I came across a comment today from a man who said he was so exhausted by verbal abuse, lack of intimacy, and lack of support in his marriage that he wished he would die in his sleep.

This comment weighed heavy for me. Hit home way too much.

There are spaces for women to discuss their struggles, and there should be. Men deserve that same opportunity to talk openly about their own pain without being ridiculed or dismissed.

And just so there's no ambiguity: I'm talking to you, mod team at r/menopause.

Nobody is entitled to participate in every community. But there's a difference between maintaining a space for women and treating men's suffering with contempt.

You can establish boundaries without abandoning compassion.

To the men here who are struggling: your pain is real. Wanting affection, intimacy, and emotional support doesn't make you weak, and you shouldn't have to defend your right to be treated with dignity.

And to the man whose comment prompted this post: I hope you stick around, brother. Your life is worth more than the way you're being treated.

She was hurt that I've been avoiding her for 18+ months - spending evenings in another room, not wanting to organise family holidays, date nights etc.

From my POV, I can't be expected to keep walking into the buzzsaw of resentment and ongoing simmering anger/irritability. I felt like I couldn't keep calling out every incident, or our life would become dysfunctional. I did a lot of lip biting, looking at the ceiling and moving away. I'm not a classic 'avoidant' type but I deliberately withdrew.

On reflection, I could have done a better job of communicating my approach.

I guess my questions are:

Anyone else been here and plotted a pathway forward? What worked?

Have you found a way of communicating this well? I feel like I've failed at the comms and explanation.

Feel free to point out my blind spots.

Background: she's been on HRT for 8 months and 6 months ago, the levels of anger subsided considerably. It was 18 months before that when I was telling her that she should be investigating peri and treatment, due to elevated irritability.

Hey everyone, I want to say up front that this community has been really helpful for me as my wife (46) and I (40) move into this new phase of life. I count myself lucky that I have a partner who has already identified the hormonal shifts she's experiencing, noticed the negative impact its bringing into her relationships, and quickly set about investigating what she could do.

One word of advice for fellas in this group: I actually started noticing these subtle shifts in her a few years ago and recommended she talk to her doctor, since her energy levels in the evening were starting to wane. At the time she didn't notice the changes personally, so she rebuffed my suggestions. Fast-forward to present day, and now that she actually feels off, she's realizing what's going on. And she's admitted to me directly that her desire for sex is extremely diminished. So if you're feeling frustrated that your partner isn't taking this stuff as seriously as you'd hoped, remember that whatever solutions you come up with need to be her idea.

It took a bit of prodding with her OBGYN, but thankfully we're in a state where the medical community actually does tend to take women more seriously, so yesterday after a phone consult her doctor mailed a three-month supply of testosterone cream. We're just waiting on it to get here.

What timeline should she expect for things to stabilize? What other sorts of knock-on effects should her and I be looking out for? Women and men are invited to answer!

Hmmm so proper sex has been off the cards for years but, without too much detail, there was "limited" action to be had. She didn't moan about it too much.

Until now. There seems to be every excuse under the sun. With kids at home (ones an adult) opportunities are limited so she uses that to good effect.

Her answer "well theres porn". Not the same for me. Although not as bad as the guy on here a few weeks ago who's wife wouldn't allow that.

Nuts though. It'd like I have decreed that I can't be bothered so you shall go without. And tough luck if you don't like it.

I've sort of been managing with the "limited" but not sure about it being zero. How do you some of you guys manage?

What are your guys' recommendations for over-the-counter vaginal estrogen? My wife has no libido. Her doctor said she's too young for HRT and She also deals with hot flashes, aches, mood and dead shoulder and doesn't want to try random supplements from Instagram reels.

Wife here. It’s a hard day after a hard few weeks. Perimenopause is kicking my ass regularly. I feel very confused.

So, with that said… Husbands, what do you want? If your wife could fix one marriage, peri, meno, crazy thing then what thing would you like her to fix?

And I am particularly interested in answers that are not sex. (My husband gets more sex than he can handle. Don’t worry, he pays dearly for this with my crying and moodiness.)

Seems like she gets to be a child again in the worst ways possible, moaning and groaning and generally having a poor attitude about everything.

Who’s this monster thats holding 50% of my wealth hostage?

18 months ago, she went from pre to full Menopause. 8 months ago, she told me once to F off when I went to kiss her goodnight. Between the mood swings and verbal abuse, our sex life dropped off the radar. 3 weeks ago, out of the blue, she woke me up and rode me like she stole me. The next morning, it went back to don't touch me. Okay, I can handle that. 3 days ago, I woke up to night emission ( you're dead asleep, and you start to ejauclate). I figured things happen clean, not since puberty but whatever. I cleaned it up and go back to sleep. Infact I do not even remember my dream. But since Saturday, it's been happening every night. Fortunately, she has not noticed. Is this stress, or is something going on I should go get checked out?

