Questions to Ask Your Partner at Midlife, According to Couples Counselors

Midlife can be a weird time. Maybe you’re grappling with new aches and pains or brain fog. Perhaps you’re one of the 2.5 million sandwich generation caregivers simultaneously caring for children and aging parents. Maybe you’re having an identity crisis, maybe not.

Middle age lands somewhere between 36 and 64, or maybe 40 to 60, depending on whom you ask. It is also an inflection point in relationships, experts say, a time when many couples emerge from the daily grind of building careers and a family, and find that they’re in a union they no longer fully recognize. Rates of “gray divorce” among adults over 50 have doubled in the United States since the 1990s.

“If you have children, your children are typically launching,” said Linda Hershman, the author of “Gray Divorce” and a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Pennsylvania. “Couples are suddenly turning around and looking at each other and thinking: What is this marriage about, and what is this marriage going to be about?”

We asked Ms. Hershman and other relationship experts to offer some big-picture questions that middle-aged couples can discuss — or can ask themselves — to help them better understand their relationships, and what they want.

What is our next chapter?

Orna Guralnik, a Manhattan-based clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who stars in the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy,” encourages her clients to consider their plans for the third chapter of their relationships (when the marriage is neither fresh and new, nor consumed by domestic demands).

It’s a conversation she sees many couples having organically, particularly those in their 50s and 60s whose children have left home. “Where are they going to turn that attention?” she often asks. “And how is that going to inflect the couple?”