SSH and the Middle-Aged Wife

The male midlife crisis is a response

A recent headline in a UK newspaper about how #middle-aged #women tend to be repulsed by their #husbands is interesting because it violated the #feminist #taboo about how everything is always the fault of #men.

I’m at the age now where I’ve been seeing this phenomenon play out in the #marriages of friends, acquaintances, and other age-peers for a few years now. Sometimes it’s surprising, sometimes it’s disappointing, and sometimes people impress you with their unexpected ability to rise to the challenge.

The fact is that to a certain extent, the #hormonal changes of #menopause literally #transform a man’s #wife into a #woman that he doesn’t know, doesn’t like, and didn’t marry. While she’s the same individual in many senses, in chemical terms she’s literally not the same woman who was attracted to him and married him twenty or thirty years ago.

Given how we know that merely being on or off #birth-control affects the sort of men to whom women are attracted, it should not be a surprise when the significant hormonal changes that take place in middle age have a similar effect. And since a woman is usually attracted to the man she marries, it shouldn’t be a surprise when a change in her body’s chemistry has a deleterious effect on... [continue[(sigmagame.substack.com/p/ssh-a…)