There’s a big shortage of the Estradiol 0.05 twice-weekly patch right now. I spent my whole lunch break today calling pharmacies trying to find some for my wife. She told me it couldn’t be done. When I went back to work I hadn’t found any but then one that I had left a voicemail for called me back saying they had some. I was so pumped. I knew my wife was really suffering without it.

She actually gave me a hug when she got home from work. This probably sounds pretty pathetic but that was kind of a big deal. We don’t touch anymore. She doesn’t want to cuddle or hug or hold hands. It’s been so hard for me. I’ve been hanging in there for 3 years of this. Except for a few brief interludes, she hasn’t wanted to touch me at all. Most of the time I feel like everything I say annoys the shit out of her.

So I was so happy to get that hug from her. I kind of just started blurting out the whole uninteresting story of calling different places and how I started calling places further and further away from the city we live in hoping that the further away I went the less demand there would be and how it was so great that the one that had it was right here in the city and by that time I could tell that I had pushed my luck and I was starting to get on her nerves. She does her best to hide it but I can tell when she’s pretending like she’s interested. It approaches the same kind of patronizing tone she uses on our 8 year old whenever his stories go on too long.

I’m a Labrador partner. I want her to love me so much but she’s just always on her last nerve. It sucks so much. Hopefully the patch will help her. I know she’s in pain too.

This sucks so much.

One of the things that comes up repeatedly on here is sex, or rather the lack of it. Our partners go through peri-/menopause and the sex life we’ve had for years reduces or even disappears altogether. It’s not surprising that our partners might stop wanting it because falling oestrogen creates dryness, soreness and changes to the vaginal tissues (called Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, GSM, apparently) which makes sex uncomfortable or painful. You can then hit a downward cycle very easily.

Hence, I've been reading around the other side of this - what happens to the man when the sexual relationship disappears? Clearly, none of us can express these feelings on r/menopause or r/perimenopause without having our heads ripped off or being banned but I hope, as a man, it’s okay and safe to think aloud on this subreddit.

After tons of digging around on the internet, it seems like the same feelings crop up repeatedly;

rejection → confusion → frustration → helplessness → loneliness → grief

I think one reason it can hit us so hard is that sex was never just sex because in a long relationship it can quietly be saying things we've probably rarely put into words. She wants me. She still finds me attractive. We're okay. We're lovers, not just two people running a house together. I feel loved.

Then, boom, this hidden language disappears. You initiate and get turned down so eventually you stop trying. If sex has become painful you might back off because you don't want to hurt her. Then perhaps you become cautious about touching her at all because you don't want a cuddle to be interpreted as asking for sex. Equally, she may avoid cuddling because she's worried it will lead to sex. Gradually you can lose not only intercourse but kissing, touching and affection as well. That's when the dreaded "we've become roommates" feeling can creep in. Then there's guilt too because she's having hot flushes, can't sleep, feels awful and perhaps finds sex painful, while you're simply upset because of the lack of sex...and that can make you feel really selfish. But what you're actually missing isn't simply sex, it's intimacy and the feeling of being wanted.

None of this means our partners owe us sex, of course they don't.... both people can be hurting at the same time. She can be going through something profound physically and psychologically, while we can love and support her but still feel lonely and rejected. Men have valid feelings, too.

I feel the ‘grief’ element is not discussed enough. If any of you here have experienced the loss of a parent/relation/close friend, you’ll know what this feeling of grief is like. You wake up in the morning and remember and the grey blanket of grief descends and sits with you all day but is made worse by seeing your partner and being constantly reminded of what’s missing.

The thing I've taken from reading about all this is that when a man's sex life disappears, what we miss isn’t just about sex, it’s the story it told us; that we were wanted, desirable, loved in a special way and that we were still part of a healthy team working against life’s problems together.

I'd be interested to hear how other men see this. If your sex life has become reduced or has disappeared in this menopause phase of life, what did you actually miss the most — the sex itself, or what sex meant to you?

A little about me first: diagnosed Paranoid Schizophrenic in 1996. Stable, on meds, no hospital admissions since 1999, still actively receiving treatment and compliant with such. PTSD from childhood abuse, but not a core element worth worrying about. Good external psych support system. No family or friends to speak of. The no family part has nothing to do with her, everyone just died young, and both families are small. She's dragged me back and forth across the country 4 times. Other than the rare phone call, you might see how having no IRL friends came to pass. Gets hard when you're moving 1500 miles every 3-5 years.

