Singles

At age 38, I thought I had the world by the tail. I had a beautiful family consisting of myself, a lovely wife, and two beautiful children. I had just built a beautiful custom home that overlooked the small rural town where we lived and out to Puget Sound. I was the owner of a law firm that I had started from scratch five years earlier. And I had been recruited to run for a seat on the Washington State Court of Appeals—a very prestigious and powerful judgeship. I was well thought of in the community I had moved to five years earlier, and in my profession. I was a young man in a hurry with a lot of energy and ambition.

I ran a great campaign but lost the election, which was followed relatively closely by the great recession that struck in 2008. Within three years, I lost my 15-year marriage, my beautiful home, my business, and the association of my children for a large portion of the year. I felt like I had lost everything I had spent my entire adult life trying to build. At age 40, I fell into a deep depression that lasted about five years.

During my long night of depression, I doubted things would ever get better. I had worked so hard for so many years to achieve what I had so far—only to see it slip away in a frightfully short period of time. I asked myself, “Why should I even try to get back to where I was? I could work another 10 years and just lose it all overnight again. This kind of thinking kept me stuck in the emotional mud and unable to believe good things could last for me. Because I seemed to be perpetually broke, I felt limited in my ability to move into a new relationship. As a Latter-day Saint, I wondered if anyone who I might want to marry would be reluctant to marry a divorced man. Perhaps most troublesome of all, I was emotionally depleted and did not feel I had the strength to overcome all the forces arrayed against me.

“Mid-life crisis” is the term we use to describe the disappointment and emotional turmoil that comes to many of us between 40 and 60 years old, when we realize that we don’t have unlimited time remaining to achieve our lives’ ambitions and, perhaps, we aren’t going to become president of the company or a Supreme Court Justice, live in a mansion, or make a groundbreaking scientific discovery. A divorced Latter-day Saint may be tormented by the idea that no other success can compensate for failure in the home. We may tell ourselves that we have not only failed at marriage but at life.

A Latter-day Saint who has never married may be grieving the hope that they would have their own children or build a life with a spouse in the springtime of their lives. Many say, “I always knew some Latter-day Saints got divorced but I never thought that would be me!” or “I always took for granted that I would get married as a young adult and never imagined I would be single into my 40s.” The loss of those long-held dreams is almost always extremely painful. I have seen many Latter-day Saints marry within weeks of ending a multi-decade marriage, who seem to be in a hurry to replace what they have lost as quickly as possible.

Often when Latter-day Saints experience these losses in the family realm, the damage to their self-esteem can easily spill over into other areas of life, such as career, and even in personal spirituality. A man who saw his role including the primary responsibility to provide for his family often feels like a failure if he struggled to provide, or if part of his wife’s dissatisfaction with the marriage included his failure to earn more or provide better. The stresses of temporal concerns can contribute to marital problems—and marital problems often contribute to depression, anxiety, and distractions that can contribute to worsening financial problems.

A woman who got married in her early 20s and stopped going to college or focusing on a career may feel genuinely terrified when she finds herself single at middle age and having to figure out how to support herself financially for the first time—which is its own kind of mid-life crisis. Many such women feel less valuable when they find that the market will not pay them very well for their experience over the last couple of decades. Many feel an urgency to re-marry quickly because they don’t know another way to find the financial support they need. But that kind of desperation for financial support may leave a person vulnerable to overlooking serious deficiencies in other areas important to marriage because she is so focused on having her financial needs met. Also, a woman looking for a “knight in shining armor” to rescue her from a financial mess is less attractive to the kind of man she may really prefer to be married to.

Between these common stereotypes lies a wide range of experiences—ways in which mid-life can quietly catch us off guard, stirring up spiritual unrest, self-doubt, anxiety, and even depression—and reminding us that time is limited, just as we begin to feel farther from our dreams than ever before.

If you are among the multitude of Latter-day Saint mid-singles who are in the throes of mid-life crisis, I have a few suggestions that can help you to navigate these challenges and come away happier and more fulfilled than ever before:

