Extract from How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis by Kate Muir
Chapter: Divorce, the Moneypause and the Couplepause
‘I love my husband, but sometimes I watch him through the prongs of my dinner fork and imagine him in jail.’
That anonymous comment perfectly expresses the frustration – and love – that many of us struggle with in a decades-old marriage or relationship. Which way will it tip for each person? Will the future hold acquiescence or anarchy? What if you no longer want to be half of a couple, but your whole self instead? What if your time together just happens to be up? Some people grow together with their partners, some grow out of their partners, and others grow up and find their partners. We need to look at the Spaghetti Junction of midlife relationships, menopause, mothering and labour – and consider ways not to crash the car.
We know about the unpredictability of menopause’s dastardly little sister, perimenopause, and how hormones don’t just drain away in your forties, but behave badly and unpredictably before finally leaving at the average age of 51. The calming hormone progesterone goes on strike, ramping up anxiety and anger, and mood-enhancing estrogen leaps and plunges by the day or week, creating a dangerous combination of sexy highs for some, and miserable lows, all of which increase the likelihood of arguments, affairs and separation, especially if the cracks were already there. Not surprisingly, the average age of divorce for a woman in the UK is 44, right in perimenopause central.
That could also be due to The Rage, during which perimenopausal irritation boils up into volcanic anger, usually directed at family or colleagues, often when they are committing such heinous acts as eating crisps loudly. This anger is not easy to live with for everyone else because it can be sudden and apparently unreasonable. These are the items I threw, in my forties, when I was dealing with three children, a sick mother, a dog, and a full-time job at The Times. Over a couple of years, the following ended up hitting the kitchen wall: blue poster paint, broccoli, a butternut squash, a full butter dish, and a copy of Nigella Christmas. No one was injured, I cleaned up the mess (the bits of broken china in the butter were particularly trying), tension was released, and everyone felt better and behaved better afterwards.
Previously I had never shown signs of a volatile temper, and I don’t have one now, probably because I’m on calming HRT, but I share this with you as a window onto the fact things change in midlife – we change in midlife – and that has a profound impact on our relationships.
In both heterosexual and same-sex relationships, midlife brings a devastating combination of factors: many women have lowered libido, or don’t want to have now-painful penetrative sex (and don’t know about rejuvenating vaginal estrogen), so that can result in rejection and anger issues, often on both sides – or worse.
Of course, some couples decide at this midlife stage that sex is one thing and their long relationship and companionship quite another, and they can hold those two points of view simultaneously. Midlife is a time when couples’ libidos become out of sync, be it decreased sex drive, or the perimenopausal sex surge, or lowered testosterone and erectile dysfunction. Or there’s the sheer boredom. ‘Suddenly they are not satisfied with the sex that they are having. And they want to work on it and demand more, and their partner finds it shocking or upsetting on some level,’ said couples psychotherapist Dr Kalanit Ben-Ari.
There are other reasons for having an affair; obviously falling passionately in love is a good one, but some women just want to be seen again. ‘They like someone that sees them as a sexual being. It’s an identity issue: women are often looking for something in themselves, whereas – and it’s a bit of a cliché – I have sometimes found for men that affairs are often with people who admire them, look up to them.’
The hormonal and physical changes of menopause also often intersect with a particularly challenging set of life circumstances that put a lot of strain on a relationship as each partner has to reconfigure their role, and the pitfalls of inequality and resentment can be hard to avoid. As we start to have children slightly later in life, the triangular rack of mothering, perimenopause and career can stretch a person, and a marriage, to breaking point. The magnificent Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, once defined menopause as ‘a pause while you reconsider men’ – and that’s not merely as lovers, but part of your shared enterprise of work and family.
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