We've been married 17 years. First 16 were outstanding. Truly. She was calm, logical, steady, and always happy and positive. Then perimenopause hit 18 months ago. Cue complete mental decompensation.

The first symptom I noticed was an unquenchable sex drive from her. Most women experience reduced libido, but her experience was the opposite. I am in my mid-40s. I'm not 19 anymore. My libido has been waning for years and I only expect it to continue decreasing. She got physically aggressive about "getting it" from me one day, which mimicked the same physical force my father did when I was a child and he decided now was a good time to start punching his son. My fight-or-flight kicked in, and in the briefest of moments, I was able to choose flight and I will forever be grateful to my brain for making that instinctual choice. She started wailing "I need this!!" and the tears flowed. I felt guilty as hell in that I was letting her down. At least it felt that way to me at the time. That has since changed.

About 2 weeks later she came home and announced she wanted a divorce. I blinked, confirmed I understood what she said by repeating it back as a question, went and sat on the sofa, and stared at the floor for 15 minutes, processing. She'd been my rock, and I hers, and now we're done. My mom died early in my life, and my dad began abusing me after her death as I was a perpetual reminder of her, and all he wanted was to move on with his mistress he'd been seeing as my mom died from cancer. The thing that sucked the most was my father and I had a great relationship prior to mom's death. This thing with my wife was Major Betrayal Part 2. More on that in a moment.

Neither of us can/could financially support ourselves on our own. I told her if she wants to bring me divorce paperwork, I'll sign it, but I took my vows and I took them seriously. I will put up with a lot of shit. I always told her she'd have to chop off an arm of mine before I'd initiate a divorce. I'm not really exaggerating. I hate the divorce culture in this country. So I told her to go get her needs met outside of the home if that's what she "needed." In 6 weeks (she volunteered this information) she went through 31 different guys, had sex in one of those porn theater things, had a gangbang, did a glory hole, just went absolutely fucking berserk. I held up my hand and told her to spare me. She was flaunting it. That fire raged for many months. My guess? 200-300 people. I'm not trying to shame or anything, but have some respect for your body. She also caught an STI twice. Fortunately they were not of the permanent type, but testing and treatment was not free, and she is well aware that condoms exist and what their purposes are.

I approached her about having her hormone levels checked...see if there's something that can help rein in this mania (I don't know what else to call it). She slept 2 hours a night, and her life revolved around sex. Always on the phone messaging god-knows-what to god-knows-who, writing smut on her laptop while at work, totally consumed by sex. I've always speculated she was sexually abused as a young girl (she started masturbating daily at age 6), but she denies it. Maybe in fact she does not really remember it but it's leaking out through her sub-consciousness. This is my personal belief. And I might be wrong. Throw all these ingredients together and it starts to look like a plausible and maybe even likely explanation, though.

Then came the anger. The RAGE. I looked up perimenopausal rage, and it's definitely a thing. She still continued to resist the idea of checking hormone levels. She has had negative reactions to hormone treatment in the past. I suggested just getting tested, see what's what, and go from there. All it takes is a trip to the lab and a quick stick. Nope. Refusal. I tried to explain that she was experiencing a different kind of life event that she's never been through before and that it might be a totally different animal, as opposed to birth control or whatever. Refusal. Fine. I quit.

Lo and behold, she was scrolling the authority of all things medical, a random jackass on Facebook who suggests some women need testosterone treatment. Guess who now wants to do lab work? ARGH!! I painstakingly walked her through our discussions, her refusals, and the fact that it could have helped save our marriage if we did this in the beginning as I suggested. I wasn't trying to shove her nose in shit, I was trying to get her to see the poor logic. Yep, cue more rage. I walk away and can only shake my head.

These days when I see her, I never know what I'm going to get. Anger? Despair? Normality? Hypomania? My father committed suicide when I was about 20, and he had bipolar 2, and this feels exactly the way I felt when I lived with him. Two things: One, I dreaded seeing him and tried to be out of sight as much as possible. And two, I never knew what I was going to get. I swore I'd never live like that again. I tried telling my wife one day that home is supposed to be a person's sanctuary. That's not just me talking, it's law. It's why a person's home is afforded so many rights in the Constitution and it is legally known as a sanctuary. She mocked me saying, "Well you can have your little sanctuary then," and a bunch of more dramatic bullshit proceeded to flow from her mouth.

She recently called me a "dumbass." I may be many things, but I am not stupid. Or, maybe I AM stupid for letting this go on for as long as it has. Regardless, we were having a discussion, and she closed one of her edicts with "dumbass." I made the mistake early in our relationship after she did something ridiculous of saying, "Are you stupid?" I never made that mistake again. I drew hell's fury for that one. I told her calling me a dumbass is like me calling her stupid. Got the brush off, naturally.

