The Perimenopause Husband
Perimenopause Crying for No Reason: The Tears She Couldn't Explain
I walked into our bedroom one afternoon and she was sitting on the end of the bed, looking out the window at the block we live on. From the doorway I thought she was watching the birds, the way she sometimes does.
As I got closer I could see it. Tears, just rolling down her cheeks. Steady. The kind that have been going for a while before anyone noticed. She didn't turn to look at me. Not when I walked in. Not when I got close.
My mind went straight to the worst place. Something's happened. A phone call. Bad news she hadn't told me yet. I got in front of her, in her line of sight, and asked what's happened. I waited for the thing. The actual thing.
Nothing came. So I asked again, more directly. You're crying, something has to be going on.
And she looked at me and said, I don't know. I just feel sad.
Why can't she tell me what's wrong?
That answer stopped me cold. For a bloke, it doesn't compute. We don't have a feeling without a cause attached. So when she gave me the feeling with no cause, I assumed she was holding the cause back.
Seriously, I said. You're just sad? There's got to be more to it.
She said it again, plainly, with nothing behind it to extract. I'm telling you. I don't know.
I didn't have anywhere to put that. I went into the bathroom, ran the tap for no reason, and stood there shaking my head at myself in the mirror. I could have handled it so much better than I did.
Over the next few days I built the case in my head. We've got our health. We've got each other. A roof over our heads, people who love us. There's no reason for this. The case was airtight and completely useless, because this was never going to be solved by evidence.
What is actually going on?
The question itself was the problem. What's wrong assumes there's a wrong to find, a cause sitting there waiting to be named. On those days there wasn't one.
Her brain wasn't withholding an answer from me. It genuinely didn't have one to give.
The sadness wasn't a verdict on our marriage, or our life, or anything I'd done or failed to do. It was her hormones running a program neither of us had asked for. No amount of pointing out how good we had it was ever going to talk it out of running.
And here's the part that took me longest to see. She was more frightened by it than I was. She told me later that my pushing made her feel stupid, her word, not mine, for not being able to explain her own tears.
The tears are one of the things husbands notice early and read wrong most often. They sit alongside the heat, the fog and the quiet in what a husband actually notices.
What should a husband stop doing?
Stop asking what's wrong. It's the natural question and it's the wrong one. She can't answer it, and every repeat adds weight to a day that already has too much on it.
Stop building the evidence case. She knows the life is good. That's part of why the sadness confuses her too.
And don't disappear on her. Walking off to run a tap in the bathroom helps nobody. I know because I tried it.
Some weeks it doesn't come out as tears at all. It comes out as anger, and it lands on you first. That one has its own article.
What actually helped?
One thing, and it's small. Sit next to her and say nothing. Not opposite her, not with questions. Beside her. A cup of tea put down without a word does more on those days than anything clever you could say.
That's the one tool for this one. Getting good at the rest of it, reading the lead-up before the tears arrive, knowing which days need space and which need you right there, took me a long time and it's the bulk of a chapter in the book. But the sitting beside her, you can do tonight.
It took a while to land. I knew it had when, on the other side of one of those stretches, she thanked me for getting her out of her funk.
Four words. Out of her funk. That was the whole report card.
The tears usually turn up on an overcast day, and an overcast day looks different from a fog day and very different from a storm warning. Knowing which one you woke up to changes what you do with it.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling an overcast day from a fog day from a storm warning, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.