A male friend was recently telling me about problems at home between his wife and his mother. He explained it the way a lot of people explain family tension: families argue, people get irritated, personalities clash, and sometimes hurtful things get said.
At first, I didn’t think too much of it. But something in what he described caught my attention. Based on my friend’s age, I could make a rough guess about his mother’s age, so instead of assuming, I asked him.
When he told me she was in her mid-fifties, it confirmed what I suspected may be part of the story. His mother was very likely somewhere in the menopause transition. I had no way of knowing whether she was in perimenopause or menopause, and I certainly could not ask him about his mother’s menstrual cycle because what son knows anything about his mother’s menstrual cycle? Exactly. None. As it should be.
I told him his mother may be at a point in her life where she is experiencing major physical, emotional, hormonal, and neurological changes. I told him that whatever was going on between his wife and his mother was not necessarily about his wife. It may look like it is about his wife because his wife happens to be the person in the room when something hits his mother’s nervous system sideways. But that does not mean his wife is the real issue. Sometimes the person standing closest to the spark gets blamed for the fire.
He pushed back. He said no, his mother just gets impatient with his wife because of the baby. He said she does not argue with his sister or other family members the same way she argues with his wife. I understood what he was saying, but I also begged him to hear me out. I told him, “I am a woman. I have lived through this. I understand things about this that you may not know.”
And yes, we almost got into an argument about menopause while I was trying to explain why arguing might not be the most helpful response to menopause. Life enjoys irony. But I kept insisting because I could see something he could not see yet.
Men often see the behavior. They see the impatience, the tears, the tone, the sharpness, the forgetfulness, the hot flash, the silence, the withdrawal, or the woman who used to hold everything together suddenly looking like she is two seconds away from throwing the entire family into the trash. What they may not understand is that they are not just witnessing a mood. They may be witnessing a biological and neurological transition.
This article is for men who have women in their lives who are in their forties, fifties, sixties, or beyond. It is also for younger people who may not understand what their mothers, aunts, sisters, friends, coworkers, or future selves may experience. If you think the woman you love is becoming difficult, unreasonable, overly sensitive, emotional, impatient, forgetful, distant, or — let’s just say the word some people think and pretend they do not — a bitch, pause before you make that your conclusion.
She is not losing her mind. She is losing her hormones.
And honestly, most of us were never taught how to recognize this. Men were not taught what this amazing transition can look like in the women they love. Women were not taught what is happening inside their own bodies. Younger humans are not being taught this in health class either, not at the level of detail that makes it useful information.
Most of us were taught the bare minimum about puberty, periods, pregnancy, and maybe the vague idea that menopause eventually shows up with hot flashes and attitude and then her period stops. Very helpful. Gold star for the education system.
That is why I appreciate Dr. Mindy Pelz so much. I found her after I had already been in menopause for several years, and boy do I wish I had found her sooner. She continues to help raise awareness around women’s hormones, fasting, perimenopause, menopause, and the powerful shifts happening in the female body. She gave me words to explain what I had lived through in my life, my body, and my world.
As I was going through that season of my life, I had no idea it would be that bad. I also realized how little I actually knew about my own hormones and how deeply they influenced so many systems and processes in my body. I have a pretty good feeling I would not be too far off base if I said many women have a similar experience. We live through it first, then understand it later, which feels like a ridiculous order of operations given the weight of what is actually happening inside our bodies and lives.
Once I had better language for it, I could finally look back and understand that my body was not betraying me. It was communicating as it moved through a major biological and neurological transition. In some ways, it can feel like a rebirth. You really are becoming a different version of yourself, biologically, neurologically, and emotionally.
So if you are a man reading this, please understand something important: the women in your life may not fully know what is happening either. She may feel different before she can explain why. She may be reacting from a body and brain in transition before she has the words to describe it. That does not excuse every hurtful word or every difficult moment, but I hope this post might change how you engage with her and maybe how quickly you judge her.
