Midlife, Perimenopause & Menopause
Explore the changes in your body, relationships, sexuality, identity, and what comes next
Orcas and humans have comparably long menopause phases.
Menopause Is More Than a Medical Transition
The story that we decline with age is a cultural myth.
Perimenopause and menopause are physiological transitions, but they are also experiences that can touch nearly every dimension of a person's life. Changes in hormones and the body can intersect with sexuality, relationships, identity, work, desire, and the stories we've inherited about what women are supposed to be as they age.
Contemporary thinkers such as Dr. Sharon Blackie and Dr. Mindy Pelz are contributing to a growing conversation about how we understand women's experience in midlife and beyond. Rather than treating this season of life simply as something to manage or endure, I see it as a potential opening: a time when old patterns and expectations can become visible and when we may have an opportunity to ask more honestly what we want, who we are becoming, and how we want to live.
This season of life can be one of the most potent entry points into the transformation work I do.
When Menopause Changes a Relationship
Perimenopause and menopause don't necessarily cause relationship problems. But they can make existing patterns harder to ignore. Changes in desire, sexuality, sleep, mood, energy, body image, or the ways partners relate to one another can expose assumptions that once went unquestioned.
You may find yourself wanting something different. Your relationship may feel different. Your partner may not understand what is happening, or you may not have words for it yourself.
This can be a difficult time—and it can also be an invitation to renegotiate how you love, communicate, desire, and move through the world together.
What Happens to Desire?
It’s easy to assume that menopause inevitably diminishes women’s sexual desire. Sometimes it does. But just as often, desire can change in unexpected ways, including increasing.
And libido isn't the whole story. Desire is shaped by the conditions and contexts that allow us to feel safe, present, curious, and turned on. As we become more able to sense who we really are and what we actually want, we may develop a new kind of clarity about sexual connection and intimacy, too.
For many women, this can be a powerful time to examine the cultural messages we've absorbed about sex and worthiness—the idea that we should please our partners, be desirable, perform sexuality in a particular way, or put someone else's pleasure ahead of our own.
Many women need considerably more time and context to become fully aroused than they have traditionally been given. If we've been socialized to focus on pleasing a partner rather than noticing our own experience, we may have spent years having sex without ever having the opportunity to discover what genuinely turns us on.
Midlife can offer an opening to change that. With greater self-awareness and discernment, we can begin to separate what we actually desire from what we've been taught to desire—and become more curious about what our bodies are capable of experiencing and enjoying.
This isn't simply about getting libido back. It can be about discovering desire more fully for the first time.
Your Body is Changing. So Are You.
Menopause can make the body feel suddenly unfamiliar. Rather than treating the body as a problem to solve, we can become curious about what it is communicating and what kind of relationship you want to have with it now.
What If You're Not Who You Used to Be?
According to preeminent neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Mosconi, our brains change in the transitions from perimenopause to menopause in ways that allow old ways to fall away and new ways to be generated. The drop in estrogen (and HRT does not fully replace pre-transition levels) reduces the bilateralism of the hemispheres of the brain, allowing us to focus more exclusively on ourselves and what we actually want rather than defaulting to the effects of bilateral processing, which tends to (along with our socialization) cause us to think about others as much as about ourselves. Far frm making us more selfish, this shift actually allows us to decipher who we really are and what we actually want... and often, that means we can be more authentically selfLESS, offering to the world what is ours to give.