How I feel at the moment is the opposite of flow (and no, that is not a period pun, I wrote the title after I wrote the blog post). I’ve been having a tough time communicating with my friend Lisa lately. It seems that she’s been distant for a little more than a week – ever since I told her that sometimes guys don’t disconnect with their matches on dating apps because they’re lazy – she was hoping to hear that it was because he still liked her that he kept the connection. I’d love to hear that my ex-fiancee, B, still has some semblance of feelings for me, but it doesn’t make it true. I’m frustrated with the way this is playing out. While the conversations were often one-sided, it was still nice to have someone to text with on a semi-regular basis. The frustration makes it so that I can’t seem to focus all that well tonight, and I can feel myself being aggravated and/or impatient.
I had wanted to write a bit this morning – had nearly finished a poem last night and read an article in the morning I wanted to comment on, but my laptop crashed 4 times in an hour. I gave up, exercised, ran, and then after lunch went and bought a new laptop. I spent the rest of the day getting it set up, searching through boxes for USB cables to try to transfer files, etc. etc. But, yay for my first post on the new machine.
I like the new machine so far. It’s a lot smaller and lighter than my last one – I might actually take this one places (coffee shops) to write – though there’s a value to also writing by hand.
The article I read this morning was called “Surviving Perimenopause” It really takes to task the medical community for not doing a better job of helping women understand the hormonal changes taking place in their 40s. It was hard not to read it without thinking of some of my friends and a number of the marriages I’ve seen break up over the past few years. Not that I’m trying to make the argument for men here – we do more than our fair share of stupid things. But, it also seems like we’re in a precarious situation. We don’t want to blame the hormones, yet sometimes, it really is the hormones. All of which plays entirely too conveniently in to the chauvinistic stereotype of irrational women… from the article:
Sometimes my own perimenopausal moods are more rage than anxiety. I woke up the other day and noticed that my husband had placed a couple of champagne corks on top of a picture frame. It made me want to start breaking things. What is this, a goddamned student house? In this state, I noticed things I had missed before: bags spilling out of cupboards, stacks of receipts and change on a table, my son’s stuff everywhere. “It’s like living in Hoarders!” I ranted. If I’d had a pack of matches I could have burned the place down.
The article continues:
“Women need to recognise that it’s a time of vulnerability, and there are some things that they can do to help.”
Dr Pinkerton gave me an example: “A woman came into my office and said, ‘I hate my husband. I hate my marriage. I need to get out of this.’ The husband had called me earlier and said, ‘I’ve noticed that my wife is really having exaggerated responses to things around the time of her periods.’
“We ended up getting her into counselling as well as on to oral contraceptives. The contraceptives calmed the hormones down and then doing some counselling let her start to see some of the stressors that were hidden.
“I saw her recently,” Dr Pinkerton continued, “and she said her marriage could not be better. She recognised that the perimenopausal hormonal fluctuations were making the problems seem incapable of being solved.
It seems pretty messed up that something like that could be so destructive – another thing us men don’t have to deal with. Of course, I also thought of this in the context of my last relationship. From time to time I’m looking for any justification other than “it wasn’t a good fit” or “she didn’t feel the same way.” A quick google search for the link to the article and one of the “suggested subjects” was “perimenopause horror stories” and one of the “people also ask” topics was, “does perimenopause make you feel crazy?” Sometimes I want to reach out with my newly acquired knowledge – “hey, maybe it was this?” I always feel like patience should win out in these things.
As I was moving files from one computer to the other I came across some screenshots of texts with D, a woman I used to date. She was asking me if I could see spending the rest of my life with her and telling me it’s easy to dream of a future with me. At one point she said she’ll frustrate me and I replied, of course you will, and I’ll frustrate you – it comes with the territory. I know I carried that attitude in to my other relationships. I may get carried away about the other person, but I’m a realist who fully buys in to the “I love you despite…” philosophy.
I’m a little bummed that I lost most of my day to swapping computers and bickering with Lisa. Tomorrow will be better.