We’re talking about menopause more and more, so how come men still don’t get it?

by Claire Isaac

I am seeing the words “perimenopause” and “menopause” around on my social feeds more and more at the moment. Last night I saw two posts in the space of about 30 mins — one from my friend Shelly Horton and one from Red magazine in the UK. I’ve written a number of pieces here about menopause and what it is doing to me, I’ve spoken about it on the podcast I co-host, Playing Devil’s Avocado, and we wrote a whole chapter on it in our book, How Not to Live Your Best Life.

Everywhere I head to digitally lately, whether it’s LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, there is a mid-life woman talking about how we need to be open about it, there are helpful articles in every conceivable place, websites like Meg Mathews’ amazing Megs Menopause make it accessible to millions, podcasts and communities run by women discuss it openly and give a forum for those going through it to discuss symptoms and the changes it brings.

And yet so many men don’t understand it.

My friends, who are mostly my age or slightly younger, discuss it over dinner or wine. We laugh about it, cry about it sometimes, get angry about it — we lament our youth and celebrate our lives, pine for our drooping boobs or complain about our widening hips. We talk about periods and the lack of them or the heaviness of them (often in quick succession). We talk anxiety, crying fits, how hot we feel at night, how sad we feel a lot of the time or how tired we are. We talk about sex, too, and desire, and our hair falling out and how much more energy we have for some things and our gym training and our thirst for good gin. We talk about it all.

And yet so many men just don’t get it.

I asked male friends on Facebook to DM me the first thing that came to mind when they heard the word menopause. This wasn’t to shame them, I was legitimately curious. I’ve also removed the post now, to protect their privacy.

And what I thought they’d say, they said. While some answered ‘hot flushes” or inserted flame emojis into their responses, and some used words like “compassion” or “the unknown'“, I’d say around 90% of them gave me more or less the same answer.

They said “get out of the way!” or “look out!” or “don’t argue” or “tough times”.

The cliched version of menopause, you know, that a menopausal woman is essentially Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

That all menopause really means is that your wife or partner will be REALLY cranky so you’d better keep out of her way. And it doesn’t matter that we’re going through up to around 34 health-related symptoms of menopause — some men think it’s just about us overreacting and being annoyed at them for not doing the washing. They see menopause like a midlife crisis — it causes us to crack the shits in the same way that turning 50 causes them to buy a Harley.

And it really isn’t true. I mean yes our oestrogen levels drop and a side effect of that is that we can lose our “warmth” a little… but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what is happening on the inside.

I also get that I asked for the first thing, and that many men do know a lot of things about it. Of course they do.

But why do so many men not understand it?

That our bodies are defeating us, that we’re not sleeping properly, that we’re aching, tense, that our hormones are haywire, that we’re feeling anxious or depressed or both, that we’re putting on weight or unable to shake weight for no apparent reason, that our hair is doing weird shit, we have headaches, we feel like we’re burning up from the inside out, we can have gum issues, our nails can be fragile, our allergies can flare up, we can panic about things that never bothered us before. We can feel unattractive and undesirable. Sweaty. And we have to fight to actually control a lot of that because it means we have to take medication or seek natural therapies to help. We can’t get a lot of it under control ourselves.

So many men don’t get it — they don’t really know. And why don’t they know?

We talk about it to other women because it’s happening and there’s comfort in finding out you’re not the only one, and that you have support and that everyone knows what you’re going through, often having it worse, always having a story, empathising.

So why don’t so many men understand?

Maybe we only talk about it with other women?

Maybe we don’t tell them.

Menopause is scary and confronting and it’s about women’s bodies and vaginas and ovaries, and it’s TOTALLY NORMAL — and the list of symptoms is long. Some of it’s gross, some of it’s just weird, some of it’s small and some is confronting and upsetting. But it’s normal.

Every single woman in the world will go through it. Isn’t it time that men understood what it means for us?

Maybe we should talk about it with them.