Meet Sarah: When Perimenopause Steals Your Sex Drive
When You Love Him, But Don't Want Him Touching You
Sarah was 48 and had always been quietly proud of the fact that she still fancied her husband. Not proud in an unbearable Facebook-anniversary-post kind of way, with photographs of champagne glasses and captions about marrying her best friend, but genuinely grateful that after all those years together, they still had that. The honeymoon period everyone assured her would eventually disappear had somehow lasted the best part of a decade, and even after three children, countless sleepless nights, mortgages, school runs, family dramas, elderly pets and approximately four thousand conversations about what they were having for dinner, he still fancied her and, perhaps equally importantly, she still fancied him.
They had built a good life together, the sort of life that didn't look particularly extraordinary from the outside because most of its best bits were ordinary. They had a home full of evidence that five people and several animals lived there, children they were proud of, friends they had collected along the way and enough shared history that neither of them needed to explain why certain songs made them laugh. Sarah had supported him through difficult periods and had been his rock when he needed one, and he had done the same for her. Their marriage wasn't perfect, because no marriage involving children, bills and another human being's inability to put things back where they found them could possibly be perfect, but it was solid, affectionate and theirs.
Which was why Sarah couldn't understand why she had suddenly started wanting him to keep his hands to himself.
It hadn't happened overnight, or at least she didn't think it had. There wasn't a morning when she woke up, looked across the bed and thought, Right then, that's enough of that. It was subtler than that. He would walk past her while she was cooking and put his hands on her shoulders, something he'd probably done thousands of times before, and instead of leaning backwards into him, Sarah would feel a strange shiver run down her spine. Unfortunately, it wasn't the shiver she'd once quite enjoyed. It was closer to the sensation of somebody standing slightly too close behind you in a supermarket queue, and every part of her body seemed to be saying, Please don't touch me, while her brain was simultaneously asking what the hell was wrong with her.
Then she started noticing herself moving away. If he put his hand on her leg while they watched television, Sarah would suddenly need her drink from the other side of the sofa. If he kissed her neck while she was getting ready for bed, she'd remember with astonishing clarity that there was wet washing sitting in the machine. If he climbed into bed and moved towards her, she became capable of producing excuses with the speed and creativity of a woman who should probably have been working for MI6. She was tired, she'd eaten too much, she had a headache, she needed to be up early, one of the children might still be awake, she hadn't showered, she'd only just showered and didn't want to shower again, the washing machine needed emptying and, on one particularly desperate evening, the dog seemed emotionally unsettled.
Her husband noticed, because of course he did. At first he responded by trying harder, which was completely understandable and unfortunately exactly the wrong thing to do. He became more affectionate, touched her more often and made more attempts to initiate sex, while Sarah became increasingly skilled at manoeuvring herself around the house without ever quite being within grabbing distance. The more he tried to reconnect with her, the more she felt herself pulling away, until even she could see the absurdity of a woman who had spent years complaining that her husband couldn't find the laundry basket suddenly becoming intensely interested in doing the washing at ten o'clock at night.
The worst part was that she still loved him. Nothing terrible had happened between them, there wasn't somebody else and she wasn't secretly fantasising about abandoning the family and starting a new life with a fisherman in Cornwall. She could look at her husband and objectively see the same man she had fancied for years, could laugh with him over dinner and enjoy spending an evening beside him, but the moment affection carried even the possibility of becoming sexual, something inside her seemed to slam the brakes on. Sarah couldn't explain it to herself, which meant she had absolutely no idea how she was supposed to explain it to him.
Several months into this strange new arrangement, her husband finally asked what was happening between them. It wasn't an accusation and he wasn't angry, which somehow made it worse, because Sarah could see that underneath the question he was confused and hurt. She knew what he was really asking: Do you still want me? She also knew she didn't have an answer that wouldn't sound horrible, because how exactly do you tell somebody you've loved for years that lately the sensation of their hand on your body makes you want to wriggle away from them?
