If Kurt Schaer was completely honest, his first thought when his wife started having hot flashes and night sweats was that she could “just suck it up.”
It can’t be that bad, he thought to himself: “You’re having a bad day. You’re feeling sick, we get sick, too. Just maneuver through it.”
His father taught him that a husband provides, a wife takes care of children. Emotional equity wasn’t built in their home.
The couple had survived infidelity and rebuilt their lives as marriage coaches. They lived through the death of their teenage son in a car accident and became grief leaders. But when Schaer watched his wife Denette suffer from perimenopause symptoms that grew to sharp mood swings, forgetfulness and extreme fatigue – he couldn’t bear losing the woman he’d known for three decades.
“I needed to find compassion and empathy,” Schaer, 49, says. “Nothing in life I would have my wife walk through by herself. I had to figure how to help.”
He set the thermostat in their Tampa home to 69 degrees, built what he calls a wind tunnel of fans above his wife’s side of the bed and bought a white noise machine to block out the irritating way his breathing sounded. He did laundry and other chores; many he admits that he should have been doing all along. He learned about hormone therapy.
“But most important,” he says, “I listened.”
Just as Gen X and millennial women are changing the way they approach perimenopause and menopause, piercing through the cultural zeitgeist, so are their husbands and partners. Bro fitness podcasts are now talking about hormones and strength training. Men are joining their wives for medical appointments, going to menopause retreats, and making TikTok videos and documentaries. They are doing so with both a sense of urgency and sometimes humor. One man even named his wife’s menopause symptoms “Agnes” to remind them that it is part of his wife, but not all of her.
But the process by which men are approaching menopause in this generation is akin to other ways they are defining masculinity. Or, at the very least, exploring how they have understood what it means to be a man. Maybe masculinity still does mean taking care of and protecting your partner, being the breadwinner and remaining stoic all the same. But just like the men who understood changing a diaper in the 1990s didn’t take away their manliness, so can participating in their spouse’s emotional needs.
This evolution in masculinity, where vulnerability and authenticity are valued, moves away from the restrictive path in which the men interviewed by USA TODAY were raised. It’s not just changing them, but their marriages.
Women are welcoming men to the menoconversation
Perimenopause and menopause shouldn’t simply be discussions in a gynecologist’s office, says Tamsen Fadal, who wrote “How to Menopause.”
And yet it was almost always relegated to the exam room, somewhere with stirrups in sight.
It’s not only about the body temperature changes. There’s the so-called “menobelly.” The irritability or walking into a room only to forget why seconds later. Oh, and a plummeting sex drive, which almost always makes women spiral into shame.
“This can create conflict in the relationship if you don’t bring men into it,” Fadal says.
There are few studies on how men view menopause, but one of the most recent shows that almost three of four men now say they talk with their partner about menopause. These men also discuss treatment options, according to Menopause, the Journal of the Menopause Society.
Perimenopause, the time leading up to the menopause where a woman’s period stops, can last up to 10 years and include a fluctuation in hormones. It can present with symptoms ranging from frozen shoulder to achy joints and often women suffer for years before diagnosis.
These are men who grew up with fathers who ignored menopause. These are men who now are realizing their mothers went through this and they didn’t even know.
After all, there’s a silence that had always accompanied women going through menopause. If they dared asked for help, it was about masking symptoms − and feelings − in order to please others. It was to not draw any more attention to the fact that they were aging.
These also are men who see that while divorce rates overall are dropping, divorces among adults 50 and older are increasing. Seven in 10 women blame perimenopause or menopause for the breakdown of their marriage, according to a survey in the United Kingdom by the Family Law Menopause Project and Newsom Health Research and Education.
Welcome to the ‘menodivorce’. Why women aren’t sweating marriage in a sea of hot flashes
Fadal helped make “The M Factor,” a documentary about menopause. When it was screened earlier this year, the majority of audiences were women. Then she noticed a shift.
“Women were starting to bring their husbands or partners to help them understand this,” she says. “Half of the population will go through menopause, and we need the other half to understand it.”
Finding his vulnerability in talking about menopause
Jesse Robertson was driving home from his sales job when he heard menopause expert Dr. Mary Claire Haver on a health podcast.
He was astounded by how often women are misdiagnosed, the misunderstandings about hormone therapy, and his own ignorance. So, he posed a question on his parenting TikTok account this summer: “Do women want husbands to talk to them about menopause?”
Hundreds of women told him they wanted men to learn more. The husband and father of two shifted his videos to menopause and perimenopause. He approaches it not as an expert, but someone learning along with other men.
