Confessions of a man: “How menopause ended my marriage and what I wished I’d known then”
Guest blog from ‘Paul’ – a man whose marriage ended because of his wife’s menopause.
Sadly there is no research about depression and suicide in men at this life stage (there’s little enough about women). More must be done. I invite you to read ‘Paul’s’ story (not his real name). You may recognise a similar situation in your own relationship. Get advice, talk to us or other experienced menopause/relationship counsellor – Kathryn Colas
Without question, my marriage breakdown was the single most painful period of my life and it has taken many years to rebuild.
We always think it can’t happen to us. Like many people, I imagined divorced couples to be the kind of people I wasn’t or could never be.
I thought ‘the others’ must have drifted apart or simply that they did not have similar values to mine.
Time has been a great healer for me and our daughter, now in her early twenties. It has enabled me to see what happened to my marriage.
And early menopause was the trigger – it impacted everything. It may sound to some that I am blaming the menopause outright all too quickly for my divorce. Whilst it’s true that there were other life challenges to contend with, like losing a parent and not being able to have more children, there is no doubt in my mind that our struggle to deal with menopause was ultimately what destroyed everything. I say it was ‘our’ struggle because it was. At the time I had no ability to fully understand what was going on, how to help or what to do about it.
Love’s young dream
We met as teenagers. The girl I knew was full of energy, always rushing around with many activities going, enjoyed with a very wide group of friends. At times she was so effervescent it was hard to calm her down! The attraction was instant. My moods could be lower and people remarked how we seemed to balance each other out in many ways. We married in our twenties and our daughter arrived three years later, but she was to be our first and last because although the birth went well, we were told that she couldn’t have any more children due to low ‘FSH’. Early menopause had arrived really early.
This was a shock and we both entered a period of mourning for the large family we couldn’t have, despite being gifted a beautiful daughter and a new life to look forward to. After three rounds of IVF treatment, we decided enough was enough.
Menopause and HRT
Everything started to accelerate some years later when my ex was in her late thirties. She threw herself into her work and started to spend more time away. Whilst she had always had many different balls in the air and a whole series of activities on the go with friends, family and at our daughter’s school, some were dropped quite suddenly. She became distant, less interested in our home and the intimacy in our marriage waned until it almost completely disappeared. I felt I was becoming sidelined.
Then she started HRT and it was as if there was a completely negative downward spiral in character. She became not just irritable or snappy but confrontational and aggressive. I remember putting our 12-year-old daughter to bed one night and she asked me if Mummy had been abducted by aliens! The false accusations began and arguments could get out of control. It felt like I was being goaded into making a serious mistake. I could be backed into a corner by an angry pointing finger one minute and the next I was trying to console a heaving mountain of tears or a quietly sobbing soul curled up in a chair. This was a completely different person to the one I had known before. I soon discovered that my ex had entered a relationship with another man. I was crushed.
Her new partner had been a boyfriend when she was just sixteen at school. She began to spend weekends away from home before eventually she pulled the ejector seat and left completely. My darkest days began. I had to take sleeping pills at night and my doctor told me I was suffering from extreme anxiety – I had thoughts of self-harm. I went to Relate on my own and received some counselling but neither the doctor or counsellor spoke to me about the menopause. My ex had an affair – that’s why I was feeling like I was…right?!
To regain control of my life I petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. My ex is now living alone with her dog and recently told our daughter that she believes she went mad.
Life after menopause
Time does heal but my scars are deep. I believe now that there is no coincidence that divorce rates are high during the menopause. It’s not always ‘because he ran away with the Au Pair’, although this does happen too! I’ve read that like in my situation, separation is more often instigated by women.
One thing I know for sure is that hormones are extremely powerful. I also think that HRT may only make things worse not better for some from a psychological point of view. It’s not a ‘one size fits all’ therapy. Some women I’ve spoken to since have told me that it just made them feel ‘very strange’!
If I had been given some advice and guidance that some women do actually appear to go mad and that the menopause can cause extreme behaviours and outcomes, I believe my journey might not have been so traumatic.
I would have appreciated some help from other men too and I believe we should be included in the conversation.
That’s what I’d like to see – a couple’s approach to menopause so that the woman has the support and help she needs to get through it and also the partner is given the support they need to understand and help where they can. Emotionally, it can be very traumatic and damaging but the right education, preparation, understanding and of course more conversation in general about menopause would be very beneficial.
