The stakes

Perimenopause Divorce Regrets: What a Husband Can Do First

By Phil, The Perimenopause Husband

Type perimenopause divorce into Google and the first thing it offers you is regrets.

Not rates. Not causes. Regrets. Enough people have gone looking for that word after the fact that it comes up before anything else.

I want to be straight with you. The word divorce was never said in our house. It never got to that stage. So I can't tell you what it's like to look back on one. But I've watched it happen around me, more than I'm comfortable admitting, and I can tell you what it looked like from close enough to see it.

Does perimenopause cause divorce?

I can't give you a number, and I won't pretend to. I can give you a pattern.

The marriages I watched end during this stretch of life nearly all went the same way. A bloke I knew would say, she's just gone crazy. Or, she's a completely different person. Or, I have got no idea where this is coming from.

He'd dwell on it. Get more frustrated, more confused. She'd close up a bit more each time, because she could tell he didn't get it and had no real interest in getting it. Every time they saw each other turned into a tiff. The tiffs grew into arguments. And eventually, the marriage ended.

Looking back now, with everything I know, I think that was perimenopause. Not every time. But often enough. None of them had the language for it. Not the blokes, and in some cases not the women either. I still get messages from women saying exactly that, that nobody told them, that it was news to them too. Nobody told those couples what was happening, so it just looked like a marriage breaking down for no reason, when there was a reason. It just didn't have a name in that house yet.

Why do people regret it afterwards?

I haven't read every one of those threads, and I'm not going to tell you what's in them.

But I know what the blokes I knew didn't have. They didn't have the word. They had a wife who seemed to have turned into someone else, and no explanation on offer except the obvious one, that she had. So they made decisions about a person who wasn't really the person in front of them. They were deciding about the weather and thought they were deciding about her.

If I'd ended my marriage in the middle of a Storm Warning, one of the five weather patterns we use in our house, the days she's irritable and snapping at things that never used to set her off, I'd be regretting it too. Not because the weather wasn't real. Because I'd have mistaken it for the climate.

Was my own marriage ever at risk?

Closer than I'd like, and quieter than you'd think.

It never felt dramatic from the inside. What it felt like was a slow acceptance. Evenings that went past without much said, and some part of me half thinking, maybe this is just how it goes from here. I wasn't fighting an ending. I was slowly accepting one might be coming, the way you accept weather you've decided you can't do anything about.

What changed wasn't fear. It was paying attention, properly, for the first time, and realising the weather wasn't fixed at all. It just hadn't been read yet.

What should a husband do before anything is decided?

Here's one of the tools. There are plenty.

Find out what it is before you decide what to do about it.

Not a decision tonight. Not a decision this month. First, the question nobody in those marriages asked: is this perimenopause.

You don't need to answer it yourself. Start with what's changed. Is the way she talks to you different from a couple of years ago. Shorter, flatter, quieter. Has the mood changed in a way you can't put down to anything. That's the first look.

Then the things she's said or you've seen. Is she up at two or three in the morning. Does she say she's hot when nobody else is. Is she forgetting words, or walking into rooms and standing there. Is there a new anxiousness with nothing behind it. Have her periods changed. For a lot of women, looking back, the sleep and the mood and the fog came before anything else, and the periods were the last thing anyone thought to count. The list of what a husband notices is here, and the quiet signs are here.

Put the two together and you're at a starting place. This could be perimenopause, and she might not know it yet either. Then ask her if she's wondered. Ask her if she'd see a doctor or a specialist in this field, and go with her if she wants you there. Give yourself a fortnight of actually watching the days instead of keeping score of them. Here's where to start reading.

None of that commits you to anything. It just means that whatever you decide after it, you're deciding about her and not about the weather.

I'm not saying every marriage that hits a rough patch in these years is saved by knowing. That would be a ridiculous thing to claim, and I won't. I'm saying a meaningful number of the endings I watched came down to nobody in the house understanding what was actually happening. That part is fixable. The rest is yours.

What if she's the one who's said the word?

Then it's a different night from the one this post is about, and I've written about that night on its own. What to do the night she says she wants a divorce. The first move there is to ask how long it's felt like this, and let her answer all the way to the end.

There's also a post on the bigger picture, the rise in divorces in these years that the family lawyers have started talking about. That one is called Menodivorce.

Is it too late?

I don't know your house. I know that the thing the blokes I knew regretted most wasn't the fight. It was finding out, afterwards, what the fight had been about.

You can find out now. That's the whole difference.

The whole story, and every tool I found along the way, is in Stepping Into the Storm With Her.