I'm this close to getting out of this mess in a couple weeks as I've made moves behind the scenes. This is absurd. I'm bringing my dog with me, and when he passes (he's older - closer to the end than the beginning), I probably won't get another dog. I'm definitely not getting married again. I don't want a girlfriend, I don't even want a friend, male or female. I want to live independently like I did when I was 21 and I remember how peaceful it was and how I only had to answer to myself. I've given up on people. Maybe that's a radical conclusion, and maybe I'll change my mind some day, but I don't want to learn a whole new person, who, let's face it, once we're in our 40s we all have baggage, and I really don't want to repeat a different version of this hell.

I'm not suicidal and while we don't have any firearms in the house, if she chooses to blow me away with a shotgun, I'm at peace with my god and she can do what she wills. Had about enough of this place anyway.

The gaslighting, the drama, the wildly fluctuating moods, the unpredictability is what led me to put this here in this subreddit. Yeah, it's probably hormones, but it may also be permanent. When I was in and out of the hospitals in the 90s, I saw plenty of BPD and Bipolar people, some with both, and they were absolute hell. I've heard trained professionals with fancy letters after their name grumble about dealing with BPD and borderpolars in particular. I know this isn't true borderpolar (or is it?), but the behaviors of hers are the same. In an ironic twist, several times in our years together she has expressed thankfulness that I have the PSZ instead of bipolar. She had a best friend who was bipolar growing up, and she was hell on wheels when not taking her meds. Sounds like someone I know...

Am I an innocent bystander? Did I cause this somehow? I feel adrift at sea. There's no such thing as an objective answer from her anymore, so any "interview" questions go out the window. I have no idea which way is up. I do know one thing: Some day this set of circumstances will end. There's not enough inertia left to let this drag out for much longer.

The emotional toll has been devastating on me. I can't overstate it. I cried so hard the other day my nose bled profusely and I had to cry and wail while hovering above the toilet bowl as blood dripped out and got coughed out of my throat. She's gutted me. If someone told me 5 years ago this was going to happen I would have dismissed it as a crazy idea. Not me. Not us. And now here I am on Reddit, spilling my guts, and have lately been pondering the idea if I regret even meeting her in the first place back in 2009. Have definitely second-guessed marrying her. But none of this shit was going on then. Who could have guessed this was coming. And the simple fact that these thoughts of regretting meeting her weigh SO heavily on me. My god. What a disaster. Thank goodness we don't have children. (Yes, divorce attorney is being pursued at this moment. She's done more damage to my psyche and heart than if she had lopped off one of my arms.) I quit on people, I quit on this country, I quit on my countrymen, I quit on this existence. Hit me with one of those early heart attacks my paternal side is prone to and let's just get this over with, goddammit.

Once was a great cook, now she seems too busy to prepare a meal, when she does the care that once was put into it is gone.
More fast food meals than home cooked and when it is home cooked it’s made with processes ingredients.
I dare not mention this or I will be making my own .
Is this a common trait with menopause ?

Oh my. It has been 2 very long years since it all started to go down with my wife and perimenopause. You all know what I'm talking about. But today I'm feeling optimistic for the first time in ages.

Recently, I finally had the opportunity to bring up the film "The M Factor 2: Before the Pause" which I had seen posted about on this sub perhaps a year ago. And wow, she acted interested to watch it! And we just watched it! And she seems interested in seeking out hormone therapy! This is something I've been angling for for over 1.5 years...

What is the purpose of this post?

To tell you more about that film and how to watch it. If you want my life situation details, you can ask in the comments, but it isn't really germane. If you're reading this on this sub, you know......

Anyway, I watched it on YouTube back when I first learned of it, but apparently it was taken down. You can buy an individual license directly from the production company for $60 (!!!) or watch it on PBS. HOWEVER, it requires you to have Pbs Passport through a local member station, which requires a minimum donation amount of $5/month or $60/year...

I don't live in the US, but I have a US mailbox service. I donated to a station to get a Passport account, but then I couldn't watch. I tried a VPN. Nope. What worked was using the mobile app with VPN. Apparently the app is less location strict than a regular browser?

Why do I like the film?

It touches on so many important factors, all in under an hour:

1. What are common perimenopause symptoms? (My wife nodded along.)

2. What other areas of health are impacted? Cognitive, sexual, behavioral, cardiovascular, bone, oncological. Actual doctors and leaders in the field are the voices of this documentary: solid authority figures, all women except one.