While it has grown his audience and given him a sense of pride in helping others, there’s been another more important transformation.
It has brought him closer to his wife of 17 years.
“It’s allowed me to have more vulnerable conversations with her,” says Robertson, 47, who lives in the Minneapolis area. “If I can talk to her about this, something sensitive, personal, and kind of uncomfortable for me, we can talk about anything.”
Bell Hooks, the late author and cultural critic, said that even the most loving of couples fall into the trap of avoiding emotions and projecting expectations onto the other person. It’s a comfortable game, one that has furnished endless aisles of self-help books. Women are from venus. Men are from mars, right?
To love, she said, men and women must be willing to hear each others’ truths without punishment or exception.
Now Robertson hears from men and couples who are watching his menopause videos together.
“It isn’t just women who have to go through it,” he says. “It’s something that partnerships have to go through.”
Men need to learn more and stop being (expletives)
Todd Maxwell was scrolling through his phone when he came across one of Robertson’s videos describing symptoms that sounded like his wife: fatigue and brain fog, frozen shoulder, and mood swings.
“I think this is what you might have,” he told her. “Perimenopause.”
She was only 40. When she told doctors, they discounted her symptoms, blaming the shoulder issues on exercise and the fatigue on their four children.
When she had confided in Maxwell about hot flashes, he says he had made jokes about it. “It was awkward, and I didn’t know what to say,” he says. “I should have been more understanding.”
They separated this summer.
“I told her that I’m really sorry it took me this long to realize that I could have been more helpful,” says Maxwell, 47. “Men need to learn more and stop being (expletives.)”
Maxwell, an oil lineman, lives in a small town in Alberta, Canada. He grew up believing men don’t show emotion. Sharing how he felt, he thought, feel could only add to his wife’s burden.
He threw himself into being the kind of father that he never had – the kind that goes to hockey games and listens. But, he says, he didn’t put that same energy into understanding his wife.
Until now. He started therapy. He’s reading books and watching videos to learn more about perimenopause.
“Now if I want to talk to my wife about how I’m feeling, I write in my journal. I take a walk,” he says. “I think about her feelings, what she needs. I want to be here for her, for my daughters and my sons.”
Men need to understand menopause is more than mood swings
When Dave Maher began training women over 40, he saw that no matter what they ate or how much they exercised, they weren’t losing weight.
It was also about hormones and estrogen, things that change drastically during perimenopause and menopause.
“It’s insulting for us to tell midlife women to just eat less and move more,” he says. “Women have been gaslit and lied to and suffered needlessly.”
Woman in menopause prescribed antidepressants in medical blunder
Leslie Ann McDonald knew something was wrong when she started skipping workouts and sleeping after school drop-offs.
unbranded – Newsworthy
Perimenopause and menopause treatment is about health and longevity, not simply feeling better. It’s about decreasing risks for Alzheimer’s and heart disease, about building strength to stay out of an assisted living facility. It’s about the quality of the last third of a woman’s life. As Maher learned more, his business shifted to helping women better understand and get treatment – from hormone therapy to nutrition – in midlife.
“Men need to understand it’s not just mood swings,” says Maher, 41. “It’s the collapse of estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. Women need this to be healthy – for their hearts, their brains. Men need to wake up. This affects their wives, sisters, and daughters.”
She was prescribed antidepressants But this mom was in menopause and needed another drug.
Becoming a better man
In some ways, Schaer’s wife’s perimenopause helped him better understand himself. And, he hopes it is making him a better husband.
“My generation of men was taught, ‘Bro, work hard. Come home. Try to make your kid’s sports games if you can’ and you’re golden,” he said. “But that’s not enough.”
In his role as a marriage coach, he sees women who want their husbands to change, to evolve. And men who often still want to come home to “the girl they married.”
(Even if she’s 48.)
Schaer wants to help them learn what he has, in many ways the hard way over decades. That the act of giving love is what makes you better, it’s what isn’t just for your partner, it’s also what changes you.
“You are going to step up and learn to love in ways you didn’t know you could,” he says. “I love my wife more today than when I met her. I have learned that the love we have has been refined.”
Every time Schaer learns a new symptom, behavior or health issue with menopause, the same thing always happens. He musters just enough courage. He gets in the pain with Denette.
And when he does, on the other side of that love, there’s just more love.
Laura Trujillo is a national columnist focusing on health and wellness. She is the author of “Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter’s Search for Truth and Renewal,” and can be reached at ltrujillo@usatoday.com.