Menopause is not just about a period ending. Perimenopause is the transition leading up to menopause. It can last for years and is often when the hormonal chaos really starts making itself known. Menopause is officially reached after a woman has gone 12 consecutive months without a period. But the emotional, physical, chemical, and neurological changes do not politely wait for that official marker, and they do not always disappear the moment she reaches it. They can begin long before menopause and linger after the period ends. For some women, the whole transition can stretch close to a decade or more, depending on her body.
During this transition, hormones fluctuate significantly, sleep can become disrupted, hot flashes can show up, and the brain can feel like someone opened too many tabs and then unplugged the Wi-Fi. A woman who used to remember every appointment, grocery item, school form, birthday, family obligation, and emotional need in the house may suddenly forget why she walked into the pantry. Her emotions may also feel out of control, like crying because a moth hit the windshield on the highway.
The unpredictability is part of what makes it so humbling. Symptoms can come and go with no warning and absolutely no regard for what a woman is doing with her actual life. They do not wait until she is home in sweatpants with a blanket and herbal tea. They can show up while she is presenting a business proposal and asking a board of directors for a $10 million check for a complex optical fiber network build, or while she is soaking in a tub full of bubbles. Yes, both actually happened to me.
During that presentation, a hot flash hit me so hard that one of the gentlemen on the board asked if I was okay. I was not, but of course I politely said, “I’m fine, thank you,” because apparently professionalism sometimes means pretending you are not melting from the inside out while discussing infrastructure funding. Afterward, I told my assistant I was just grateful it was a hot flash and not a brain burp that made me forget critical details in the presentation. And yes, we got the money. Thank you, universe. Needless to say, menopause can be deeply humbling.
This is where men can misunderstand the whole thing. They may think, “She never used to act like this,” or “This never bothered her before,” or “Why is she so emotional now?” But that is exactly the point. She is not in the same internal state she was in before. Her hormones are changing. Her chemistry is changing. Her biology is changing. Her brain is changing. Her nervous system is changing. Her sleep may be wrecked, and her patience may be thinner because the old internal buffer she relied on for decades is not working the same way.
This is not her being moody because she woke up and chose chaos as a lifestyle brand. Perimenopause and menopause change the way a woman feels inside her own body and inside her own life. That is why a comment, a noise, a demand, a mess, a baby crying, someone’s breathing being too loud, or one more person needing one more thing can land differently than it used to.
For many women, this transition is not only physical. It is deeply personal. I know it was for me. Around that point in my life, I questioned everything. My work. My friendships. My purpose. My identity. My marriage. My body. My relationship with myself. And even my relationship with food.
I started speaking truths I had been holding inside for decades. I stopped being as willing to perform peace if peace required me to abandon myself. I even transformed my body, and instead of that being seen as the powerful, beautiful transformation it was, I was told, “I want the fat girl back.”
Sad, right? But that sentence revealed something important. Sometimes people do not miss the old version of you because she was happier. They miss her because she was easier for them. She asked for less. She tolerated more. She swallowed more. She kept the peace. She made herself smaller in ways that kept everyone else comfortable.
Menopause has a way of making that arrangement impossible. The woman you love may start becoming less interested in pretending. She may stop volunteering for emotional labor nobody notices until she quits doing it. She may no longer care about keeping everybody comfortable while she is quietly falling apart inside. She may start hearing her own needs louder than the expectations around her. She may become more direct, more sensitive, more honest, more withdrawn, more expressive, or more unwilling to tolerate things she once let slide.
That does not mean she does not love you. It may mean she is finally learning how to love herself too. This is where men often get scared, defensive, or offended. They take the change personally. They hear her frustration and think, “What did I do?”
Sometimes, yes, maybe you did something. Let’s not get carried away and pretend every man in the room is an innocent woodland creature. But often, the deeper truth is that what she is experiencing is not about one isolated comment, one messy kitchen, one family argument, or one badly timed question. It is about chemicals and hormones in her body changing, impacting her mind, and yes, maybe even her spirit and soul shifting all at once.
The small thing may not be small to her nervous system in that moment. The baby crying, the kitchen noise, the feeling that she does everything and no one contributes, the feeling that no one sees her, the sense that she has no space, the exhaustion from not sleeping, the internal heat rising in her body, and the emotional pressure she cannot name yet may all collide over something that looks ridiculous from the outside.