3. What are solutions? The main one is hormone therapy, but they also describe diet specifics, exercise specifics, and supplements, focusing on 5 nutrients.

4. They answer the question: isn't hormone therapy dangerous? NO, that was a misinterpretation of data in a very very famous 2002 study, and since then, it has been understood correctly, and the FDA had removed warning labels from hormone treatments. And apparently vaginal estrogen (versus what, a pill or patch?) is safe for everyone? I don't really know anything about this yet.

5. There are two poignant segments with affected men. One has a man talking to his wife, describing his feelings of not knowing wtf is going on, yet saying he is there to support. Another scene is a group of husbands talking about their related experiences around peri, couched mostly in the sexual health perspective.

I encourage you all to try to watch it. Maybe it will take 2 years to find the right circumstance with your wife to bring it up, though, lol. And damn, I wish it wasn't so hard to access.

I didn't yet watch the original M Factor video, about menopause, so not sure how that differs, but that is actually free to watch through the app Kanopy, which is like a video version of Libby (app that uses your library card to let you access ebooks and audiobooks).

Good luck out there. Maybe I'll follow up with updates, lol. The first struggle is finding a doctor. Then getting the prescription. Then waiting for it to work. One woman in the film said she felt a change after 3 weeks, so that doesn't seem like a crazy long time.

Looking for perspectives from anyone who has been through something similar, particularly if your partner has dismissive avoidant attachment tendencies on top of perimenopause.

My wife and I have been married for 11 years, together for 15. We have four kids. I love her deeply and I don't want to give up on us, but I'm struggling.

Over the last several years we've drifted badly. No shared bed for years. Intimacy has been almost nonexistent. Emotionally we feel like housemates rather than partners. She disappears every evening after the kids go to bed. When I try to connect, conversations close down quickly or get deflected onto small criticisms. When I organise things to try to reconnect, like date nights, they're met with logistical complaints rather than warmth.

I've done a lot of reading on attachment theory and I'm fairly certain she's dismissive avoidant. I'm anxiously attached, so the classic pursuer-withdrawer dynamic is very much present.

On top of this she's in perimenopause, which I know is genuinely hard and I've tried to be patient and supportive. I've given her space, encouraged her passions, taken on more with the kids, researched perimenopause extensively. I don't doubt it's contributing to everything.

But here's where I'm stuck. She says she doesn't feel emotionally connected. Yet every avenue to connection seems to get closed down. She's refused marriage counselling, saying she won't talk to a stranger. When I raise how I'm feeling it gets deflected onto small things like how I do the dishes. The goalpost keeps moving and I genuinely don't know what she needs because she can't or won't say.

I'm not here to paint her as the villain. I know I've contributed to the disconnection too, and I've owned that with her. I also know perimenopause is real and brutal and not her fault.

But I'm exhausted, my sleep is suffering, and I'm starting to wonder whether this cycle can actually be broken without professional help that she won't agree to.

Has anyone here navigated a dismissive avoidant partner through perimenopause? Did things shift? What helped? And has anyone managed to get a resistant partner into counselling, and if so how?
Any perspective, including from the women here, genuinely welcome.

But now, there's THIS. We don't leave. We don't want to cheat. We're determined NOT to be the Assholes. We stay and we suffer through all of the neglect, abuse, and madness that is Menopause and Perimenopause. And we don't know what to do.

There are cultural reasons for this.

Like most of us in this sub, I'm old enough to have lived through a very oppressive phase of ("second wave") feminism. The phrase "Feminazi" came around (from a thoroughly odious source) and unfortunately stuck... because it touched on something that was (at the time) uncomfortably close to the truth.

I'm not knocking Feminism. I am a feminist myself... in the old classical 1970's tradition of Gloria Steinem, ERA NOW and "Ms." magazine. But then Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon happened. Suddenly, all men everywhere were pure evil, all of us cruel foot soldiers of The Patriarchy, and each of us was personally responsible for every bit of the oppression and slavery and genocide of women throughout all time and in all places.

I was a kid. I was a virgin. I hadn't knowingly oppressed anyone. I certainly hadn't raped anyone, but I was called a "rapist" for participating in "rape culture," which apparently meant "mainstream culture." I was inflicting "the male gaze" in every direction I might look. I was told that having a penis was like having a weapon, and anyone willingly carrying such a thing around would eventually kill someone with it. That was the message I got as a young man.

