The Perimenopause Husband
My Wife Hates Me: What Perimenopause Resentment Is Actually Saying
We have always kissed each other. Not dramatically. Good morning, good night, goodbye at the door. Twenty six years of it. Lips, every time. We never agreed to it, it was just the way we were.
One morning I went to kiss her goodbye before heading out. She turned her head. Not slightly. A clear, deliberate turn. I got the cheek.
Then she kept walking. No explanation. No argument the night before. Nothing I could point to and say, that is what this is about. Just the cheek, and then she was gone down the hallway.
I stood there for a second. Then I walked out the door and started the day.
Does my wife hate me, or is something else going on?
I was ropeable. Not visibly. I held it together on the outside and did a hard day of physical work with the whole thing turning over in my head.
What did I do. What did I miss. There was nothing. We had gone to bed fine as far as I knew. And yet I had been sent out the door like I had come home at five in the morning reeking of someone else's evening.
I know how that sounds. I know some blokes reading this are thinking, mate, it is a kiss, get over yourself. That is exactly the point. It was not just a kiss. It was the kiss. The one that had been there every morning for twenty six years, the one that said whatever else is going on, we are still in this together.
When that disappears with no explanation, it is not a small thing. It is a signal you do not know how to read.
What did I get wrong?
That evening I did not bring it up. I held it. Got through dinner, got through the night. No goodnight kiss either. Two people in the same bed not quite reaching each other.
Next morning, the cheek again.
So I did what blokes do when we do not have an answer. I grabbed the most obvious explanation I could find and asked her about it in the way men ask when they think they already know.
Is it hormonal. Are you getting your period. Is that what this is.
I am not proud of how I asked it. It was clumsy and it was reductive and I could hear how it sounded before the words had finished landing. She said no, I do not have my period. Short. Flat. End of conversation.
Days of that went by. I kept asking questions and kept getting walls. I kept hunting for the thing I had done so I could fix it, and kept coming up empty, because there was no thing. I just did not know that yet.
What is the resentment actually saying?
Two things, and the second one is the one that took me years to face.
The first. She was not being cold and she was not punishing me. She genuinely did not know what was happening to her. The mood that arrived without warning. The heat in the night. The fog some mornings that did not lift. The energy that was there one day and gone the next. She was lost, and she did not have the language to explain how lost she was. Nobody had ever sat either of us down and said the years running into menopause could do this to a person. The distance was not a verdict on the marriage. It was weather I could not see, and she could not see it clearly either.
The second is harder, and it is mine.
For longer than I would like to admit, I let the kids take my side without ever deciding to. When mum was distant, when she snapped at something small, when the things she normally did around the house were not getting done and one of them said something about it, I would agree. Not loudly. Just a shrug and a yeah, mum's a bit off at the moment, in a tone that quietly confirmed whatever they were already feeling.
I was not defending her. I was going along with the room.
Home is supposed to be the one place you do not have to perform. By letting that sit unchallenged I had taken that away from her. She was not only dealing with perimenopause. She was dealing with it in a house where she had started to feel like even her own kids were quietly against her.
So while I was standing in a hallway deciding my wife hated me, she was living in a home that had gone slightly cold on her. That is the part I regret most out of the whole period. It is worth sitting with before you decide the resentment in your house is aimed at you.
What do you do when she will not talk to you?
One thing. Stop her and hold on.
That is not advice I worked out. It is what I stumbled into. She walked past me in the hallway one day, head down, eyes on the floor, moving through the house like she was somewhere else. I just grabbed her. Not forcefully, just stopped her. Put my arms around her, pulled her in, hand on the back of her head, and held her there against my shoulder.
I had no speech. I said, I do not want to fight with you, I do not know what is going on, but I am here.
She did not pull away. And after a moment she said the thing I have never forgotten. I do not know what is going on either. I do not know what is wrong with me.
That was the whole thing. Not a conversation, not a fix, not an explanation. Ten seconds in a hallway with no words that solved anything.
If she has gone cold, do not chase the reason. Do not ask if it is hormonal. Do not build a case. Just stop her, hold on, and tell her you are here and you are not going anywhere and she does not have to explain it right now.
Has she stopped loving me?
You have not lost her. She is in weather you cannot see.
Telling one kind of bad day from another changes what you do about it, and doing the right one is most of the job. That is the whole idea behind The Weather Report, the free two page guide. Five states, what each one looks like, and the one thing to do in it.
There is a version of the goodbye kiss that comes back. Ours did. Not overnight, and not because of anything clever I said.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling a storm warning from an overcast day from a fog day, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.