1. Let it go. You are at a time of life when you and those closest to you have made mistakes that have caused pain. Do the best you can to make amends for your part in causing the pain. But regardless of how others respond or whether they ever seek to make things right, do as Paul counseled and “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you“ (Ephesians 4:31-32). Holding on to conflict and pain will sap your strength. Let it go and you can move forward unencumbered by the injuries of the past.
2. Put God on the Throne. The reason I felt so hopeless during my mid-life crisis was that I thought solving the mounting pile of problems was all up to me, and I didn’t feel up to the task. You are middle-aged now and you have learned about your limitations. As the Levite Prophet Jahaziel said, “Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s” (2 Chronicles 20:15). Jesus also promised “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).The reason His yoke is easy and His burden is light is that he is on the other side of the yoke, and lending you His strength. Even when you feel all alone, help is coming. Pray in faith, knowing that He has a plan for you that is more glorious than you can imagine, and watch and wait for Him to show up in your life. Worrying and stewing about things you cannot control is soul-sucking and exhausting. You can “rest” when you allow yourself to believe that He is in charge and He wants to take care of you.
3. Remember that Life is not a race. When I was a younger man on my mission in Australia, I wanted to be the first person from my MTC group to be a senior companion, and then a trainer, and then a district leader, and then a zone leader. You get the idea. I was called to each of those positions in turn, relatively early in my mission. Several months ago, I heard that a missionary I knew who never became a trainer, district leader, or zone leader, had recently been released after twelve years as a stake president. I have never been ordained a high priest, which is honestly fine with me. Some of my law school classmates are retiring now. I have just re-built financially enough to have a good start on building a retirement. I am nowhere near ready to retire.Life has brought me the experiences I needed—which didn’t include being either a high priest or a stake president up to this point or retiring early. My path is unique and need not be compared to others. So, if you see your old high school sports rival pulling up to the class reunion in a Mercedez Benz, tell yourself it is ok. Let your life be your life, and understand that the experiences you dream of will come for you at the right time. Remember, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).
4. Base your reevaluation on things that last. Middle age presents a unique opportunity to reevaluate the way you have lived in the past and determine what has worked for you and what has not. As the proverb says, “Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established” (Proverbs 4:26). So, ponder the path you have trod in the past and honestly evaluate what has worked and what practices or ideas you need to let go of. You are old enough to have experience, but young enough to have time left to implement what you have learned. As you strive to re-build your life, make your foundation on things that last, like the wise man who built his house on the rock (see Matthew 7:24). The intellectual fads of the moment will mostly die away. Money will eventually be eaten up by inflation. The new sports car and a bunch of temporary romantic flings are fleeting pleasures. What lasts? Prayer lasts. Your relationship with God lasts. The love of people who have truly chosen you lasts. “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).
5. Look at the advantages. You are old enough to know, but young enough to do. You have the advantages of experience and time ahead of you. This is the time when you will decide who you really want to be. As a young man, you may have liked the idea of working in your profession more than you liked doing the work. You may have tried a business or profession and liked the idea but found that your native skill set was better suited to something else. I do not recommend getting divorced. But if you are already in that position, you are free to try a new career or interest that may suit you better. You are free to try new hobbies and make new friends. Your mid-single life will be what you make it.
6. Get excited! Start a list of things you want to explore. What kind of people are you interested in dating? What romantic moments would you like to enjoy? What kind of experiences would you like to have? Would you take up painting or sculpting as a creative outset? Would you like to take up hiking or fishing or skydiving or skiing? Would you like to make a list of national parks you would like to explore over the next 5 years? Would you like to get together a group of single friends and take a cruise together? Be creative, use your imagination, and plan some adventures. You have an opportunity to reinvent yourself and live the rest of your life with more intention. If you chose to read this article, I think you are ready to choose an enthusiastic and hopeful approach to the rest of your life.

Mid-life, especially for Latter-day Saint singles, can be a season of deep introspection, unexpected loss, and emotional upheaval—but it can also be a time of powerful renewal. My journey of success, personal collapse, and spiritual rediscovery reflects a broader experience shared by many who find themselves navigating mid-life crisis alone. Rather than remaining mired in disappointment or fear, I encourage you to shift your mindset: to let go of bitterness, trust in God’s plan, abandon comparison, build on lasting values, and embrace the unique opportunities that come with experience and maturity. With faith, forgiveness, self-compassion, and a willingness to dream anew, mid-life can become not a decline, but a beginning—a time to reimagine one’s path with clarity, purpose, and hope.

Resource:

Intentional Courtship can help in this journey.

About the Author

Jeff Teichert, and his wife Cathy Butler Teichert, are the founders of “Love in Later Years,” which ministers to Latter-day Saint single adults seeking peace, healing, and more joyful relationships. They are co-authors of the Amazon bestseller Intentional Courtship: A Mid-Singles Guide to Peace, Progress and Pairing Up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jeff and Cathy each spent nearly a decade in the mid-singles community and they use that experience to provide counsel and hope to mid-singles and later married couples through written articles, podcasts, and videos. Jeff and Cathy are both Advanced Certified Life Coaches and have university degrees in Family & Human Development. They are the parents of a blended family that includes four handsome sons, one lovely daughter-in-law, and two sweet little granddaughters.

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Website: http://www.loveinlateryears.com/
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/loveinlateryears
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