When He Finally Understood: A Menopause Story from the Inside

When I entered menopause, I thought I was prepared. After all, I’d spent decades teaching women about their bodies, s//xuality, emotions, and cycles. I understood hormones, mood swings, and the shifting tides of energy.

But when it arrived really arrived it wasn’t a neat, graceful transition. It was raw, unpredictable, and profoundly humbling. My body became a landscape I no longer fully recognised. My emotions, once steady, began to rise and fall like ocean waves.

And beside me stood my husband, watching, confused, wanting to support but not quite knowing how.

The Early Days

In the beginning, neither of us realised what was happening.

I’d wake in the night drenched in sweat, tangled in sheets, my heart racing for no reason. My fuse was shorter. My energy vanished without warning.

He’d look at me with that mix of concern and helplessness I’ve seen in so many men wanting to fix it, not realising that what I needed wasn’t fixing. I needed witnessing. I needed space. I needed to be understood.

The Turning Point

The turning point came the day he said quietly, “I don’t know what to do, but I want to understand.”

Those words softened everything.

We started to talk about what was happening in my body, the hormonal changes, the brain fog, the waves of heat and emotion. But we also talked about what was happening in my identity.

Because menopause, for me, wasn’t just about hormones. It was a stripping away of old roles mothering, caretaking, people-pleasing and a re-emergence of the woman underneath.

I was becoming more myself, but to the outside world, it sometimes looked like I was falling apart.

Learning Together

He began reading about menopause. We watched documentaries together. Sometimes he’d ask questions that made me laugh; other times I cried with relief that he was trying.

There were still moments of misunderstanding, days when my need for solitude felt like rejection, or when his logical brain clashed with my emotional reality. But slowly, we began to navigate this new landscape together.

He started to see that menopause wasn’t an ending, but a rite of passage. A threshold into a deeper, wiser way of being.

And I started to see how hard it can be for men to watch the woman they love transform in ways they can’t control or fully comprehend.

What Men Need to Know

Menopause changes everything, not just for women, but for relationships.

It can challenge intimacy, patience, and communication. But it can also deepen them. When a man meets this season with curiosity instead of fear, compassion instead of distance, something beautiful happens: the relationship grows up right alongside the woman.

Men don’t need to fix menopause. They just need to listen, to learn, and to love through the changes.

Now

Now, on the other side, quite a few years later I feel more grounded, more embodied, more myself than ever. And our relationship feels different too, less about roles and more about presence.

He tells me often how much he’s learned through watching me walk this path. I tell him how much it mattered that he walked with me.

Menopause stripped me down, but it also revealed what’s real in me, and in us.

And that, to me, is the true gift of this right of passage.

It’s not something a woman goes through alone. It’s something that reshapes the landscape of love itself.

These days I call that time in my life my journey of WomanPause. It’s World Menopause Month currently let’s open the conversations and normalise this often taboo subject.

Jenni Mears - Holistic Sexologist, Clinical Hypnotherapist & Teacher of The Fembodiment™️ Method Facilitator Certification.