The Perimenopause Husband
When Your Husband Doesn't Get It: A Letter From One Who Didn't
My wife and I ran a business together. We were on a job, a physical job, in someone's home, machinery running. There is a rhythm to how we work. She knows what I need before I need it.
On this day the rhythm was gone. Simple things were not done. Steps I needed were not ready. One after another.
I stopped mid job, turned to her, and said it plainly. If you can't get these basic things right, I don't need you here. You're better off at home.
In someone's house. To the woman I had loved for thirty one years.
Her head went down. She did not answer. She finished what she was doing, packed up, and we left. The drive to the next job was silence. The whole afternoon was silence. She picked up the kids, I did the admin, and the entire time I sat there thinking, what is her problem.
That is the honest truth of it. I thought it was her problem.
Why doesn't my husband understand what is happening to me?
Because nobody told him, and because he is reading the wrong instruments.
While I stood in that house getting frustrated, I had decided what was going on in her head. I thought she was in Bali. Cocktail in hand, not a care in the world, somewhere else by choice, choosing not to pay attention.
What was actually going on in her head was thunder, lightning, waves crashing, heavy cloud that had nothing to do with me or the job or where the equipment was. She was not choosing to be somewhere else. She was already in a storm I could not see.
I had noticed things for years. She was hot when the rest of us were cold. Awake in the night. Shorter with things that never used to bother her. Noticing and paying attention are not the same thing. I was noticing. I was not paying attention. Nobody had ever sat me down and said the years before menopause could do this. Not our dads. Not our mates. Not anywhere.
What is he actually thinking when he goes quiet or snaps?
I can only tell you what I was thinking, and I am not proud of most of it.
In the evenings I knew something was wrong. You cannot live with someone for thirty one years and not know. So I would ask, and the answer was always the same. Nothing.
I took that word personally, because nothing did not look like nothing. Nothing looked like silence and distance and tears that arrived from nowhere. Nothing looked like the clothes coming off at midnight because it was unbearably hot when it was not hot. So I went back through the day looking for the wrong thing I said, the moment I missed, and when I could not find it I landed somewhere worse.
Maybe this is just how it ends. Couples who do everything right for twenty years, raise the kids, build the life, and one day look at each other and think, who are you. I was not there yet. I could feel the direction.
That is what the silence and the snapping usually are. Not a man who does not care. A man who is frightened, has no map, and is defending himself against a verdict nobody actually handed down.
What was actually happening?
She was not giving me nothing. She was giving me everything she had.
She was in a storm nobody had named for her yet, and she could not explain it because she did not understand it herself. The withdrawal, the tears with no reason, the moods that arrived without invitation and left without explanation. That was not a choice. That was a body and a mind that had stopped behaving the way she expected them to.
And there I was, driving in the same lane I always had, same speed, same tone, the same directness that had always been fine between us. Except none of it landed the same way anymore. The tone that once said I know you well enough to be straight with you now said something she could not defend herself against.
That is the thing about mistakes made in ignorance. They do not feel like mistakes at the time.
What can I say that will actually get through to him?
One thing, and it is small. Tell him the weather, not the reason.
A long way down the track, once we had started talking properly, my wife and I worked out the thing that helped most. It was not an explanation. I told her plainly: you don't have to explain it, just let me know if you feel something in a moment. That's all I need.
So she did. A line in the morning: I'm already off today, it's not you. A text in the afternoon: I'm having one of those moments. That was all. No reason attached, because most of the time there was no reason she could name, and hunting for one was what had been hurting us both.
It worked because it took the guessing off him. He stops going back through the day looking for what he did. He stops taking nothing personally. He gets a forecast instead of a verdict, and most blokes can act on a forecast.
If he will not hear it from you yet, he might hear it from me. You can send him this, or the one I wrote for him about how to explain perimenopause to your husband. Same story, told to him instead of to you.
Will he ever get it?
I did, eventually. It changed at a bench seat in the corner of our kitchen on a Sunday morning, and what was said there is in the book, because it is not a script and it would not have worked as one.
What I can tell you here is this. You are not asking too much. You are not the problem. And a husband who does not get it is not the same thing as a husband who does not care. I was the first one for a long time. I am writing this because I was never the second.
If any of this sounds like your house, he is not a bad husband. He is just uninformed. That can change.
Send Him the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to the five weather states, what each one looks like from his side and the one thing to do in it. Free. Send it to him, or print it for the fridge.