The Perimenopause Husband
Is It Perimenopause or Something Else?
Hey hun. That's not perimenopause talking. I'm just bloody annoyed at you.
My wife said that to me. Word for word.
I had done something. I do not remember what. Something that would have annoyed her ten years ago and will annoy her in ten more.
And she was right, and I had it coming.
Is everything she does now perimenopause?
No. And I went through a stretch where I acted like it was.
That is the part nobody warns you about. A bloke spends a year or two with no idea what is going on. Then he finally learns there is a name for it and a shape to it, and he swings the whole way over. Every snap. Every short answer. Every quiet afternoon. That will be the perimenopause.
It feels like understanding. It is not. It is a different way of not listening to her.
Because if everything is the weather, then nothing she says counts on its own. She cannot be annoyed, she can only be hormonal. She cannot be right, she can only be having a day. That is a worse place to put your wife than where I had her before I knew anything at all.
Could it be something that needs a doctor or a specialist?
Sometimes, and this is the half you do not get to skip.
There are things that turn up in these years that need a proper look, and some of them look exactly like everything else on the list until somebody with training says otherwise. In our house that was headaches with dizziness and numbness in her arms, and it took a year of appointments and scans and a specialist before anyone could tell us what we were dealing with. Palpitations put us in hospital on another night entirely.
I am not going to retell either of those here. The headaches one is its own article, written properly, because it deserved more than a paragraph.
What matters for this question is the rule we came out with. You do not diagnose your wife. You do not diagnose her by reading a symptom list either, and you certainly do not diagnose her by reading me. If something is new, if something is getting worse, if something frightens either of you, see a doctor or a specialist in this field. Say it early rather than late, and go with her.
The symptoms post says the same thing in more detail, and it says it for the same reason. Knowing the picture helps you pay attention. It does not make you qualified.
Is she allowed to just be annoyed at me?
She is. And this is the bit I got most wrong.
When she said that line to me, my first reaction underneath was almost relief, because it meant I had not missed a storm. Then the rest of it landed. She was telling me I had said or done something careless, and it had annoyed her exactly the way it would have annoyed her at thirty five. Nothing hormonal about it. Just me.
Here is one, and I am not going to dress it up. I hang the washing out. The way I put the pegs on annoys her, because she has her own way of doing it. For a long time my attitude was that the clothes get dry either way, so what does it matter. Then I actually looked at her way properly. She spreads the pegs wider. Better air flow. Her way is a tad better than mine, and I had been quietly ignoring that for years.
That is not perimenopause. That is a bloke doing a job his own way in someone else's system and calling it close enough because the washing dries either way.
Here is another one. I get direct with the kids about getting their clothes out of the washing basket and into the wardrobe, and the baskets sit in their rooms anyway. Credit where it is due, every one of them does their own washing and puts it away. They just treat the basket as temporary storage. And it still annoys her when she has to remind them a couple of times.
Nobody yells in our house about any of this. She does not spit the dummy and go off at me. We are all doing better than we have ever done. But not yelling is not the same as not annoyed. This stuff does get heightened in these years, and the reminder she has to give twice costs her more now than it used to.
Me not listening the first time is not perimenopause. Twenty six years of marriage does not stop generating ordinary reasons to be annoyed at your husband just because something else is happening at the same time.
She is not a weather system. She is a person who is also dealing with weather.
How do I actually tell the difference?
Honestly, most days you cannot, not from the outside, and that is worth admitting up front.
What you can do is stop needing to know. The reading is not a diagnosis, it is a question about today, and it changes what you do rather than what you decide about her.
Two things did help me, and neither is clever.
The first is the shape of it. Weather comes and goes without a cause attached and it does not track with anything you did. Rage that lands on you first over something tiny, on a day nothing happened, is usually the storm. Annoyance that arrives right after you did a specific thing, and that would still make sense if the two of you were twenty five, is usually you. The pegs would have annoyed her at twenty five.
The second is that she knows. Not always, not instantly, but far more often than I gave her credit for. The day she could say hey hun, that's not perimenopause talking, out loud and half laughing, was a good day in our house. It meant we were both looking at the same sky. She was not hiding in it and I was not hiding behind it.
You do not get that sentence from her on demand. You get it after she has watched you take the whole thing seriously for a while.
What do I do about it tonight?
One thing. Before you call it the weather, ask yourself one question.
Did I just do something a bit annoying?
That is it. That is the whole tool. Ask it silently, before you decide anything, before you say anything, and be honest in your own head about the answer.
If the answer is no, you are probably reading weather, so read it and act accordingly. If the answer is yes, that is genuinely good news, mate. You can fix you. You cannot fix perimenopause and you were never going to.
Getting from there to the conversation where the two of you can say this out loud to each other, calmly, with no scorecard, is a whole chapter of the book. This is the question that keeps you honest tonight.
Does this ever settle down?
It does, in the sense that matters.
Not every storm is perimenopause. Some of them are just you, and some of them are just life, and a few of them need a doctor or a specialist in this field. Learning to tell those apart is most of the job, and menopause itself, when it finally arrives, is a line on a calendar you only spot looking backwards.
She will tell you which is which, once you have earned it. You earn it by taking it seriously when it is real, and by owning it when it is not.
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.