Is this a midlife phase, or are you genuinely no longer compatible with your partner?

Most of my clients have done lots and lots of therapy.

If you’re questioning whether you can spend the next thirty years with your current partner, whether you would genuinely choose them again, today, knowing everything you know…you are not alone.

Really, not even close.

Research suggests that relational dissatisfaction peaks in midlife, with studies showing marital happiness follows a U-curve: highest in early marriage, declining through the middle years, and only recovering for those who do the work to understand what actually happened. 

The American Psychological Association estimates that 26% of people experience what clinicians identify as a midlife crisis, a period of intense questioning, identity disruption, and the unsettling sense that the life you built no longer fits.

What’s baffling to me is how rarely do these studies look at what’s happening beneath it.

Because here’s what I know from having worked with hundreds of executives on this very issue:

It’s NOT actually a crisis. Rather, it’s an awakening.

The cultural story about midlife is almost always about dissatisfaction with external things, the marriage, the career, the body, and so on. 

And so the proposed solutions are external: leave the spouse, buy the car, find someone younger, start over.

This can work, yes. Sometimes.

But it’s definitely an arguably unnecessarily explosive strategy.

Because in my experience, the dissatisfaction you are feeling is not primarily about your partner. It’s about you. Specifically, about the version of you that has disappeared somewhere between your thirties and now, and the fact that your subconscious mind has finally gotten safe and comfortable enough with who you are now, to start revealing that truth to you.

Think about it - you’re older, you have more assets, more resources, more comfort, more safety. Now is the time for your true self to start to come back. You’re not 21 anymore and trying to fit in, right?

So what looks like incompatibility with your partner, is often something else.

It’s your subconscious waking you up to the fact you have been inadvertently in a pattern of self-abandonment for many decades.

What self-abandonment actually looks like in a high-performing life

Self-abandonment is subtle, insidious and prevalent amongst high performers. I know it because I lived it myself for decades - and so have my clients. And it’s subtle, because it looks like competence. It looks like responsibility. 

From the outside, it looks very much like success.

It sounds like: 

I’ll work a bit more. I don't need much. It's fine. I’ll just let this go. This is how marriage is. I'm chill. I hate drama. I’m not a person who makes a fuss.

It’s that little part of you that tells you you don’t want to be too much, you’d rather fit in and belong, and you will do what you need to do to be successful. It’s a pattern that serves you incredibly well in achieving great things.

But over time - a decade, two decades - suppressing your own needs, desires, and emotional truth becomes so ‘normal’ to you, that you no longer experience it as suppression. It simply feels like who you are.

And this is where you abandon yourself. Your real self.

And it happens because your subconscious mind learned early that performance was safe, and being ‘needy’ (aka. having needs) was not. Your subconscious learned that being indispensable kept you loved - or at least kept you secure. 

And it worked. For decades! Only now, you’re older, and the situation has changed.

You’re older, wiser, and feel safer.

And all those years of repressing your real self have led to a low level sense of anxiety and resentment that doesn’t feel great. 

You start to feel trapped. 

And at this point, the subconscious mind does what it was always designed to do. It looks for relief.

It looks for aliveness, that the feeling of being seen, desired, chosen.

And thus, the midlife crisis happens.

Whether it’s relief through the form of an affair, or a violent awakening of your real self gasping for air, trying to come out and let itself be known.

So you wake up one day and everything in your life feels out of kilter. 

Because you’re seeing it differently - you’re seeing it from the lens of craving relief.

Why you should NOT act now

Now, you can’t assess your marriage clearly from inside self-abandonment.

When the subconscious mind is in a prolonged state of unmet need, it simply cannot produce a reliable read on external relationships. Everything is filtered through the distortion of what’s missing internally.

Which means the question "am I actually incompatible with my partner?" can’t be answered honestly until you have done something first: reconnected with yourself. 

By that, I mean understanding your subconscious wiring, identifying where and when you first learned to abandon your own needs, and beginning to build the internal conditioning of a person who is actually present - in their own life, in their own body, in their own marriage.

Only from that place can you see the relationship clearly. 

Only from there will you know whether what you have is worth rebuilding, or whether it was never the right fit to begin with. 

You have to reconnect with yourself and know yourself intimately - as your real self now - to get answers.

Dave's story

Dave came to me at 47. He had just exited his company and was looking forward to slowing down the grind.

He had also been having an affair for eight months. He used some exit proceeds to buy a car he didn’t need, and struggled with insomnia, telling himself it was the transition period. He told me in our first session that he was fairly certain his marriage was over, that he and his wife had grown apart, that they wanted different things, that he had simply changed.

Despite all the money, his life felt hollow and he felt lost.

What we found, over the following months, was something different.

Dave had been the responsible one his entire life. He was the person everyone leaned on and assumed as ‘husband’ and ‘father’ he would figure things out. He had built his company on the same subconscious wiring he had been praised for as a kid, being indispensable, performing, never needing anything, never admitting he was weak.

What Dave found was that it wasn’t his marriage that had failed him.

His wife was there, his kids loved him.

Rather, he had abandoned himself over the decades and in the process, abandoned the marriage too. The affair was never about the other woman. She was just the first time in decades he had allowed himself to feel alive - and that’s what she signified to him.

When Dave began doing the real work in understanding the subconscious wiring underneath his patterns, he stopped needing the affair to feel alive. 

He started being present with his wife in a way he hadn’t managed in years, and they began to have deep, vulnerable, connecting conversations that felt honest and real. And for the first time, he was actually there, his real self, in his life, in his marriage, in himself.

In the end, Dave chose to stay. It was the first genuine choice he had made about his relationship in two decades. I call it his marriage 2.0.

What this means for you

If you are feeling like a midlife crisis is hitting you, then the question to ask yourself is: who are you, underneath all of this? What is waking up within you? What is the honest truth you haven’t expressed for decades, that wants to come out now?

Because you can’t make a clear decision from inside the fog. And the fog is not your marriage. The fog is the accumulated weight of years of self-abandonment that your subconscious mind has been in a pattern of to keep you surviving and thriving - only now you’re outgrowing it.

The Successfully in Love® Method works in exactly this territory. I offer structured, private, work that encompasses attachment theory, subconscious mind work, and strategic decision frameworks designed specifically for high-performing individuals who are serious about getting honest with themselves, and getting answers.

My private clients come to me feeling confused and leave knowing themselves - with answers. Any decisions they have to make about their relationship follows naturally from there.

If this is the conversation you have been waiting to have, message me.