Middle-aged women are blowing up their lives. This is what’s behind the boom

May 14, 2026 — 5:00am

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In my experience, happiness is that lovely, warm, toasty feeling you get just before you fall flat on your face. At my age I expected to be as content as a canary-filled cat. But KAPOW! I suddenly find myself tip-toeing through an exploding minefield. Nearly every middle-aged woman I know is in a state of upheaval, either due to romantic trauma, career implosion, life epiphanies or family meltdown.

Take Fiona. The worst sentence in the English language must be: “Whose knickers are these and why are they in our marital bed?” This is how my girlfriend greeted her husband of 30 years when she came home early from a work trip to find him leaping naked into the shower and a dishevelled woman running out the patio door. Needless to say, they’re now fighting over custody of the designer dog and the espresso machine. “I don’t know what went wrong between me and my husband – or that two-timing worm as I prefer to call him,” Fiona sobbed over cocktails. “But I did........

© The Age