The Hot Topic

by Christa D'Souza

  ‘People have this idea that hormones cause behaviour, and that may be true,’ says Dr Julie Holland, a former head of the emergency department at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, ‘but just as often environment and behaviour will actually trigger hormones. It may be that our husbands and partners aren’t doing that for us. Say you start working out with a cute personal trainer, you’re like, oh my God! I’m aroused! Well, his hormones are triggering your testosterone… which is why I tell my patients, even though you aren’t feeling horny, go ahead and start having sex. Sometimes, even though you don’t think you are in the mood, once you get going, things change.’

  Or as the French poet Rabelais once said, ‘L’appétit vient en mangeant…’* I confess, though, that as I write this, I can feel a slight slump in the shoulders. This burden society puts on us older folk to bonk like 20-year-olds, is that the price we pay for living longer? My standard answer when a mere acquaintance wants to know about my sex life is: ‘We’ve managed to limit it to once a day, thanks for asking,’ which usually shuts them up.

  But what gave them the right to ask in the first place? In a way, I wish it was like it was in the days of The Lucille Ball Show, i.e. when it was normal for couples with kids in their late teens to have separate beds; when it was okay for our sex lives, or the lack of them, to remain private. There has to be a reason, after all, why children retch at the idea of their parents having sex. So why do we find it so hard to admit not just to our friends but also to our doctors that that part of the relationship disappeared years ago?

  ‘I was shocked when I went back to my doctor after being prescribed HRT and straight off, he asked me about my sex life, and wasn’t it amazing how testosterone made orgasms so much deeper and quicker,’ says Kate. ‘And I had to tell him that my husband, whom I adored, and I hadn’t had sex for years.

  ‘When he then said why didn’t I take a lover, like so very many of his other clients had, I was confused and a little offended. Should I – when I’d sort of put all that to bed, and was fine with it?’

  This testimony struck a chord with me, on the testosterone. To have that level of desire when it is not necessarily directed at the person it is supposed to be directed towards didn’t feel right. Somehow it just didn’t seem fair, in my longstanding domestic situation, chemically destabilising the playing field, being in that permanent state of disconnect, and so, somewhat regretfully, after a month, I took myself off it.

  When I hear stories from friends about the marvellous clandestine sex lives they are having, the stolen snogs in dark alleys, the filthy whatsapp conversations, the cinq à sept sessions in Premier Inns, yes, of course I feel a stab of something. Friends for whom sex has remained pivotal to the relationship, they stick in my craw, too. They stick in my craw because, yes, I do feel guilty at not having worked harder at the physical side of things, of so willingly taking the path of least resistance, of falling into the nice comfy trap of treating my partner like my sibling; of conflating intimacy, in a word, with familiarity. Perhaps, at this point, I should issue a clarion call to all you out there who still feel a teeny tiny iota of desire for your other halves. Keep that bathroom door closed! Have the dumb date nights! Role-play away! Because, like they say, once it has gone, it is almost impossible to get back.

  On the other hand, it’s kind of nice knowing that the hurly-burly of the chaise longue is history, that there is one thing less to think about as I go about my day. That I get out of bed in the morning and take pride in getting dressed not because my amygdala vainly hopes its carrier might still mate but just… because.

  ‘I’d been menopausal for a year when I went to this very glamorous doctor in Cadogan Gardens who put me on HRT, including testosterone gel,’ says Sarah. ‘Within a week of being prescribed it, though, I had to come off it. It started reviving those feelings of sexual need which, after a year of not having them suddenly no longer felt appropriate. It felt inelegant, not mature. Within days I experienced this sort of bodily awareness, the edges of myself tingling, and I thought, do I like this? Is this right? And, in truth, being “unchained from the beast” was a weird kind of liberation. It’s a small death, the menopause, and I’m still partially grieving, but if I don’t feel authentic, I can’t operate. And if my marriage of a quarter of a century cannot weather this, my way of thinking was, then what did that say? It was a big negotiation with my other half, but I had made a decision that I didn’t want to live playing that game any more, that I had to go out and look for the silver-lining stuff. Yes, nature had been phenomenally cruel, but I had faith in nature and was sure there would be something else.’