So Sarah did what human beings have been doing since the beginning of time when confronted with an emotion they don't understand and a conversation they desperately don't want to have: she got defensive. She snapped that she was exhausted, that she had a million things to think about, that sex wasn't exactly top of her priority list when she was working, running a house and keeping track of three children, and by the time she'd finished listing everything she did in an average week, the original conversation had somehow become an argument about mental load. Her husband backed off, but the expression on his face stayed with her long after they'd stopped talking because he looked exactly how she feared she had made him feel: rejected.
Once the anger disappeared, the guilt arrived to take its place. Sarah had always thought of herself as a sexual woman and had liked that part of herself, not because she believed she should be constantly swinging from the chandeliers but because intimacy had always been an easy, enjoyable part of their relationship. Now she was lying beside the man she loved pretending to be deeply engrossed in something on her phone because she didn't want him to mistake eye contact for an invitation, and she couldn't stop wondering what the change meant. Perhaps this was simply what happened after enough years of marriage, perhaps she'd stopped fancying him without realising it, perhaps there was something wrong between them that she hadn't been paying attention to, or perhaps, and this was the thought that frightened her most, there was something wrong with her.
When Sarah started looking properly at what else had been changing, there was more there than she'd realised. Her periods, after more than three decades of arriving whether invited or not, had apparently decided they were now entitled to annual leave and had begun disappearing for weeks at a time without so much as an out-of-office reply. Her memory had become unreliable enough that she'd walk upstairs with purpose and arrive on the landing with absolutely no idea what the purpose had been. She was warmer than she used to be, her sleep wasn't quite what it once was, and there were days when her patience seemed to have been replaced by somebody else's much shorter version.
None of that particularly surprised her because Sarah knew about menopause, or at least she thought she did. She knew about hot flushes because everybody knew about hot flushes. She knew periods eventually became erratic and disappeared, and she'd heard enough women joke about forgetting why they'd walked into rooms to understand that memory could become a bit questionable too. These were the things she'd absorbed over the years as the change, a slightly mysterious period of life involving fans, forgotten words and eventually being liberated from buying tampons.
What nobody had mentioned was that her libido might pack its bags and fuck off at the same time as her periods.
That discovery came late one evening when Sarah, still bothered by the conversation with her husband, started searching for women describing similar experiences. What she found wasn't a collection of women announcing that they no longer loved their partners or that their marriages were secretly falling apart; it was women talking about loss of libido during perimenopause, about suddenly not wanting sex after years of enjoying it, about affection feeling different in their bodies and about the strange guilt of loving somebody deeply while simultaneously wanting them to move their hand off their thigh.
The more Sarah read, the more familiar it became. There were women avoiding bedtime because they knew their partners might initiate sex, women inventing excuses because they didn't know how to explain what was happening, women worrying that the absence of desire meant something catastrophic about their relationships and women whose partners, understandably, had begun taking the rejection personally. Sarah had spent months privately wondering whether she was becoming cold, selfish or somehow broken, only to discover an entire population of women sitting in bedrooms around the country apparently thinking, I love you very much, but if you touch my boob right now I may actually bite you.
For the first time in months, the question changed. Instead of asking herself what was wrong with her marriage, Sarah started wondering what was changing in her body. She still didn't suddenly want sex, and discovering that loss of libido could be part of perimenopause hadn't magically transformed her into the woman she'd been a few years earlier, but it removed something that had been sitting heavily between them: the assumption that her lack of desire must mean she no longer desired him.
That distinction mattered, because once Sarah understood it herself, she could finally begin explaining it to her husband without reaching for the washing basket, blaming the children or questioning the dog's emotional wellbeing. There was still a conversation to have, probably several of them, and there was still the uncomfortable business of working out what intimacy looked like while her body seemed to be rewriting rules she'd understood for most of her adult life, but at least they were dealing with the same problem now instead of quietly believing they were the problem.
Sarah had known about the hot flushes, the disappearing periods and the memory that occasionally left her standing halfway up the stairs wondering whether she'd gone up for clean towels or one of the children.
Nobody had warned her that perimenopause might wander into her bedroom, climb into the middle of a perfectly good marriage and announce that it lived there now too.
That would have been useful information.
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