Marriage and Middle Age

Abstract

Students in the field of human development recognize that there is an element of convenience, if not pure arbitrariness, in the way we conceptualize and segment the life cycle. Philosophical, folk and literary definitions compete with those of social science. It served Shakespeare's purposes very well to discover seven periods of life and to compare them with seven acts of a drama. If the East Indian reaches into the river and brings out a handful of water and says that is life and then puts the water back into the river and says that is death, he certainly has a defensible dichotomy; although we have a surprising amount of recent evidence that we are not even sure when life begins or death commences. In French folklore, it is possible to find a three-part life cycle: Les Jeunes, the young, at the beginning. Le Troisieme Age, the third age, at the end. With Un used to refer to the great inbetween period. It is to the Certain Age that I wish to address my attention. It should come as no surprise that reasonable observers disagree as to when middle age begins and when it ends. Although some U.S. Census reports define middle age as from 45 to 64, we have research which uses 30 as the onset-age and other studies which refer to 70 as the end of middle age. Professor Bernice Neugarten (1968), who has focused her scientific inquiry on adulthood for several decades, has suggested some subdividing