That is why telling this woman to “calm down” is not the brilliant relationship strategy some men seem to believe it is. Neither is “relax,” “you’re overreacting,” “this never used to bother you,” “you’re being too sensitive,” “is it your hormones?” or “maybe you should go to the doctor and get something.” Trust me, if she is suffering, she has probably thought about all the options. In fact, she may have even gone to the doctor only to be dismissed or sent home with an antidepressant because the doctor did not know what else to do. Back to that darn education system again.
Some women choose hormone therapy, and some do not. That is personal. I chose not to go that route because I did not want to depend on medication to feel like myself. At the time, I also wondered whether taking hormones would prolong the process, which I did not want to prolong for one second longer than necessary. From what I understand now, hormone therapy is used to manage symptoms, not delay menopause itself.
What I appreciate about Dr. Mindy’s teachings is that she also talks about ways to support the body through food, gut health, hormone-supportive nutrition, fasting, and when we eat. What is most interesting to me is that before I even had that language, I was already doing some of those things. I had significantly changed my diet to improve my health, and I was intermittent fasting before I even knew intermittent fasting was a thing. I did not have the hormone education yet, but my body was already guiding me toward some of the practices that would later make so much sense.
What a woman may need is not a correction. She may need space. She may need quiet. She may need a hug. She may need help with the practical thing in front of her. She may need to be alone without you interpreting that as rejection. She may need you to stop trying to drag her back into the version of herself that made life easier for everyone but her.
For me, space would have mattered. I needed room to process my feelings, my emotions, and the changes taking place in my body. I needed privacy to feel what I was feeling. I did not need to feel like a specimen under a microscope. I did not need to be watched, questioned, challenged, or judged. I needed to cry, scream, laugh at myself, breathe, and sort through what was mine to understand.
I needed the people closest to me to know this was not about them in the way they thought it was. It was about me. Classic “it’s not you, it’s me,” except for real, not in the fake relationship-exit-line kind of way. I did not need to be asked every five minutes, “What’s wrong?” I also needed to stop doing everything for everyone except me. I needed people to take responsibility for themselves.
I did not know then what I know now. I wish I had. I wish more women knew what might happen before it happens, or at least understood what was happening while they were in it, not years later when they finally look back and think, “Oh. That explains a lot.” I also wish more men understood that the menopausal transition can either deepen a relationship or expose the places where it was already fragile.
I have seen how much damage happens when the people closest to a woman in this transition treat it like rebellion, disrespect, or drama instead of becoming curious about what is changing inside of her. Some relationships do deepen through this season. Others do not survive it. But understanding gives love a better chance than accusation ever will.
And no, this does not mean a woman gets a free pass to be cruel. Compassion is not the same as accepting emotional shrapnel as a lifestyle. Everyone in a relationship or family still has responsibility for their words and behavior. But there is a big difference between reacting to her as if she is deliberately making everyone miserable and responding with curiosity, steadiness, and care because you understand something bigger may be happening.
One of the best things you can do is stop asking, “What is wrong?” and start asking, “What might she be going through that I do not understand yet?” That shift alone can change the whole energy in a room.
When she loses her temper over something that seems small, do not immediately argue the facts of the situation like you are presenting evidence in court. When she starts crying and you do not know why, do not demand a perfectly organized explanation while she is sobbing because honestly, she may not know either. When she asks for space, do not follow her around trying to fix the mood because you feel uncomfortable. When she tells you she needs help, believe her. When she says she is tired, assume she may be carrying more than you can see.
Sometimes the best response is simple. “I’m here.” “Do you want space or do you want a hug?” “What would help right now?” “I can take care of that.” “I’m not leaving you alone emotionally, but I can give you room if that’s what you need.” That kind of presence can calm a nervous system far better than a lecture about how everyone else in the house is also stressed.
Yes, everyone may be stressed. But she may be stressed while her body is also changing the rules from the inside. That deserves tenderness, not a debate competition in the kitchen. That is what I wanted my friend to understand. Maybe his mother really was reacting to something between her and his wife. Families are complicated, and I was not there pretending to know every detail. But I also wanted him to consider that something deeper might be happening inside his mother, something that had very little to do with the argument in front of her and everything to do with the transition happening within her.