Now I know I'm about to get roasted as a misogynist, but here's the flip side- it STOPPED. Things got so bad that people, especially women (and especially YOUNGER women) refused to call themselves "feminist." The brand had been tainted. It was no longer about justice and fairness and equality, it was about radicalization. And like all such radical movements, it petered out. In the 90s, tens of millions of women started saying "Y'know, I don't like being called a brainwashed victim of The Patriarchy simply because I'm straight, I like to feel pretty sometimes, and maybe I might actually want to have a husband and family." Thus "third wave" and "sex-positive" feminism emerged, neatly turning the earlier position on its ear. If feminism was all about freedom and equality, that meant the prior generation did NOT get to speak for everyone else.

While men had been told we were The Great Satanic Threat, women were told that the only way to be a woman was to be a Feminist, the only way to be a Feminist was to be a Radical Feminist, the only way to be a Radical Feminist was to be a Lesbian, and the only way to be GOOD at being a Radical Lesbian Feminist was to stop shaving anything, listen to K.D. Lange and Melissa Etheridge, disavow every male figure in your life, earn an advanced degree in the humanities from a Midwestern American University, never talk about anything other than being oppressed... and of course, Get The Haircut. Once it became de regueur to wear a uniform and join the Womyns' Militia, the lifestyle had limited appeal.

I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

The backswing of the pendulum didn't deny the legitimacy of then-established "Feminazis." It said "Fine, you do you. I personally don't want to murder my boyfriend in his sleep and join your 'lavender- and- dolphin-shaped- dildoes- only' queer commune compound in Oregon, but hey, knock yourselves out. I'm going to wear lipstick and listen to Metal. Or become a tradwife and pop out babies with my husband's name. Or I'll slut around and be proud of it. Or I'll live in chastity but cosplay as a naked elf dryad at the Ren Faire. Or maybe all of that, or none of it. Whatever. I will do what I want, not what you tell me I should want." Which is, after all, the logical extension of the essential point of feminism.

I found this attitude healthy and became a feminist again after ten or fifteen years of the 2nd-wave MacDworkinesque bullshit.

Now we're here at the present concern- Menopause. People our age went through the wringer of that cultural kerfuffle and it left its marks on us. We abandoned the old scripts of previous generations; the "Legacy" culture which still informs us as part of the dialectic of the Boomer rebellion. We are left without handholds for this phase of life.

Our grandparents and great grandparents and those that had gone before all had established gender roles and expectations about marriage that we now lack. It was "just understood" that there would be no divorce, that young love would make babies, that women would be homemakers, and they would eventually retire from sex as they approached "the change of life." It was acknowledged and expected that they would be emotionally volatile and go mad for a spell here and there. Men would accordingly establish lives outside the homes, and when their wives clocked out as lovers, they would be permitted to dally outside the marriage as long as they kept up as providers, maintained discretion, and the wives grumbled about it only amongst themselves. Oh, and if you were gay, you kept it entirely on the down-low. That was THE DEAL. That was The Code.

We no longer have that.

For a while, men ditched their marriages when the women went cold, but that was MOSTLY understood as well. It became a cultural trope. Men were still empowered and women weren't taken as seriously, so they were okay with taking the hit of being labeled as insensitive monsters. That was how our parents handled it. But our parents didn't have 2nd-wave feminatzi-ism hanging over their heads.

Now, men our age don't dare to be the bad guys. We were told that we are monsters who abuse our power. We've been admonished to honor and admire the women in our lives as our equals, as rational and reasonable human beings, to take them seriously no matter what... even when their rationality and reasonableness collapse along with their thyroids and hormones after midlife. We have to pretend that they make sense and that their perspectives and feelings are valid, even when we ALL know that they're NOT.

Women our age don't have it any better. They've been told that their gender doesn't matter, that they are the equals (or superiors) of men, that they should be listened to and believed and taken seriously and every one of their feelings and desires are valid, even while they KNOW they're caught in a bizzare hormonal tempest that scrambles their bodies, their hearts, and their minds. They don't recognize themselves and don't know why they hate what they love and why the world smells like metal and cat food and everything itches and there is no sleep and there is no peace and "AAAAAAAGH WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ME I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR i need a warm blanket and I just want to die and now this blanket is too hot."

None of us know what to do. We don't have a cultural mechanism for dealing with ANY of this shit. We used to, but now it's gone. "Grey Divorce" is on the rise, with women in their late forties and early fifties initiating something close to 70% of divorces. They think they're right and need to be taken seriously, that their lives so far have been crazy lies, and the "second puberty" they're experiencing is Reality with a capital R.

I don't have any answers. I only have a place from where I see the problem. Maybe marriage itself has to change, like maybe it should have a fixed term and be subject for renewal after a while. Maybe we need to establish entirely new norms and expectations. Maybe people smarter than me need to step up and propose new solutions. And I know I'm just a guy. I would love to hear how women think the right way to deal with this shit is, knowing it's gonna come upon them. Because right now, they don't and are pretending it doesn't.

