MANDY APPLEYARD's Menopause Diary: Why do men think the menopause is all about THEM?
Someone emailed this week to tell me that the Chinese call the menopause the 'Second Spring', regarding it as a time of renewal in a woman's life.
With that pleasing thought in mind, I decided to conduct a straw poll of male friends, colleagues and relatives to find out how The Change looks from their perspective.
The results soon wiped the smile off my face.
'Women's Troubles': Men generally pay little heed to a woman experiencing the menopause unless it has a direct impact on them (and their sex lives)
It seems that men generally pay little heed to a woman experiencing the menopause, unless it has a direct impact on them.
One 54-year-old male friend, married for 27 years, says: 'The menopause is something men file in a giant envelope marked “Women's Troubles” - along with periods, varicose veins, saggy breasts and stretch marks. Men don't take much notice of the menopause unless it affects them directly - and that usually comes down to the impact it has on their sex life.
'I'm just grateful it's my wife who's going through it, and not me.'
Someone I used to work with tells me his marriage foundered when his wife started the menopause. She lost her sex drive completely, he complains, but instead of showing sympathy and loyalty, he had an affair.
Very constructive, I told him. 'I didn't want to give up on my marriage, but I wasn't ready to say goodbye to sex,' he said.
Keep talking: If you want to maintain a healthy relationship with each other, communicate
My ex-colleague admits his wife's menopause also made him more conscious of his own ageing process. Of course, his affair was with a younger woman to whom he is now married. I assume he's choosing to ignore the fact she'll have her own menopause one day fairly soon.
A friend told me what he fears most about his wife's impending menopause.
'The physical changes in her,' he said. 'I can cope with a woman filling out a bit round the middle, as long as it isn't too much and as long as she exercises to keep herself fit and healthy, but any loss of libido on her part would have a big impact on my feelings about the relationship.' So it's all about him.
According to my unscientific poll, the received wisdom among men seems to be that women become a little trickier and go a tad doolally during the menopause - 'PMT to the power 10', as my cousin puts it.
He quotes Woody Allen, worried by Diane Keaton's behaviour in the film Manhattan Murder Mystery: 'Save a little craziness for menopause.'
The average man's reaction to the menopause is much like his response to women in general: bafflement, lashings of self-interest, head-in-the-sand reticence and, when all else fails, making a joke of it.
So what hope for relationships in mid-life? Keep talking, the experts suggest. Communicate. Share what you feel. Don't let the menopause become the elephant in the room.
Otherwise the 'Second Spring' begins to look more like a long, hard winter for both sexes.
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