Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the U-shaped happiness curve. You probably already know it – this theory posits a dip in happiness in midlife, one so universal that even primates are thought to experience it (though I have no idea how they measure that). According to the data, wellbeing peaks in our 20s and again in older age, but slumps somewhere in the middle – with 47 often cited as the most abject age. The slump can be more pronounced in men. For women, it’s often accompanied by more emotional volatility and higher rates of anxiety and depression.
There’s lots of reasons put forward for declining happiness among women in their 40s, from increased responsibility, to unmet expectations to hormonal biology – oestrogen goes offline at about age 45, inducing an upheaval worse than puberty for some women. The graphs feel grim; they promise nothing good. But maybe, with unhappiness on the horizon, it’s time to interrogate what happiness is, what it’s for and ask whether choosing to be “unhappy” might not be the worst thing.
In The Promise of Happiness, the queer theorist Sara Ahmed claims that happiness is framed as a moral or social good, something we all should want and pursue. But who gets to define happiness? And how might those definitions serve power in a society where certain lives, choices or identities are often framed as unhappy, or as blocking the happiness of others?
Happiness behaves like a promise, Ahmed writes. It’s the reward that follows the “right” life choices, like getting married, having children or building a successful career. But this happiness payout is endlessly deferred. People – women especially – can find themselves at the end of a road of all the right choices, wondering why they are (still) not happy. In fact, we might attribute much of the unhappiness of the U-shaped curve, not with goals unmet or roads not taken – not even with hormones that have fled the building – but with this gulf between what women are promised and what they actually get.
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To be a happy woman, Ahmed argues, is to adapt yourself to a world that has already taken shape. We’re told that if we live the right kind of life by the right social script, happiness can be ours. For women, these scripts arguably include acts such as abdicating your own desires, dedicating yourself to others, or even the impossible condition of “having it all”. If you can do these things without feeling conflicted, you might just be happy.
Other identities have scripts too – the good man, the male provider – but I wonder if this gulf isn’t particularly keen for women, who may have more to lose by following the scripts society writes for us. Society still frames motherhood and marriage as essential tenets of the good life for women. And yet the reality of this path often includes not just compromises, but a bad deal – financially, emotionally, physically. According to the social script, single women in their 40s are lonely and sad. But the graphs tell a different story – childless, single women actually report the greatest life satisfaction, more than their married cohort.
Could it be that happiness keeps us attached to things that are ultimately bad for us? It seems I’m not alone in asking these questions. Lately a whole range of stories, from Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hit TV Show Fleishman is in Trouble to Miranda July’s novel All Fours explore women and middle-aged malaise.
In July’s All Fours, the protagonist (who reads like a version of July herself – a 40-something artist with a public profile, a loving partner and a young child) plans a solo vacation to New York with money she’s earned from an ad campaign. Instead, she turns off the highway into a small town 30 minutes from her house, rents a room in a motel and begins a kind of affair. On finishing the novel I was straight on to my book club (like middle-class perimenopausal women the developed world over, I’d imagine). All Fours has been hailed as the perimenopausal bildungsroman. To me, it felt like a distillation of every conversation we’d ever had over lukewarm prosecco.
All Fours is, at heart, a novel about the U-shaped happiness curve. It contemplates what happens to women in their mid-40s – when oestrogen falls off a cliff, when society suggests they’re worth less and when life choices made solidify into what they now must live with. But it’s not all gloom. July offers the possibility of midlife unhappiness as a space for personal growth and change – but only if we’re brave enough to reject what’s supposed to make us happy. Throughout, the character builds a getaway, outfitting a motel room in sumptuous fabrics and in a truly revolutionary scene (why?) has a rapturous sexual experience with a woman old enough to be her mother. These explorations aren’t framed as a crisis or a woman throwing away all she has built to chase a thrill, but as a U-turn into new territory.
“You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new,” July writes. As I approach the supposed happiness dip, I want to ask what unhappiness can do. What if women embraced “unhappiness”, not as a personal failing or even a fact of our biology, but as a chance to live more authentically – to reject the roads that promise women so much but sometimes (often) fail to deliver? What if we rewrote the script? Bring it on.
