Midlife Crisis without Money?
Can you have a midlife crisis without having any money? This is a key question for those midlife bachelors out there who were maybe married for ten or fifteen or twenty years, and/or have young children. You probably have alimony and child support payments that are killing you, right? You might barely be able to afford to have your own apartment because of your other financial obligations. You may wonder how on earth you could possibly have any fun (much less a successful midlife crisis) without any cash. And there is certainly a lot of validity to the issue – as it is difficult in today’s society to do anything that doesn’t cost money.
The short answer to the question is – yes, you can have a successful midlife crisis without having any money … but your options are much more limited. The brand-new Corvette, for example, is probably out of the question. Expensive dinner dates with foofy, high maintenance socialites are probably also out of reach. You’ve got to understand your financial constraints, and then make some critical choices about how you are going to get what you need out of your life right now. Let me illustrate this by describing my good friend who lives in Iowa, Cornfed Ed. I’ve known Ed since we were kids in elementary school – and we’ve always been the best of friends … even though he moved away from Southern California in his early twenties. Ed only attended college minimally during our youth – instead he joined the Marines, and traveled the world. He got married in his late twenties to a woman named Ronda who he met while stationed in Yuma, Arizona – and then had two children with her. He left the Marines after eight years, and worked various blue collar jobs around Colorado before settling his family in Iowa for a particular job in the transportation field … but unfortunately Ed was laid off from his job several years after arriving in Iowa. Ed was unemployed for a while, but his wife was working. However, after fifteen years or so of marriage, Cornfed Ed’s wife, Ronda, wound up leaving him for some guy she met at her job. Ed was devastated – and he was broke. He lost his house to foreclosure. He wound up sleeping on the couches of friends in the area … but he never wanted to leave that part of Iowa because he wanted to be near his children. Ed could have easily fled the state, and went somewhere else where employment was easier to find – but what was most important to him was his relationship with his children. And that is highly commendable.
So Cornfed Ed was unemployed, homeless, and barely able to take care of himself with the public assistance money he started receiving. His ego was bruised – he was an unintentional midlife bachelor … and he wanted to get back into the dating life … but how? Cornfed Ed took inventory of himself – at age forty-two, he actually looked thirty-two … he had a good head of hair, he had a strong build-type of body. Unless you knew he was forty-two, you would swear he was a lot younger. Plus he was a smart guy. He barely went to college in his youth – but that was because he was more interested in partying and then in becoming a Marine at that time. He decided to take two giant steps forward – he started going to college full-time, and started working fairly menial jobs part-time. How does this fit into the midlife crisis? Well – Cornfed Ed became a serious lady-chaser around school, and around his warehouse loading job. He liked dating the college-age women because they were accustomed to guys not having any money. He also dated a number of women who worked at the company that he had the part-time job at – he was just very up-front with them, and told them that he didn’t have money to date … and those women wound up paying for a lot of their dates. Cornfed Ed leveraged his good looks – and also his easy-going personality. He also charmed the more mature women with his commitment to his children. Ed got himself a fairly substantial number of women – six or so his first year as a bachelor. He wound up settling down with a twenty-six year old former stripper who lived upstairs from him in one of the many apartments he bounced around from. The moral to this story is – you can have a successful midlife crisis and midlife bachelorhood – you just have to really know what your own personal strengths and attributes are, and leverage the hell out of them to achieve what you want. Trust me – if Cornfed Ed can succeed out in the middle of nowhere in Iowa, then you can also succeed wherever you happen to be right now.
