The Perimenopause Husband
Why Is My Wife Always Mean to Me? A Perimenopause Read
Why is my wife always mean to me.
If you typed that in at eleven at night, I've been you. Different words in my head, same question.
I'll be straight with you about the words first. In our house it was never yelling. Nobody yelled. It was an edge. A sharper edge than usual on an ordinary sentence, and then quiet. Then the two of us doing our own thing under the same roof for the rest of the night.
If yours yells, I haven't lived that. But I know the edge, and I know what I did with it.
Is my wife being mean, or is something else going on?
I can't see your kitchen. I can tell you what was going on in mine.
Her system was running hot. Perimenopause doesn't wait for a good reason before it shows up. The irritability runs in the background, and whatever happens to be in front of her in that moment becomes the thing it lands on. Me asking about the washing. A cup left on the bench. The dog. It would have landed on something. That day, it was me.
It is a hormonal, biological change, and it is not aimed at you. Why it lands on the husband first has its own post.
If it's wearing her down, that's a doctor or a specialist in this field. Go with her.
That is not a free pass for anyone. Bad behaviour from either side isn't okay, and understanding something isn't the same as accepting it. Respect runs both ways. But in our house, what I was calling mean wasn't bad behaviour. It was weather, and I was taking it as a character reference.
What did I do with the edge?
Two things, and both of them wrong.
The first was go looking for the crime. I'd go back over the last day or two, trying to find the thing I must have done. There was never a thing. I just didn't know that yet.
The second was get defensive. Nobody likes being told, even silently, that their presence is the problem. So I'd answer the edge with an edge of my own. Not loud. Just enough.
Neither of those made anything better. They turned one annoyed person into two, and then there was nobody left in the house who wasn't in the weather.
Why does it feel so personal?
Because that's how it would work the other way round.
If I'm short with someone, there's a reason, and the reason usually involves them. So when she was short with me, every instinct said there must be a reason and it must be me.
Sitting with the idea that there was no reason, that her body was just running a low grade Storm Warning that day and I happened to be standing nearby, was genuinely hard. A Storm Warning is 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. Learning the name took some of the sting out. Not all of it. I'd be lying if I said it stopped bothering me completely.
Enough of it, though. Enough that I stopped adding fuel.
What do I do when she's short with me?
Here's one of the tools. There are plenty.
Take the short answer as information, not insult.
A one word reply. The flat tone. The silence when you were expecting a conversation. None of it is a message written about you. It's a reading. It's telling you what kind of day she's in, the same way the sky tells you whether to bring the washing in.
So read it. Don't argue with it, don't chase an explanation she may not have either, and don't go quiet back at her to make a point.
Information. Then act on it. Name the day and give today what today can take.
What I do once I've read it, and what I say on the edge days, is in the book, in the chapter called When She's Annoyed at Everything.
Will she go back to how she was?
She's not gone anywhere. She's in weather you can't see.
The edge days still come in our house. The difference is I stopped meeting them with my own, and that left one of us standing clear enough to hold the day together.
It was never a free pass. Respect runs both ways in our house, on the Storm Warning days and the Sunshine ones. But the short answer on a hard day was never bad behaviour. It was a reading, and once I took it as one, the edge had nothing to catch on.
If the angry version is closer to your house, that one has its own post too.
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.