“That always surprises me, the dark in the light”: meaningful pleasure in creative leisure of midlife women

Abstract

Hegemonic narratives of midlife portray this understudied life-stage as a time of decline, depression, and joyless juggling of career and caregiving. Women in midlife face the “double standard” of aging at the intersection of ageism and sexism (Sontag 1972), pressured to “age successfully” (Lamb et al. 2017). An interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith et al. 2009) comprising interviews, observations, and photo-elicitation of five women in the Netherlands suggests a counternarrative, by which engagement in creative leisure provides opportunities for pleasure, delight, sensual joy, and flourishing through midlife transitions. The findings reveal a wide array of meaningful pleasures in creative leisure: embodied delights, immersive sensations, transformative play, adventurous risk taking, friendships, new learning, and identity exploration. These pleasures gain nuanced understanding when considered in context of fears of aging and mortality, embodied inhibitions, and self-criticism. The sombre themes enhance the joyful ones, highlighting dark and light as a delicate interplay underpinning women’s creative leisure in midlife.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2026 · DOI ↗