It’s Tough To Stop an Emotional Affair
I am finally convinced that there is little that can be done to stop an emotional affair. This article details how hard it was for Doug to end his affair and how frustrating to me that was.
By Linda
I recently came to this conclusion after a comment that Doug made a couple of weeks ago about what pushed him to think about ending his emotional affair. He said that my reaction when I reviewed the phone logs was a catalyst for him to end the affair, but that ending the affair was still a process.
I know this is not new information to me but in a very strange way it still hit me very hard. I suppose that it really does take time to fully recover from an affair, and I at least have to hear things over and over again before they finally start to sink in.
Recently, Doug and I had a discussion about this “process” and I felt more like a person looking at it from the outside – almost like I was in an airplane viewing the timeline from above. It was really a strange and unsettling feeling for me.
When I look at the actual progression of trying to get Doug to end the affair, I realize that nothing that I did made much difference at all. The emotional affair had such a strong hold on him that traditional thinking, methods and ideology had no affect at all. It was something that he had to do on his own. As he has said previously, the pain had to override the pleasure.
I thought back to the day I found all the calls on his cell phone. A day you would think that the shock of being caught in the act would have brought some kind of action or guilt to the cheating spouse. What happened instead was denial, justification and an intensifying of the affair.
Later, I tried to fix our marriage by offering opportunities to connect, spend time together, communicate and be intimate. Did those actions stop the affair? No. Instead it provided an opportunity for Tanya to reassure Doug that I was just being desperate, that I should have been doing those things before and that I only wanted him because someone else had him.
Those actions added more confusion to the situation with the result being the affair relationship and Tanya coming out on top. It was another opportunity to put up a wall between our marriage and open up the flood gates to allow the affair to prosper.
It was a time for the two of them to discuss their relationship, their future, all the feelings and emotions and what they were going to do about the situation. At the same time, I was still in the dark about the affair. I was still trusting and believing Doug and just trying to save my marriage.
The reality was that all my efforts to reconnect with Doug could not stop the affair. It had too much power.
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A couple of months later, I felt in my heart that my efforts were not as productive as I had hoped they would be. The wall was still there and I felt like I was really losing my mind. During that time I was overly vigilant with everything that was happening around me and with every action and conversation with Doug.
This was the time that I finally demanded he tell me what was going on. Of course he did confess a portion of it, and I again believed everything he said was true.
He downplayed the affair, their relationship and the ending (or not ending) of their emotional affair. Of course all of this was very painful for me. He watched me have panic attacks, crying spells, lack of sleep, weight loss, hopelessness and helplessness.
I WAS desperate. I loved Doug, and deep down felt he loved me. I wanted to do everything to save our marriage. But again this wasn’t enough to end the affair.
The pleading, crying and begging had little effect. The only repercussion was that it forced Doug to make an effort in our relationship to curb my emotions, insecurity and to lesson his guilt. It also forced him to lie and sneak around even more.
He was trying to maintain two turbulent relationships which was wearing on him (Tanya was also becoming emotional and desperate). However, the power and control of the emotional affair was still winning.
Fast forward another month. Of course I knew deep down that the affair was still going on and everything I had read indicated that I needed to take a stronger stance. So I demanded the phone records. After I reviewed them I told him he could leave.
This is the point that Doug has told me (much later of course) that he knew he had to end the affair. Again he said it was a process, and of course it didn’t end that day.
The thought of that still produces so much anger because I looked at the previous four months to this occurrence as the “process.” I wonder what it took to finally end it. What kind of hold did she and the affair have over him that seeing his world crumbling around him didn’t seem to make any difference?
I will never understand the power of an affair and how someone could let it continue when they are hurting everyone around them. The only thing I could do is accept and forgive, which has been the most difficult thing I have ever had to do.
I hope that Doug can look at this process the way I have and learn from it, so his insight could help others that are going through the same thing. I know there are many things I could have done differently to have sped up this process, but I believe in the end, the decision to stop an emotional affair has to be one made by the cheater.
Additional Resources
Break Free From the Affair – the best book for determining the type of affair, what action you can take for each kind of affair, and predict how and when the affair will end.
Affair Recovery Group – learn real life ways on how to recover from an affair based on our own experiences as well as direction from therapist, Jeff Murrah.
How to Stop an Affair by Exposing it – Dr. Harley’s recommended way to get the cheater to stop his/her affair.
