Quotes from Gail Sheehy

The forties are the time to rediscover community on a more realistic plane. Before this decade is out, if you are determined to become authentically yourself, you will find a way to assemble all the parts of your nature into one whole. You will have to stop pretending to be the person you have been and begin to recognize and ultimately accept who, or what, you are becoming.

Further discomfort from these new realities afflicts men who expected to reach a certain level by dint of their white maleness but who now have to make room for women and minorities as well as their own generational bulge. The old boy network doesn't help them much anymore.

No matter how different the forms we choose, our concentration during the Trying Twenties is on mastering what we feel we are supposed to do.

And to what degree does the young woman invent the man she marries? She often sees in him possibilities that no one else recognizes and pictures herself within his dream as the one person who truly understands. Such illusions are the stuff of which the twenties are made.3

Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One

If there's something about me you don't like, just tell me," says the newlywed anxious to please. "I'll change it." If he or she is not forthcoming with such an offer, the other one is determined to change it for the partner. "He may drink a little too much now," the bride confides to her friend, "but I'll reform him." Examination

Ignorant of our own and our mate's inner life, we are ruled largely by external forces at this stage.

50, there is a new warmth and mellowing. Friends become more important than ever, but so does privacy. Since it is so often proclaimed by people past midlife, the motto of this stage might be "No more bullshit.

Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don't exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don't grow.

The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety

Many people find it easier to live together when that commitment is voluntarily renewed. The

The caring of experienced partners goes less into roles and more into enhancing the special qualities and endearing idiosyncrasies that brought them together in the first place.

And even as one part of us seeks the freedom to be an individual, another part is always searching for someone or something to surrender our freedom to.

We are the only ones with our own set of thoughts and bundle of feelings. Another person can taste them, through shared experience or conversation, but no other person can ever really digest them.

We look to our mates, to our children, to money or success, hoping they will extend the protection of the caregivers from our childhood.

As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.

You can't take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people's agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations, in search of an inner validation. You are moving out of roles and into the self.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

THE TRYING TWENTIES CONFRONTS US WITH THE QUESTION of how to take hold in the adult world. Incandescent with our molten energies, having outgrown the family and the formlessness of our transiting years, we are impatient to pour ourselves into the exactly right form—our own way of living in the world.

Married at 23, a mother at 24, and blindsided by divorce at 28, I found myself struggling, like many young women I meet today, to strike a balance between my personal life and my career.

I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.

I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.

To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.