“I could never have made this change or taken the cut in salary if my wife hadn’t been working,” said lawyer Bob S. about his mid-life shift. “So in my case women’s lib has turned into men’s lib—in spades!”
Most men who change direction in their middle years, are equally emphatic- about the importance of having wholehearted support from their wives. Emotional support is essential, of course. But, in addition, some men could not possibly embark on new ventures that require returning to school or reducing their salary unless their wives contributed financially as well.
When Leo W. quit his managerial job in the music and entertainment business to set up his own shop, his wife not only agreed to their digging into savings but also went to work. Without her co-operation he wouldn’t have had a prayer of succeeding, says Leo W. “If your woman doesn’t understand, God help you!” he warns. “You can’t even get into something like this otherwise. Without Lynn’s backing this would have folded two or three years ago. We’re both very much concerned with each other’s rights and desires and aims and hopes—and always have been for the twenty years of our marriage. My wife is a rather special girl, and she was with me 1,000 per cent”
Whether or not a wife goes to work, however, her willingness to accept a reshuffling of priorities and tolerate financial uncertainty is crucial. Harding Lemay and his wife, Dorothy, now live comfortably because he supplements his income by writing a television soap opera, and by teaching. But when he first left his publishing job, things were not so rosy.
“There were times we were down to three dollars,” says Dorothy, “but then something always rescued us.” Despite such moments of anxiety, she is delighted with the change and feels the family is much closer now that her husband has more time for them. When he first quit, she recalls, “A couple of my friends said, ‘I don’t see how you dared to let him do it’ As if I could have stopped him! But even if I could, I didn’t want to. It’s not fun to live with a man who is miserable. Now he sings in the morning, and life is much better!”
From a woman’s point of view, the pressures become even greater when her husband leaves the business world for an entirely different way of life, renouncing his former standards of success and security for a more independent existence in the great outdoors. Such dramatic departures from city or suburban life do not necessarily lead to divorce. They may even strengthen a couple’s relationship in time. But initially the marriage often hangs in the balance while a man grapples to define his dream, and his wife ponders whether she is willing to join him.
Such was the case with Jack and Lisa Hobbs, who each scrapped promising careers in San Francisco for life in the wilderness of British Columbia. That was in 1968, when they were both forty. Jack headed the science department of a private high school, and Lisa was a newspaper columnist. Several years later she wrote a deeply moving account of their experience, which describes her husband’s fiercely felt dream and her own struggle to accept it
Prior to their move, Jack had become disillusioned with teaching and fed up with the “rat-race pressures to be successful.” At first he had been looking only for a summer escape for the family. But after he found isolated property on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and they spent some time there, his desire to make the move permanent became a compelling force. Ready to go it alone, he told his wife that “it mattered so much to me that I didn’t care whether she followed me or not. I had a real deep-seated need—like a bomb pushing me from the inside.”
Lisa claims that this tremendous upheaval was their last chance for survival as a couple. After eighteen years together they were each, for different reasons, feeling a need for change. While her husband was becoming consumed by his dream, she was developing a new feminist consciousness that made her unwilling to endure guilt feelings caused by work assignments far from home. Their marriage was already troubled when Jack’s search for a remote retreat began, Lisa recalls. At the end of their first summer in the wilderness, she was horrified when he said wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be nice not to go back? To jump out of bed with joy in the morning and not give a damn about how we looked or acting smart or getting ahead?” Knowing that part of herself still clung to the city, and aware of her still-unresolved struggle to establish her full identity, Lisa protested. “You’d be running away from life!” she proclaimed.
No, said Jack: “Quite the opposite, we’d be running towards life.”
When they returned to San Francisco, the subject was dropped. “It would take Jack and me one full year of ambivalence, probing, introspection and, at times, fearful tension and conflict before both of us arrived at the point where we had the courage to do what had to be done,” says Lisa. Gradually, however, her own feelings began to change as she discussed with friends Jack’s desire to make a permanent move. “Millions of other men” wanted to do the same thing, she discovered:
As I began to speak about these things to friends, cautiously at first and then more and more openly, I was surprised to find an instant response.
Many women told of their husbands being obsessed by this dream—the dream of freedom in the land of the free and brave, the dream of being their own boss, of starting a task and being allowed to see it through to its end, of not having to dress, look and speak for twelve hours a day like actors playing before a critical audience.
In confidence they spoke of their husbands’ recurrent depressions, irritability, moodiness and melancholy that sometimes bordered on madness. I glimpsed a nation of men caught in the wheels of the vast American dream machine that consumed body and soul for $200 a week.
Listening to these confidences with an open heart and an open mind, Lisa began to shift her position. She and Jack began to talk more honestly about changing their life—and finally made a mutual decision to move.
Certainly their move to the wilderness presented enormous challenges. Jack was undaunted, however, by the run-down condition of their acre-and-a-half sanctuary, which was purchased for $10,000 along with a dock and a small cottage. Though the building projects engrossed the whole family, he did most of the work almost single-handedly. Besides renovating the cottage and building a dam to produce electric power, he also slowly constructed a new hillside home. When not laboring physically, Jack now spends his time reading and working on a fictional biography.
Lisa describes how their confrontation with the whims of nature, and with isolation, led to continually unfolding discoveries. As each month passed, they exercised more freedom: in sleeping and waking, dress, play, and physical activity. Finally, she says, they graduated “to the greatest freedom two beings who live together can experience—the freedom to say what you are really thinking and feeling rather than what you should be thinking and feeling. This is the fountain of youth
Two years after their move they took another big step by reversing traditional sex roles. When their money ran short, and the children’s boarding school tuition had to be paid, they agreed that Lisa would be the one to live and work in the city during the week—writing for the Vancouver Sun— and return home on weekends. The switch was made naturally and simply, with respect for each other’s deepest needs.
As a result of their courageous decisions, Jack and Lisa Hobbs have transformed themselves and their relationship. Says Lisa: “The freedom we have found has loosened us forever from all traditional concepts and has freed us to move and flow with ease as life demands. … On the brink of middle age we are finding growth, excitement and fascination in a twenty-year marriage.”
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