  My wise mother, who actively chose the single life after the breakdown of her last marriage and has flourished ever since, agrees. ‘In these last 10 years I have felt quite unencumbered and free to do what I do,’ she says. ‘It’s like giving up drinking or smoking – you don’t have to think of taking your cigarettes or lighter with you, you don’t have to worry about taking the car. Life becomes easier, simpler, not being in that game any more. But that is not to say you opt out completely. You are still in the game; it is just that it is a different game. I’m still competitive, maybe even more so, and let me tell you my main battles, if I have them, are more often than not with other women – the sisterhood is not the sisterhood when it comes to careers. But after years of it you do build up experience in dealing with these things – if you don’t then you’d have to be pretty daft. There’s also the notion that if it goes wrong, it doesn’t matter and there’s a kind of confidence in that…’

  ‘There’s a strange bullishness that takes over,’ says Pippa, another 50-something friend. ‘I always worried while in the thick of bringing up my children that I had peaked at 21 and it was downhill all the way, careerwise. I had become progressively less ambitious as my twenties, thirties and even forties passed. But now I can feel a little flame reigniting, almost in spite of myself. Having done years of mashed veg, and traipsing to the local swings, it’s suddenly all about you, you as an island, self-sufficient in a way you haven’t been for years – staying with your partner ideally because you love them, and enjoy them, but not because you need a hunter-gatherer to keep you in H & M children’s clothes or to help heat the house any more.’

  ‘That year when every scrap of oestrogen had left my body was definitely the year I discovered ambition,’ says Sarah. ‘That was when all that focus on being attractive and being in a sexual relationship shifted and I suddenly started fantasising about leadership and running companies. Which is not to say I lived like a housewife before, just that I’d never really been what you’d call pushy. And yet here I was thinking, fuck it, this is what is driving me now.’

  * ‘Appetite comes with eating…’

  8

  MENOPAUSE AND MARRIAGE

  ‘There is no more creative force in the world than a menopausal woman with zest.’ So said the anthropologist Margaret Mead. ‘PMZ’, as a features writer recently dubbed it, although it could also be called PMD when you look at the latest divorce statistics.

  I’d always thought it was the men who did the walking at midlife and beyond. That is what they do, don’t they: trade us in for younger models, ideally going for someone with the same name so they don’t have to repaint the boat’s transom, and all?

  Not necessarily. According to a landmark study conducted by AARP magazine, statistically it is us who are more likely to want out once the kids have left the nest, 66 per cent of us, in fact, leaving our poor menfolk walking around in a daze not knowing quite what hit them.* Post-divorce, it is also women who are more likely to appreciate their newfound freedom – men tend to report feeling better off after a divorce only when they have remarried. Not so much ‘Dad, stop being so mean to Mum’ then, as much as ‘Mum, stop being so mean to Dad.’

  Look, I’m not saying some men can’t be shits. The long-suffering, selfless wife who gets dumped by her sub-standard husband after 20 years of marriage is hardly a niche demographic. But we can
be pretty darn brutal too. And for every woman who descends into apologetic despair at this time of her life – maybe it’s not the menopause, maybe it’s just me?; for every woman who doesn’t think she’s worth a bikini wax any more, who can’t see the point in fixing the increasingly hillbilly teeth; for every woman who somehow believes because she has let herself go she doesn’t deserve any better, there’s another who feels that, actually, after years of dutifully putting supper on the table every single night and having sex with someone who now frankly repulses her, she damn well does deserve better. (The late-blooming lesbian: now that’s another demographic, right there.)

  The ancient Greeks had a whole philosophy about the menopause. When women reached 40, they were perceived to become drier, with the absence of blood, and (weirdly, given the hot flushes) colder. Because some women grew facial hair and their voices deepened around this age, the belief was that their physiology was becoming more male (and as we know, ancient Greeks always considered men’s bodies to be far superior to women’s anyway).

