The Perimenopause Husband
What's For Dinner: Perimenopause Decision Fatigue at Six O'Clock
It's three words. What's for dinner.
The kids said it walking in from school. I said it walking in from a day on the tools, boots off at the back door. Every house in this country says it at roughly the same time every evening.
For years I could not work out why those three words landed on my wife like a physical weight.
She was working from home then. Admin, scheduling, the school runs, the million small threads that keep a household moving. I was out doing physical work all day that wore me out in its own way. So when dinner came up and I watched her visibly stress about it, every single time, my honest reaction was disbelief.
It's just dinner. You've had all day. How hard can it actually be.
I thought that more than once. I was wrong every time.
Why does my wife get stressed about what's for dinner?
What I did not see, because I was not the one carrying it, was everything that question landed on top of.
By the time dinner came around she had already made hundreds of smaller decisions that day. What the kids needed and when. What had to be booked, signed, remembered, chased up. And what her own body was doing, which on a lot of days she could not predict or explain any better than I could.
The dinner question was not hard because cooking is hard. It was the last item on a list that had already asked too much of her, and it kept arriving at the exact moment she had nothing left to meet it with.
What is perimenopause decision fatigue?
Decision fatigue is a real thing, and perimenopause turns the dial up on it considerably. Not menopause, the years running into it, which can start a long time before anyone in the house says the word out loud.
Nobody in our house had a word for it at the time. What we had was a woman who was never properly rested, not tired as in needs a nap, tired as in never getting back to full, and a brain that on some days could not hold a straight line of thought from one end of a sentence to the other.
Run all day on that, and by six o'clock a small question with an easy answer is not small any more.
That is Overcast weather. Not angry. Flat, dimmed, going through the motions. The fog behind it is its own thing, and it has its own article.
Was she just being lazy about it?
No, and I am not proud of how long I let that sit in the back of my head.
I made it worse without meaning to by treating her stress about dinner as proof that something was wrong with her effort or her commitment, rather than proof that the system she was operating under had changed.
She was not slacking. She was not checking out of looking after this family. She was running on empty in a way that had nothing to do with how much she loved us.
This is one of those things a husband notices early and reads wrong, the same way he reads the heat, the tears and the quiet wrong.
What can I do instead of asking her what's for dinner?
One thing. Stop asking. Decide, and tell her.
Not as a favour, not announced, no speech about it. Just walk in and say we're having the chicken tonight. You have taken a decision off her plate instead of adding one to it, and you have done it before she had to spend anything she did not have.
We changed more than that over time. The rest of what we did is in the book, and it belongs there as one connected piece rather than a tip.
Does one small change actually make a difference?
It sounds too small to count. I underestimated it for exactly that reason for a long time.
But taking even one decision permanently off her plate meant one less thing landing at ten past six on a day that already had plenty. Some evenings that was the difference between the two of us eating together and the two of us in separate rooms.
Most blokes will recognise the moment. Most of us have thought some version of how hard can it be, without ever realising what was actually being asked of the person standing across the kitchen from us.
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.