The Perimenopause Husband
Can a Marriage Survive Perimenopause? What Changed in Ours
The car was where I noticed it.
Driving somewhere together, and nothing. Not a fight. Just the road, and the two of us looking straight ahead.
The evenings went the same way. Plenty of them went past without much said at all.
And somewhere in there, without ever deciding it, I started to accept it.
Can a marriage actually survive perimenopause?
Yes. Ours did.
But I want to be straight about how close I came to not really trying. It was not a big blow up that nearly did it. It was me getting used to the quiet.
I was not lying awake terrified. It never felt that dramatic. What it felt like was a quiet kind of acceptance. You hear about couples who do everything right for years and then drift apart once the kids start leaving, and some part of me had just decided that might be us.
If it has gone past quiet in your house, and you are lying awake doing the sums, that is a different post.
Why do so many marriages drift in these years?
Because it creeps up, and nobody in the house knows what they are looking at.
I never said it out loud. I never actually decided it. I just accepted it, the way you accept weather you think you cannot do anything about.
That is how a lot of marriages go in these years, I reckon. Not with a door slamming. With two people in a car, both deciding the silence is just how it is now, and perimenopause, the long run up to menopause, sitting in the middle of it with no name on it. The numbers on that are worse than most blokes would guess.
I am not proud of it. Giving up quietly looks a lot like being patient from the outside. It is not.
What changed in ours?
I started paying attention.
Not fixing. Paying attention. And once I actually looked, the weather was not fixed at all. It had just never been read. The same flat evenings I had been accepting as the end of something turned out to be days I could learn to read, and some of them I could make easier.
That is not a promise that yours comes through. I would never tell you that, and nobody honest will. It is just what happened in my house.
What is one thing we actually did?
We put something ahead of us.
Every couple of months, two or three nights away. A decent hotel with an ocean view, close enough to the esplanade that we could walk from the room. It was not always easy to afford, and it was not always easy to get away from the business, so we set money aside for it on purpose.
Here is the part I nearly missed. The weekend was good. But the six weeks of knowing it was coming is what actually carried her. Something on the calendar, the two of us, that she could look at on a bad day.
So if you do one thing, book something. It does not have to be a hotel. It has to be booked, it has to be the two of you, and she has to be able to see it coming. Then talk about it.
That is one. How the rest of it got rebuilt, the conversations and the ordinary everyday stuff, is the back half of the book.
If you are reading this on her side of the house
You are not the problem, and you are not asking too much by wanting him to notice.
If he has gone quiet, and the car has gone quiet with him, that is not always him giving up on you. He may just not know what he is looking at yet. Send him this. It is easier than explaining it again on a hard day.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling a storm warning from an overcast day from a fog day, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.