  The question is, do we become more like men, once all the mummy hormones dribble away? Or do we become our true selves, the way God meant us to be, unchained from that wheel of reproduction and child-rearing?

  It can certainly feel like that, for some of us. And according to American psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, MD, it has everything to do with our hormones. There’s a biological equilibrium that we simply didn’t have when we were menstruating, she explains in her book The Female Brain, what with our oestrogen and progesterone levels peaking and ebbing, depending on the time of the month – and if you took an MRI scan of a menopausal woman’s brain you’d see the difference.

  When those hormones are roller-coastering, she argues, the circuits between the amygdala (the bit of our brain associated with survival instincts, memory and emotions such as fear and sadness) and the pre-frontal cortex (the bit that regulates our behaviour and is most associated with abstract thought and making decisions) are constantly being over-amped. When those hormones dwindle, those circuits stop spiking and start running more consistently. That doesn’t mean we become unfeeling automatons; it just means we can trust ourselves a bit more, knowing our realities aren’t going to be drastically altered the way they so often were at certain times of the month. We don’t think the end of the world is nigh just before we bleed.

  Meanwhile, the decline in oestrogen causes our bodies to produce less oxytocin. And consequently, that urge to people-please the hell out of every situation, to avoid conflict at any cost, to ‘want to help people and serve people and cut up their sandwiches into ever-tinier squares,’ as the comedienne Sandra Loh Tsing put it in her cult menopausal memoir The Mad Woman in The Volvo, becomes radically less pronounced. It’s as if nature is saying, if we can’t have any more children, what is the point of instincts maternal or, for that matter, uxorial? What’s the point of perpetually caving in and being so nice?

  ‘You look at your husband and you think: it’s my turn,’ says a 55-year-old musician friend of mine, married with two grown-up children. ‘For 25 years I’ve put your shirts in the washing machine, listened to you talking about your work and cooked you dinner. I worked out I’ve probably peeled and chopped 10,000 onions in the years we’ve spent together. That’s an awful lot of onions.’

  ‘I think way too little is said about the connection between hormones and nurturing,’ she adds via email. ‘The same hormones that keep you making spaghetti for your children’s supper for two decades and driving bags full of tennis rackets back and forth – after the menopause, they switch off. This more or less coincides with your children heading off to university, which leaves just you and your husband alone in the house together. The last time you had this much time together, you were horny as anything and eager to soothe his troubled brow.

  ‘But it’s a different story now the oestrogen is wearing thin: the desire to look after him, to cook and take care of things, let alone do it – it just evaporates. No wonder you’re ready for a gap year. Or, more likely, a gap rest-of-your-life.’

  So yes, we become, dare it be said, more like men.

  Although, is that right? What about that woman who decides to take the ‘gap-life’? As the AARP study revealed, 75 per cent of women who took the plunge enjoyed ‘a serious, exclusive relationship after their divorce – often within two years.’

  That’s really heartening news, when one thinks of the husbands parading around their shiny new wives (or, indeed, yet another demographic here, their shiny new husbands), expecting their friends, their exes, their kids, to fall in as if nothing had happened. I know a few couples who fell madly in love with each other in their late fifties and sixties, and it is very encouraging, seeing them with this new lease of life, flirting with each other as if they were teens. Maybe menopause is precisely the time to bolt. Hell, maybe it should be compulsory.

  But what about the woman who does just that and then realises she’s made a terrible mistake? No study has been done on that particular demographic, not yet anyway, but surely there’s a play, a short story – okay, a 1200-word feature – to be written about the woman who wakes up one morning in her two-up two-down in Shepherds Bush (as opposed to the rambling family home in Chelsea) next to the semi-professional karate instructor she left her husband and children for, who cannot believe the appalling error she has made?

