The Perimenopause Husband
My Wife Wants Time Away From Me: Perimenopause and Her Own Hour
Out the back of our house there is a gym.
A 40 foot container and a covered area. Exercise machines. Punching bags. Room for all six of us to train at the same time, with space to move around each other.
My wife went to yoga. On her own.
Why did it bother me so much?
Because it made no sense to me.
Everything she needed was right there. So I asked her. Why not the home gym. I don't get it.
I took it personally without really meaning to. I had built it for all of us, and I could not see why it was not enough.
What was the yoga actually for?
She told me. I just had not been listening.
She liked yoga while I was at work. That was her time, in the hours that suited her.
And the gym, she would use if someone from the family was working out with her. Not on her own. The trouble was the timing. Six people, six timetables, and more often than not nobody was free when she was.
So it was never the gym. It was never me. It was when, and who with.
Think about what she was carrying at the time, too. Tired in a way that sleep did not fix. Overwhelmed by things that used to be easy. A list of changes in her own body she had not asked for and could not switch off. With a tank that low, she was going to spend it on the thing that actually suited her, not the thing I had set up.
Is she pulling away from me?
That is what it felt like. It was not what it was.
Not everything she does without you is a rejection of you. Sometimes it is what lets her come back to you with something left.
I made her explain a perfectly reasonable choice, just because it did not match the setup I had built. A lot of blokes do that without noticing.
If she has gone quiet inside the house as well, that is a different thing, and worth reading on its own. A woman going to yoga, or out with her friends, is not a marriage in trouble. It is a woman in the middle of perimenopause, on the way through to menopause, looking after the bit of herself she still can.
This is a relationship thing, not just her thing. Respect goes both ways.
Why is she so excited to see her friends?
For the same reason you are excited to see yours.
Think about it for a moment. You have a round of golf booked with your mates. A morning fishing. A day on the boat. Whatever it is you do. You look forward to it all week. Nobody thinks there is anything wrong with that.
It is fine for her to look forward to hers.
The difference is what she is running on. You go to the golf with a full tank. She goes to her friends depleted. She is happy to be there, and she is, but it is taking everything out of her when she did not have much to give in the first place.
So by the time she gets home, the tank is empty. That is the version of her you get at that moment. It is not a comment on you. There is a whole post on who gets the best of her, and why it is not what it looks like.
What do I say when she wants to go?
Here is one of the tools. There are plenty. This is the easiest one in the whole lot.
Say yes, and make it quick. If she wants the class, the catch up, the hour that is hers, the answer is yes, and it comes straight away. No sigh. No look at the clock. No "again?" No reminder of what else needs doing.
A lot of blokes make it harder than it needs to be without meaning to. A pause before the yes. A question about who is doing dinner. She hears that pause every time, even when you do not.
Make it easy. If there is something that would stop her going, sort that part yourself before she has to ask.
What if I want to do things together too?
You can have both. In our house we do.
Once I got it, we made the time to train together out the back. How that happened, and what moving together looks like in our house now, is a chapter in the book.
But it started with me dropping the gym question.
Start With the Weather
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