We Built a Side Door. It's for Them.

Sofrena is By Women, For Women. It says so on the homepage, in a typeface we argued about for two days, and we meant both the words and the typeface. So when we tell you we're adding a section for people who are not in menopause in any way, please understand that we argued about that too. Properly. With positions, and a whiteboard, and at one point a flip chart. A chart that was flipped off the stand and onto the floor. Story for another time.

Then the universe started sending people. Not in a group; that would have been too obvious. One at a time. Friends of ours, husbands and partners of women going through menopause, each arriving at the end of some other conversation with the tone of a man asking for directions in a town he's lived in for twenty years or more. (You can laugh. A man asking for directions. And yes, pigs do fly.) But in this case they were asking for direction, insight, and help. And each of them, independently, without conferring, said some version of the same thing: She's not sleeping. She's not herself. I want to help. I have no clue what I did, but it must have been bad. I have absolutely no idea what to do.

After twenty-some-odd of them, you stop calling it a coincidence and start calling it a survey.

I had already written a post here called I Love You. I Want to Help. I Have Absolutely No Idea What to Do. I thought it was a joke about the men, and maybe a little humor for a stressful situation. It turned out it was the men, verbatim. And underneath the joke was a second one, quieter and more sincere: they would like to stay alive, and not be exited from the house, or from life generally, by asking the wrong question at the wrong time. That's a reasonable goal. It felt unkind to keep it behind a locked door.

So the argument became a discussion with these others (men and women outside menopause land), and the discussion became a side door.

Them, for our purposes, means anyone not currently in menopause but attached to someone who is, and who would prefer not to be exited from the relationship by a single poorly timed question. That's the whole eligibility requirement. It's on the door. It's also the password to a place of curious understanding.

Here is the part we found fascinating, and then found ourselves saying out loud: the women, by and large, did not want them around for it. Most were ready to exit their partnerships, marriages, and families and go commune with the silverback gorillas in Uganda.

Not because the men or partners were doing anything wrong, exactly. In some cases they were entirely wrong, and that exists too. But mostly because menopause is already a full-time occupation, and the last thing a woman in the middle of it wants is a second person in the room who needs briefing. She's still figuring it out herself. She does not want to become the menopause instructor. She wants to go through the thing without also narrating it. So he stands in the doorway, meaning well, and she wishes he'd go do something else, and neither of them can say so, and that is the whole situation in most of the houses we know.

So the side door is for men first, because they knocked. But it doesn't check ID. If you are a partner of any description, a grown child, a sister who is inexplicably still ten years behind, or a very close friend who has been on the receiving end of a text that just said no, you're one of Them. Come in.

Introducing Man-o-Pause. No, not that one.

We should clear this up immediately, because the internet is a crowded place. Man-o-Pause is not about men's hormones. If you arrived here looking for information about testosterone, you took a wrong turn at a very large pharmaceutical billboard, and we wish you well.

Man-o-Pause is the first thing behind the side door, and it's for the men who love women going through menopause. It is not a manual for handling her. There is no handling. She is not a situation. She is a person whose sleep, temperature, mood, memory, body, and sense of herself may be doing several things at once, some of them contradictory, most of them without warning, and you are in the room while it happens.

Or, more accurately, you are in the doorway, and she would like you to pick a side of it.

You don't need to fix her. You could probably use a map. And the map should be somewhere other than her.

Who's drawing the map

We're starting with one thing, not a whole wing. The one thing is Chris DiMarco.

Chris is not going to explain menopause to anyone. We have clinicians and roughly half the population for that. What Chris does is create space for the person standing beside her: how to listen, how to ask instead of assume, what to do with your own reaction when the woman you've been married to for years wakes up at three in the morning furious at the ceiling fan, and how to tell the difference between supporting her and quietly relocating to the garage. Sometimes the garage is the support. That's the kind of thing he's for.

He'll be posting here regularly. The first pieces cover things like:

Ask before you fix. "Do you want me to listen, help, or leave you alone?" is one sentence and prevents an estimated forty-seven arguments. We did not audit the number. It feels right.

"Leave you alone" is a real answer. It is not rejection. It is not a test. It is not code. It is information, and the correct response is to leave, warmly, and come back later without a report.

Not everything is menopause. If she's angry because you did something, "is this your hormones?" is not a question. It is a decision, and you have made a poor one.

Sex changed. Now what. This is not a how-do-I-get-my-sex-life-back conversation. Nobody's sex life is a lost luggage claim. This is bodies, desire, pain, affection, and the alarming discovery that you may have to talk about it.

Don't hand her your feelings to carry. You're allowed to have them. Something is changing in your house, and you live there. But she is not the customer service desk for your reaction to her menopause. That is, in fact, why this page exists.

You're allowed to ask questions. Just not all of them, and not all of them to her. Curiosity beats eggshells. Eggshells have never once improved a marriage.

What is not changing

The women's conversations stay women-only. Some things belong exclusively to women, and they will keep belonging there. Nobody is going to discuss vaginal dryness while wondering whether somebody's husband is three chairs over pretending to read a pamphlet.

What we're doing is making room for the people who love us, without taking the room away from women. That isn't a change to By Women, For Women. It's what the second half of the sentence was for.

When you're both in it

Not every household has one well-meaning person in the doorway. Some have two women in it, which means the thermostat is a two-front war and nobody gets to be the calm one. Janine and I know that particular arrangement from the inside. That's not a side-door situation. That's a different room, and we're building it too.

What to do with this post

If you are a woman reading this: you don't have to forward it. You don't have to want anyone around for this. You are allowed to want the kitchen to yourself. But if someone keeps asking what they can do, this is now an answer, and it is not you.

If you are one of Them: welcome. This is the room. Read what's here before you say anything at home. Then, and this part matters, do not go back and report on what you learned as though you've completed a certification. Ask her what she needs. If the answer is "nothing right now," believe her. That's not a door closing. That's her telling you where the door is.

Stop guessing what she needs. Start asking. And then, sometimes, go stand somewhere else.

Visit the For Them page