  ‘It was like a drug. I felt alive. Like a light had been switched on. And I couldn’t see why it was wrong. I looked great, I felt great, I had this amazing tan, I felt I was really living and that I deserved it after 20 years of devoting myself to my kids and my husband. This was my time.’ So speaks my friend Katy, California-based novelist and mother of three boys who, at the age of 49 – hah! Another 49-er! – found herself ready to end it all for a semi-professional tennis player she met while on assignment in Spain.

  ‘What is scary, in retrospect, is how little empathy I had, how little guilt I felt; how, in the throes of peri-menopause, it seemed absolutely what I should I be doing. I remember thinking, this is really working, the kids seem really happy; okay, my husband is a little miserable, but he’s been happy for 20 years so he should just suck it up… I was, like, what else do you want? I’m here it’s all good.

  ‘I had no empathy for anyone, really. For example, there was this friend of mine who had just gotten brutally divorced after her husband met someone else at work. I got that she didn’t like to be rejected, I got that the kids were upset, intellectually I understood the whole companionship thing, but emotionally I couldn’t grab onto it. She was going to be single! She was going to find some cute guy with whom she could go to the movies and see the movies she wanted to see! She was going to be free.’

  And then, she says, she got caught and she was forced to make a decision.

  ‘A friend sent me to a therapist and I told her I might be on the verge of ruining my life, but I still didn’t get it. I’d nod my head as she talked about intimacy and sharing and a deeper kind of love, and then the moment I walked out I’d be texting him. It really was like a fix, like I’d been chemically taken over. But eventually I quit him, I still don’t quite know how.’

  Katy, now 53, is as immaculately turned out as ever in eau de nil cashmere and tracksuit bottoms, her earlobes and wrists discreetly glistening with diamonds. If you want to know what still-sexy-in-your-fifties looks like, Katy would be it. Four years on, after some serious rebuilding on her part, she is still with her husband and profoundly grateful for the way things turned out. Yes, she is now on hormones – a mixture of progesterone and DHEA (which promotes testosterone) – which she describes as ‘helping things along… we still have sex – in fact we did it in the bathroom this morning. It’s very different from “affair” sex – sometimes you come, sometimes you don’t – but it always feels good.’

  Regrets, though, does she have a few? ‘I think it infuriates my husband I’m not more remorseful,’ she says with a wry smile, ‘but I can’t erase it, I can’t pretend
it didn’t happen. There will always be a part of me that rebels against the fact of monogamy and the notion that marriage ends a certain kind of ownership of our bodies and adventures.’

  Katy is deeply grateful to the friend who recommended the therapist and knows for sure that it would have been a terrible idea to run off into the sunset with her lover ‘who was, in retrospect, a pretty second-rate person.

  ‘I look at it now as a choice between having almost everything – a wonderful, secure home and family, happy children, companionship and shared values and the joy of sharing books, music, friendships, extended family and history – but saying goodbye to the intoxication of selfish, self-reflective fantasy sex and the bubble of pure freedom.

  ‘For some reason when I was in it that choice seemed possible and if I had acted on it my life would have been a very diminished, very self-oriented and ultimately, I think, very sad life… but that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss the moments of bliss. In the clutches of hormonal shifts and changes, the world looks a very different place and love and empathy get really wiped out – it is incredibly easy to make terrible mistakes.’

  * Study conducted in 2004, based on surveys with 1147 men and women between the ages of 40 and 79 who had gone through divorce in their forties, fifties and sixties. (http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/general/divorce.pdf)

  9

  SOME THINKING ABOUT DRINKING

  For many women, around the time they hit menopause, their tolerance for alcohol decreases. You hear it all the time. My one pleasure left in the world, a friend will moan, and I can’t even enjoy that any more! Well, lucky them. Because my tolerance seemed to go up. And with HRT, unlike for a lot of women I know, it didn’t abate. Where two glasses of wine used to be perfectly sufficient for an evening, now it was more like half a bottle, and quite often more.