The Perimenopause Husband
Perimenopause and Low Libido: She Hasn't Gone Off You
We are on the couch with the kids, the telly on. Sometimes I have my arm around her. Sometimes I am just holding her hand.
Not every night. And it goes nowhere. That is the whole point of it.
I want to talk about the bedroom, because a lot of blokes reading this have already gone there in their heads. Low libido was there in our house. It never became a war. And I only worked out why a while back, reading what women say to each other about it online, and seeing the things we already had.
I was lucky. Most blokes are not.
Why has my wife lost interest in intimacy?
Not because of you. That is the first thing, and it is the hardest one to believe from where you are sitting.
Here is what I did not understand. It used to just arrive. Now it has to be built, slowly, from feeling safe and rested and not on the clock. And pressure knocks the build over. A sigh. A look. A hand that means something. Gone, before it ever got started.
That is not her choosing. That is what she is in. Perimenopause is a hormonal, biological change, and she has no say in what it does to her.
Think about what she is carrying into the bedroom at the end of the day. Nights she has spent awake and burning up. The 3am side of the bed is real, and a woman who has been up since then has nothing left by nine at night. A full day of holding everything together for everyone else, and saving her best for them because she has to. By the time she gets to you, the tank is empty.
Has she gone off me?
That is the one every bloke asks himself. I have asked it too.
When the closeness is not there, the worry is that she is losing interest in me. That is the honest version, and it is a lonely thing to carry around on your own, because you cannot say it to anyone.
I had my own version of reading it wrong. A cheek kiss at the door, eyes down, and I took it personally. I have written about that one before, and I arched up over it in a way I would not now.
Here is what I know now. She has not gone off you. Her body has gone offline. Those are two different things, and a bloke reads the second one as the first every single time.
And she knows. That is the part we miss. She is watching herself pull back from the person she picked, and she cannot stop it, and she feels terrible about it. The last thing she needs is your hurt stacked on top of hers.
Why was it never a war in our house?
Luck, mostly. And a few things we were already doing without knowing why.
We walked. Most days, the two of us. We did weights together, the kettlebell, short hard sessions. I did not do any of it for this. I did it because we liked it. It turns out a lot of what women are being told to try, we were already doing.
The other half of it was the way I was thinking. Somewhere along the way I had stopped reading every no as a verdict on me. I did not have words for it then. I do now.
I will not pretend we had it all worked out. We did not. We just happened to be standing in the right place when it came through.
What can I do tonight that will not make it worse?
This is one of the tools. There are plenty. It is the one I would hand any bloke first.
Take the pressure off, out loud, and then keep your word.
Say it plainly so she does not have to guess. Couch tonight. It is going nowhere. I just want to hold you.
And then it goes nowhere.
That is the part that matters. Not the saying, the keeping. If a cuddle has ever turned into a lead in, she has learned that a cuddle is a lead in, and she stops coming to the couch. Keep your word every time and the couch becomes somewhere she can relax again. Break it once and you are back at the start, only further back.
One more thing, and it is the part I learned last. Read the weather before you reach for her. Once I got better at that, I did the arm around her more, on purpose, on the days it would help. Not on a Storm Warning day. On those days the kindest thing I found was often to leave her to watch her own show in peace. It did not fix anything. It took the edge off.
That is the free one. There is a lot more to this, the honest conversations, when to have them and where, and what to do with your own side of it. Some of that is in the book and the rest is coming in the next one.
Does it hurt her?
For a lot of women it can, now. Plenty of blokes do not know that, and it changes how an advance lands. To her it can feel like an invitation to something that hurts.
If it does, that is a conversation for a doctor or a specialist in this field. Your job is to make it easy. Take the awkwardness out of it, drive her there, and never once act like she is broken.
Is this about respect?
Yes. Both ways.
This is not something happening to her while you wait for it to finish. It is happening to the two of you, going into menopause and out the other side. How you treat each other through it is what decides how you come out.
She is not withholding. You are not only after one thing. Both of you are guessing, and both of you are wrong about the other one more often than you would think.
She is in there. She is in weather you cannot see.
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.