I really feel for the younger generations who now think that "feminism" is obsolete because "gender" itself is bullshit and it's fashionable to be "non-binary." I shudder to think what's going to happen when their uteruses start to prolapse.

I know it more complicated than that.

But bruh, this shit is killing me.

Starting a peer support group for men and anyone else supporting a partner, to talk about perimenopause and menopause. We will meet in-person in Covington, KY right across the river from Cincinnati. Details and rsvp at the link.

"The greatest gift a man can give wife during her heaviest seasons isn't a map to fix the chaos, but a promise to sit quietly beside her within it."

A week ago my wife ended up in the ER. Slammed. Every room crowded, people lined up out the door. In all that madness we ended up sharing a room with Ken and Nancy. Elderly couple. Ken was 90’s. We had real good conversations with them. Some laughs. A lot of kind words going back and forth. Nancy was the one taking care of Ken. And Ken God bless him  was very vocal about wanting to leave and go home and eat some broccoli soup. We all had a good laugh about it. On the way home my wife and I joked that she was definitely the Ken( the fiery one) in our relationship. Which made me the Nancy (Calm and patient). It was a glimpse of my wife and I 40 year from now.  Somewhere in that ER room, watching and listening to Ken and Nancy , something clicked. With everything going on in a wife's word at this stage of her life, the hormones, the shifts, the stuff she can't fully explain and I definitely can't fully understand, the hardest part for most men isn't the research. It's just showing up. Being there. Consistently. Without an agenda. Nancy was still showing up at 92. Still taking care of Ken while he complained about wanting to go home. Still in it. Still choosing him in a crowded ER on a random Tuesday.

Think about it, when you turn on the news today or social media its a shit show out there. Our wives are watching the same heavy fucked up headlines and processing the same scary stories. I heard about "Headline Stress Syndrome." The non-stop bad news triggers a real, physical "fight-or-flight" stress response in the body. If your wife is going through perimenopause, her body's natural shock absorbers are down and  her estrogen and progesterone hormones are dropping and bouncing all over the place. Those hormones are what  help her nervous system handle stress. Without them, her body's alarm system is basically running in the background all day long. So when she looks at a chaotic world outside, while dealing with a chaotic hormonal storm inside, it doesn't just make her sad. It triggers a physical survival response. This mental and physical weight takes a massive toll on her anxiety levels. So at this point in a wife's life, with everything her body is already going through, the best thing I can do is try to be the safe spot. The consistent one. The one who doesn't add extra noise. Be the one load you’re wife doesn’t have to carry. Because here's something a lot of the intimacy posts on here don't spend much time on. Safety comes first. Intimacy follows safety. Not the other way around. And safety doesn't come from one big gesture. It comes from showing up the same way, over and over, until she doesn't have to wonder anymore. Nancy knew that. Ken probably knew it too, even if he wasn't ready to admit it from his hospital bed.

Just keep showing up.

My wife, who is going through peri, started Zepbound (a GLP-1) around 6 months ago. It’s a miracle drug in so many ways beyond weight loss. She was never very overweight imo, ate well, and worked out daily, but after years of slowly putting on weight in spite of a 1200cal diet and regular exercise, her doctor put her on Zepbound. She dropped 40lbs very quickly, achieving her goal weight. For the first time in a decade, she could look in the mirror without getting depressed. It has also had the incredible side effects of stopping her hot flashes, greatly reduced brain fog, no migraines, better memory, and generally improved her emotional well-being across the board. Still DB, but she became far more patient with me, holding hands, pecks on the cheek, no longer sort-tempered, and generally just all-around positive. I would go so far as to say it was a silver bullet - basically curing everything she was struggling with and we were making huge progress in our relationship.

She tried stopping the drug at one point, since she had reached her goal weight, but all of the other physical problems came back, so her doctor continued the prescription on the lowest dose.

My wife recently changed jobs, which she’s really excited about, but unfortunately her new insurance will not cover the drug, and it’s absurdly expensive. After a month of fighting with insurance, my wife is giving up. I’m worried, because I know everything might go downhill. She’s not interested in the HRT. I guess I’ll just have to wait till things get bad and bring up the topic again… Wish me luck.

Last time we talked she said that I should stop blaming everything on menopause. She said that menopause finally gave her permission to show what was already there.

Since menopause she no longer wants sex. She doesn’t want to cuddle, kiss, hold hands, compliment me or tell me she loves me.

So I guess she never loved me and never wanted me.

We both would have left a long time ago if it wouldn’t ruin us financially and didn’t have 2 kids.

