The Perimenopause Husband
She Saves Her Smile for Everyone Else: The Perimenopause Energy Paradox
There was a stretch where I used to brace for her coming home from coffee with her girlfriends.
Nothing bad had happened. No argument. No conversation I was avoiding.
I braced because I knew what was coming through the front door.
I could see her before she left. Getting ready. The energy in the house lifted. She was genuinely looking forward to a couple of hours with her friends, and you could tell from across the room.
Then she came home, and it was like someone had flicked a switch. No smile. Flat tone. Body language shut. The lights that were clearly on an hour ago were off.
And I stood there thinking, she couldn't wait to get to them. And she can't wait to get away from me.
I never said any of that out loud. I added it to a quiet pile of things I was carrying and told myself it was fine.
It was not fine.
Why is my wife nice to everyone but me?
Because you are the only person she does not have to be nice to.
That sounds like a line. It is not. It is the actual mechanics of it, and it took me years to see.
The neighbour gets the laugh. The kids get the fun version. Her friends get the woman she used to be for two hours over coffee. You get what is left, and some days what is left is nothing.
I read that as a ranking. She has energy for them, not for me, so that is where I sit on her list. That is what I decided, and I am not proud of it.
Why does she go flat the second she walks in the door?
Because our front door was the only door in her life she could walk through and stop.
Every other room she walked into that day, she did the good version. That is what the world expects of a woman, and she delivered it, on a body that was not sleeping properly and never felt rested. She was tired in a way sleep was not fixing. She still went, still smiled, still held it together for two hours.
There is only so much of that in a day. She had spent it. Not on purpose. Not to punish me. She walked back into our house with an empty tank and no requirement to pretend otherwise.
Nobody had ever told me the years before menopause could do that to a person's energy. So I did not have it as an option in my head, and I reached for the only explanation I had.
The cruel part of perimenopause, and it took me a long time to say this without feeling sorry for myself, is that the person she feels safest with is the one who gets the leftovers.
Is she happier without me?
No. She is unguarded with you.
Those two things look identical from the couch and they are not remotely the same thing.
I was reading the performance and calling it the truth. The version her friends got was the effort. The version I got was the actual state of her that day. I had it exactly the wrong way round for years.
I was not being punished. I was being trusted.
That does not make a flat evening feel good. It changes what the flat evening means, which is the only thing that ever changed anything in our house.
What should I do when she walks in with nothing left?
One thing, and it is a thing to stop doing.
Never mention the difference.
Not "you seemed fine at Sarah's." Not "so where is that version." Not the joke about it, which is the same comment wearing a hat. Every one of those asks her to explain a gap she cannot explain, at the exact moment she has nothing left to explain it with. It also tells her the last safe room in her life is now being marked too.
Be the one room where she does not have to do the good version. Take the bag off her. Put the kettle on. Sit in the same room and say nothing much. That is the whole tool.
Reading the weather she walks in with, rather than the weather she left the house with, is what the Reading the Room chapter of the book is for. The Power of Just Being There is the one about doing nothing well, which is harder than it sounds.
Does it stay like this?
Not in our house.
It shifted once I stopped treating the flat version as a verdict and started treating it as a forecast. Nothing clever. No conversation I can point at. I just stopped keeping the tally.
Home got the flat one. Took me years to work out that was the compliment.
And if you are the one walking through that door with nothing left, you have not done anything wrong either. Send this to him instead of explaining it again.
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.