I think about this now through the lens of generations too. My grandmother once told my mother that I saved her life when I was little. She watched me every day while my mother worked, and at the time I understood it as a sweet family story. Now I hear it differently. She would have been in her late forties, which means she may have been moving through perimenopause without a name for it, without real support, and probably without anyone asking what she needed, certainly not my grandfather.
Maybe a busy little kid gave her purpose, distraction, movement, and love when she was feeling old, invisible, or lost inside herself. I am grateful I was that for her. I am also sure there were moments when a toddler was exactly the medicine she needed and moments when she probably screamed, “Enough!” and wanted five minutes of silence and a door that locked. Both can be true, especially during perimenopause and menopause.
It makes me wonder how many women from my grandmother’s generation suffered quietly because no one understood what was happening. They did not have podcasts, hormone educators, women’s health conversations, doctors who understood hormones, or Instagram posts making us cry in the middle of an otherwise normal day. They had duty. They had family. They had expectations. They had obligations. They had “keep going.”
And many of them did keep going, as women still do today. But “keep going” is not the same as being understood. It makes me sad that women continue to suffer that way because we just do not know.
I saw something online recently that made me cry. Yes, Instagram made me cry. Apparently that is where we are now. A young man asked an older man the secret to loving the same woman for a lifetime. He did not laugh. He did not say “communication” or “date nights.” He said, “You do not love the same woman. She changes every few years. And if you do not update the way you love her, you lose her.”
He may not have understood those changes as hormonal milestones, perimenopause, or menopause at all, but he understood enough to think about her differently instead of expecting the same woman through all of those seasons.
In other words, love has to update because she is updating. That landed for me because women go through major hormonal transitions that change them in very real ways. Puberty changes a girl’s body, brain, emotions, and sense of self. Pregnancy and motherhood change a woman’s body, brain, emotions, priorities, instincts, and identity. And perimenopause and menopause change a woman into a more authentic, unapologetic, strong, wise version of herself, whether she feels ready for that transformation or not.
This is not fluffy. Her hormones are changing. That changes her chemistry. That changes her brain. That changes her nervous system. That changes how she reacts, thinks, feels, sleeps, tolerates stress, relates to people, and sees herself.
So yes, during perimenopause and menopause, the woman you love is changing. Not just emotionally. Biologically. Neurologically. Chemically. And if you keep responding to her as if she is the exact same woman with the exact same internal wiring, you may misunderstand almost everything happening in front of you.
That does not mean it is easy. Beautiful transformations are not always cute while they are happening. Caterpillars do not become butterflies by doing a gentle skincare routine and journaling under soft lighting. There is a whole messy breakdown involved. Menopause can feel like that. Parts of the old self are being questioned, released, burned off, or rebuilt. Sometimes she may not know what is happening yet. Sometimes all she knows is that she cannot keep living the same way.
If you love her, do not be angry or intimidated. Be curious. Be steady. Be willing to learn. Be willing to ask what she needs without making her responsible for managing your discomfort too. You do not have to become an expert in female hormones before you are allowed to be useful. You just need to understand that something real is happening, even when it shows up in ways you did not expect.
You get the chance to witness a woman becoming more herself. That is not always convenient. It may not be quiet. It may not fit the family script. It may interrupt old patterns that worked better for everyone else than they did for her. But if you can walk beside her instead of trying to drag her backward, you may get to know the woman who emerges on the other side. She may be stronger, clearer, more honest, more alive, and more herself than she has ever been.
In The Awakened Body, I write a lot about learning to listen to the body because the body is always communicating with us. Menopause is one of those seasons when the body may start communicating in ways that are impossible to ignore. Hot flashes, mood shifts, sleep disruption, brain fog, emotional truth, impatience, and the sudden inability to tolerate old nonsense may all be part of the message.
So if the woman you love is changing, do not assume she is losing it. She may finally be finding herself. And if you love her well through that, not with all the answers, but with presence, respect, curiosity, and care, you may not lose her in the transition. You may meet her more fully than you ever have before.