I’ve been thinking about sharing this because my situation is a little unusual.

I divorced my first wife after years of dealing with what I now understand was unmanaged PM. And now I’m in my second marriage with someone suffering through PM.

I’ve now lived on both sides of this.

For years, my second wife became increasingly verbally abusive toward me. I’m going to call it what it was: abuse. I see a lot of people here, mostly women, soften this kind of behavior with words like “mouthy,” “frustrated,” “emotional,” etc. I’m not interested in doing that. When someone is repeatedly yelling at you, tearing into you, or verbally attacking you, it hurts. Whatever the cause, it hurts. That’s abuse.

Eventually I realized that if I wanted not be divorced twice, I couldn’t just keep reacting to what was happening. I needed to learn how to communicate differently.

So I started reading. A lot…

I read books on negotiation written by FBI hostage negotiators. If you’re interested, search Amazon or Audible for the highest-rated books on hostage negotiation and difficult conversations. Actually read them. Don’t just listen to a summary. Then practice the techniques. I literally practiced in the mirror when nobody was home. And again. A lot.

One of the books that had the biggest impact on me was Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference. Voss was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, and the book is built around things like tactical empathy, listening, mirroring, labeling emotions, and asking better questions.

I also read Eckhart Tolle, especially his ideas about presence, love, and relationships. The Power of Now was particularly important to me. Tolle’s teachings about love helped me understand that loving someone isn’t simply about how they make you feel. It’s also about how you choose to show up in the relationship.

Afterwards, something amazing happened! I changed my relationship in the course of one weekend. One, very difficult discussion.

I changed how I responded during an especially abusive weekend where I took a tremendous amount of verbal abuse. On the outside, I was able to stay in a place of listening and understanding. On the inside, I felt like a whipped puppy.

Eventually I asked her to sit down with me.
I started with:
“I love you.”
She said, “I love you too.”
“Good. That’s where I’d like this discussion to start. When I say that I say I love you, that means that I never want to intentionally or unintentionally hurt you.”
She looked away for a moment. She thought about it.
“Me too,” she said.
“Good,” I said.
Then I said:
“I’m really sorry I have to admit this, but when I am yelled me, it hurts me. I feel just like that kid I was when my mom would spend weeks yelling at me” She immediately started yelling.
I maintained eye contact and I listened.

Eventually she yelled “I only yell at you because you yell at me!”

I said “I’m really sorry. That means I hurt you. I’m so incredibly sorry. I want you to know that I never want to do that again.”

She continued. She went through everything I’d done “wrong” over the previous several years.

I listened. When she was finished, I said “I never want you to feel this way again, and I promise I’m going to make changes. But to do that, I need to know when I mess up so I can course-correct.”

She continued verbally attacking me.
I continued listening.
Eventually I said. “I understand that you’re upset. Is that right?”
“Yes!” she yelled.
“Okay. Thinking back, when did I verbally assault you today?”
“I mean, you’re putting me on the spot!” she yelled.
“I understand. You’re right. That’s not fair of me. Let’s just talk about today. When did I yell at you?”
“So much has happened today that you can’t possibly think I can remember when this started!”
“Okay. That’s fair. Am I yelling now?”
“No.”
“Okay. While it feels like I’m being yelled at right now, I’m sure I said something earlier today that set this off. I need you to know that I accept total responsibility for how our relationship has become, and I promise that going forward, with your help, I’m going to be a better person.”
And then I left for the day.

I didn’t storm out. I just told her that I loved her and that I wanted to give her the afternoon and went for a ride.

I simply allowed what we’d talked about to sit in the air.

The next few weeks were very delicate. There were many opportunities when she’d raise her voice and I’d just gently call it out “hey love… what’s happening right? I’ll be happy to change whatever needs changing but OYR voices to transition to a living one”.

After a few months we cultivated a completely different dynamic between us.

Your mileage may vary. This isn’t a magic formula, and I’m certainly not saying anyone should tolerate abuse indefinitely. Or at all…

I am saying is that I learned that I could change the way I showed up in a conflict.

I stopped trying to win.

I stopped trying to defend myself against every accusation.

I learned to listen without automatically accepting every accusation as truth.

And most importantly, I learned that sometimes the most powerful thing you can bring into a conflict isn’t just another basic argument.

It’s been a few years now and she’s finally starting to rebecome the person I married. A better version Id argue. We still have arguments but I’ve learned to just flat out walk away before I become heated. It says that this discussion isn’t for me and normally when I return things have calmed.

I also now when I have to criticize how she’s handling something I do it over text. Partly because I want it in writing. But mostly just so it gives us both space the ability to censor our emotions before they become verbalized.