What behaviour to expect from your midlife crisis husband or partner

...anger, adultery, aggression and abandonment. 

If you're dealing with a male in midlife crisis, you're fairly likely to see all of these. Every MLC has its own peculiarities but they have much in common too. Some wives and partners see the crisis developing over time; for others it's sprung on them one day when a previously apparently contented husband announces he's leaving because he needs "time and space." The Speech is a fairly standard feature of MLC. Your husband may tell you he loves you but is not in love with you any more. He'll probably list your faults - these excuse him walking away. He'll either tell you there's no-one else - usually a whopping lie - or else he'll tell you in a blasé fashion that yeh, there is someone else and what's it got to do with you really?

Often MLC is accompanied by overtly weird behaviour. Your husband will say and do things that seem completely out of character. He'll have a huge sense of entitlement, feeling that life has short-changed him and now he deserves, as my MLCer said explicitly, to "get everything I want." His panic at reaching middle-age drives fairly desperate and reckless behaviour and if he feels you or the children are in his way he'll walk right over you.

Many women respond to the aggression, strange behaviour and affairs with disbelief at first. Which is entirely understandable. Suddenly you're living with someone unrecognisable. Often, the next instinct is to reason with him. Unfortunately, it's not possible. A man in midlife crisis has his own agenda and his thought processes are very screwed up. Where once he may have been the fount of logic and wisdom, he'll now come out with things that by any standard are just plain weird.

So the next response is often to try and advise him - to urge him to get help. But he's not listening. He may be about to run away with a teenaged hooker, but for the moment it makes a lot of sense to him.

Your best bet is to read as much as you can about MLC and understand - hard as it is - that this is not about you, or your home, or your kids - you're more than likely exactly the same people he used to love. Instead it's about an overwhelming panic experienced by some men around and after 40. It addles their brains and sets them off on a quest for a different life. Whatever the shape of the life they've lived up to now, they want something different, just to be sure they're not missing out.They typically have no insight whatever - no understanding that they're really chasing lost youth and they can't have it back even if they do have sex with someone young enough to be their daughter or become a beach bum or start going to nightclubs and dancing till 3am. Rather than coming to terms with ageing, which would require figuring out how they're feeling and why, they seek exterior solutions - rented accommodation away from their homes, drink or drugs, cars or bikes, new wives or mistresses. And often a new, 'younger' style of dressing and a gym subscription to get back the body they had in their twenties.

Women dealing with MLC husbands also often struggle to control them. You can't. The best you can do is decide what you will and won't put up with, as far as that's possible. For example, many men in crisis leave their families, but still keep their stuff at 'home'. If that doesn't suit you, you can give him a deadline for collecting it and tell him after that you'll put it in the street. Then the onus is on him to get his stuff. Many also keep a key and come and go as they want. A lawyer can advise you whether you have to accept that.

In more extreme cases, lawyers are essential (unfortunately) to try and stop a husband wrecking the family finances and acting in other abusive ways.

But apart from looking after your own practical and emotional interests as well as you can at this time - and MLC can last for years - the best advice is not to struggle to get him back. For one thing, he may not be worth having back now. And if he does eventually come out of the other side as someone like the man you used to know, then he'll take steps to reconcile. If you've been looking after yourself, you'll be in a better position to deal with him at that point than if you've spent a year or two weeping, pleading and pursuing. For your own sake, let go of him emotionally because even if he does resurface, he'll be gone for some time.