My partner recently wrote a social media post about menopause, ageing, anxiety, insomnia and wanting me to stop making too much noise when I sleep.
More than 350,000 people have now seen this post, which means several hundred thousand strangers know that the woman I love would quite like me to sleep on the sofa because she can no longer tolerate the sound of my breathing. There are probably gentler ways of discovering that you have become acoustically incompatible with your partner of six years. I have been breathing for over 50 years and thought I had become reasonably competent at it. Cassy disagrees.
Cass has been navigating the rollercoaster of menopause for nearly two years; I was merely a passenger without a ticket, a passport or a clue. Neither of us had been warned what was ahead, and I only have a loose interpretation of the map from the pilot.
I have spent most of my working life in news, finding stories in enormous datasets and trying to make complicated things clear. I like facts. Facts behave themselves. You can check them, compare them and, if necessary, argue about the methodology. Feelings are much less satisfactory.
For quite a long time, if Cassy told me something felt different and I couldn’t see any obvious evidence that anything had changed, my instinct was to investigate. There must be a reason. There must be an answer. If we could only establish what was actually happening, presumably we could fix it. It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to understand that this is not always helpful. Sometimes you can win the argument and still find yourself sleeping on the sofa.
Since her social media post 10 days ago, women of almost every age have written incredibly personal things to her, including one woman who is 91. Some said they had genuinely thought they were losing their minds during the menopause. Some had wondered whether they were becoming mentally ill, whether their marriages were falling apart or whether the person they had always been was somehow disappearing. There have been women who were frightened enough by what was happening in their own heads thanks to these hormonal changes to wonder whether they were experiencing psychosis. And underneath so many of those stories is essentially the same sentence: I thought it was just me.
I’ve watched Cassy reading the comments, laughing at some and crying at others. However, there is something uncomfortable about watching hundreds of thousands of women immediately understand what your partner is talking about when you, the man actually living with her, have spent two years standing beside her holding the metaphorical instruction manual upside down.
My preferred approach has generally been to fix things. Can’t sleep? Find something to help with sleep. Hormones wrong? Speak to somebody about changing the hormones. Feeling anxious? Let me explain why you don’t need to be anxious. If none of those work, I can always produce a plan. I assume she will love this (I know now that, obviously, she doesn’t.)
In the past few years that Cassy has been struggling with the menopause, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned as a partner who didn’t quite get it right. I hope they can be useful to other struggling partners too.
Ask her this question
It’s a tale as old as time, but only now am I beginning to understand that sometimes maybe what women need is not another solution. Perhaps they just need us to believe them when they say something feels awful, even if we don’t understand why it feels awful. Occasionally, they need something practical done. Occasionally, they need us to listen. And occasionally, rather disappointingly, they need time alone.
I’m trying to get better at asking which one it is. “Do you want me to listen, do something or give you some space?” is considerably more useful than launching into whatever excellent solution I have just developed.
The difficult part is accepting the answer. Particularly when the answer is, “There isn’t anything you can do.” I dislike this answer enormously.
Low libido has nothing to do with you – and you can’t solve it
There is another part of this that I think men find harder to talk about, partly because the moment you do, there is a danger of sounding as though you are trying to make somebody else’s menopause about yourself. When her libido is very low – which is very often the case for millions of women during menopause – it is hard to make peace with because all couples know that sex matters and intimacy really matters.
If we men were honest, it isn’t the sex we miss; it’s just the feeling of being wanted. There it is. I said it. At nearly 50, I would like my emotional needs to sound rather more sophisticated. Purpose. Fulfilment. Pension planning. But I just miss the small things. A hug that happens without anybody thinking about it. A hand reaching for you. A kiss because somebody felt like kissing you.
When the sound of your breathing makes the person beside you want to cry, it takes a better-adjusted man than me not to occasionally think, “Does she actually like me anymore?”
But right now, she’s not even sure who she is, so the inevitable answer can range from a flat “No” to “Of course, I love you”. Which leaves plenty of room for a man to overthink things. The way through is to listen without making every difficult evening a verdict on the relationship, and to talk, when we’re both calmer, about what we each need.
Does she need some distance today, or is something between us changing? Do we both want to find a way through it together? Those are difficult questions, but guessing the answers will not help you.
Try to be emotionally open, even when it’s hard
I think men need to be allowed to say that it affects us too without pretending our experience is the same as the woman’s. It obviously isn’t. She is living through the physical reality of menopause. But the relationship is happening to two people, and the other one can also feel frightened, rejected or completely unsure how to help.
Keeping all of that quiet does not make you noble. In my experience, it mostly makes you quieter for a while and then slightly resentful, which is not an improvement.
But don’t blame everything on menopause
It also doesn’t mean that everything is menopause. This has been another useful discovery. Sometimes she is annoyed with me because I genuinely have an expansive range of annoying qualities.
So now, I’m trying to be a little different. If practical help would make life easier, practical help should probably just happen. Make dinner. Do the shopping. Sort out the thing that has been sitting there waiting to be sorted out. I am learning that completing an ordinary household task does not require a press conference or a small commemorative plaque.
Be kind to yourself, too
Men probably need to look after themselves a bit better through this, too. Speak to a friend. Get out of the house. Keep some parts of your life that make you feel like yourself. Tell your partner you feel lonely before it comes out disguised as an argument about whose turn it was to empty the bin.
Preferably don’t choose two in the morning to have the important conversation. Nothing genuinely useful has ever followed the sentence, “Seeing as we’re both awake…”
Humour helps. It has always helped us. But there is a difference between laughing together and using a joke because saying the real thing feels too exposing.
Cassy’s humour is one of the things I fell in love with, and reading her post reminded me how much of her is still right there. The odd tangents, the observations, the ability to make something awful funny, the vulnerability she probably wishes she didn’t have quite so much of. I had spent a lot of time wondering, “What has happened to us?” Reading what she had written on social media made me realise she may have been spending the same time wondering, “What is happening to me?” And that is a rather different question.
She hasn’t disappeared. She has changed and so have I. We will both continue to change if we are lucky enough to have plenty more years alongside each other.
I don’t think my job is to wait patiently for some earlier version of her to come back. I think it is to keep finding out who she is now, while being honest enough to tell her when I’m struggling as well.
Sometimes I will manage this with enormous sensitivity and emotional intelligence, and other times I will have a genuinely excellent point about breathing or being correct.