At some point in the last few years, you may have quietly considered one of the following… 

Messaging the old schoolfriend you’ve been half-flirting with in the comments section for eighteen months, and seeing where it goes. 

Creating a shortlist of beautiful Ukranian brides under the pretence of broadening your horizons. 

Buying a boat, despite never having sailed one, stood near one, or expressed the faintest interest in sailing before this exact moment.

None of these urges are really about a fling, a new bride, or a boat. 

What the urge is actually asking for

The specific object of the craving is almost interchangeable. It could be a business idea, a motorbike, a one-way ticket. What’s underneath all of them is the same need: proof that you still have agency, desire, and an unscripted life, and it usually comes after a long stretch of being defined by what other people need from you. 

The clichés may be a joke, but what they show is the intensity of this underlying need – which makes you reach for the easiest, most vivid symbol of freedom lying around and hands it to you as a plan.

This sideways urge to do something seemingly absurd is a sign of just how long that particular need has gone unfed.

Should you act on the urge?

The trouble with the fling with an old flame or the boat is that you end up asking them to deliver something they can’t – a new identity. 

A boat can’t answer “who am I now.” An affair can’t either, though it can feel like it has, briefly, which is exactly what makes it so convincing in the moment. When the real question is still unanswered underneath, you’re left with the original problem, plus a new one on top of it: a marriage in pieces, a bank account down forty grand, or an old flame standing on your doorstep with a suitcase saying their husband kicked them out.

The healthy version – same craving, better plan

None of this means the craving itself is wrong, or something to white-knuckle through until it passes. It’s information, and handled well, it can be the start of a genuinely good chapter rather than a costly detour. A few honest shifts like these could make the difference:

• Name what you’re actually craving before you name the vehicle for it – freedom, being desired, mattering, novelty, unstructured time – and ask what would satisfy that directly, rather than accepting the first specific answer your brain hands you.

• Run a small, reversible experiment before a large, irreversible one. Take a sailing course before you buy the boat. Reconnect with the old schoolfriend openly over coffee, rather than in a private inbox. Test the restlessness in a form you could walk back from, and see if it’s still there once you have.

• Do it in the open rather than in secret. Secrecy is what turns an ordinary midlife stirring into a betrayal – not the stirring itself. Telling your partner “I’ve been feeling restless and I don’t fully know why” is uncomfortable, but it’s a completely different act from disappearing into a version of your life they’re not allowed to see.

Get support built for exactly this. A coach or a therapist gives the craving somewhere honest to go, which matters, because otherwise the only two places it has to go are suppression or action – and suppression doesn’t hold forever either.

What this means for your relationship

Most of this doesn’t have to be a solo project, and it’s worth resisting the idea that it does. If you can say the restless, half-formed version of what you’re feeling out loud to your partner, before it’s calcified into a decision, you give the relationship a chance to move with you rather than be blindsided by you later. 

Some couples take up the reversible experiment together – the sailing course, the campervan trip across Europe, the new shared hobby – and find the restlessness was looking for a partner in it all along, not an exit from one. Remember The Piña Colada Song by Rupert Holmes? He replies to an ad in the personals column, looking for an adventure. The mystery woman turns out to be the old wife he was lying in bed with when he read the ad.

To be fair to the harder truth: sometimes the honest answer, once you’ve actually done this work, is that the relationship isn’t right for the person you’re becoming. That’s a real and sometimes correct conclusion. But it’s one worth reaching deliberately, with your eyes open, after the questions have been asked and not one you back into because the temptation of the shiny new thing made the decision for you.

If you like piña colada, and getting caught in the rain…

A healthy midlife crisis is what you get when you take the questions seriously enough to ask them on purpose, instead of waiting for them to ask themselves in the most expensive, least reversible way available. Same reinvention. None of the wreckage.

Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev