (if they had them) to build slowly over multiple decades. But the latest census data measuring new timetables for marriage, motherhood, and women’s earning power reveal that today’s young women are getting married, having babies and making major career decisions at a very compressed juncture—right around their 30th birthdays. At the same time, the number of single women in their late 20s and 30s has tripled, adding yet more emotional intensity to what is emerging as a significant interval in women’s lives.

The echoing, pervasive anxiety of our peers is also largely connected to the lingering social and economic contradictions that continue to affect women of all ages—namely, the persistent gap between What Has Changed in terms of women’s progress and What Has Stayed the Same in terms of old-school corporate structures and rigid social conventions.

While the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among younger women about the real barriers and flaws that still exist despite the opportunities we inherited.

In the absence of that bigger picture understanding, women of our age perceive lingering cultural problems as personal shortcomings. Instead of questioning what’s wrong with “the system”—if we are not on our way to having it all by our 30s—we question what’s wrong with us.

When all is said and done, analyzed and chronicled, I now realize the good news about having a midlife crisis at 30 is that it happens when you’re 30.

There’s still time for all of us—the generation of women following both the feminist revolution and its subsequent backlash—to get it right, as long as we have the courage to trade in rigid choreography for improv techniques that are more appropriate to lives that have unpredictable rhythms.

If we let go, listen, and learn from other women who have learned a few things along the way, we each can claim a happily ever after rooted in reality—one that we will fully appreciate but have yet to fully imagine.

Kerry Rubin ’93, a producer for CNN, is coauthor (with Lia Macko) of Midlife Crisis at 30: How the Stakes Have Changed for a New Generation and What to Do about It (Rodale Books, 2004), from which this essay is adapted.