Maybe it’s not your hormones. Maybe you need a divorce.
When everything feels like too much, it’s worth asking what you’re no longer willing to carry
There’s a point in midlife when you start noticing how much noise you’ve been tuning out. You begin to feel everything more acutely… the exhaustion, the irritability, the resentment that builds slowly and then all at once. The natural assumption is that your hormones are responsible. And in part, they are.
The physiological changes that come with perimenopause and menopause can absolutely affect your mood, energy, and patience. But I want to offer another possibility, one that might be harder to say out loud.
What if it isn’t just your hormones? What if it’s your marriage?
I don’t mean this in a careless or dramatic way. I mean it in the way women whisper to one another after long dinners or quiet walks, once the initial conversation gives way to something deeper.
They describe feeling unrecognizable to themselves. Not in a nostalgic or superficial way, but in the sense that they’ve spent years accommodating, smoothing things over, and ignoring their own unmet needs, until their body simply refused to cooperate.
Hormonal changes have a way of turning the volume up. They make it harder to pretend. And what many women begin to see clearly, often for the first time, is the amount of labor they’ve been doing silently, both emotional and logistical, in their relationships.
The short fuse might not be random. It might be the result of years spent swallowing frustrations that never got addressed. The sense of disconnection might not be hormonal. It might be clarity.
I’ve spoken to women who describe this time in their life as destabilizing, but also as the first time they’ve allowed themselves to feel what they actually feel.
They stop minimizing their discomfort. They stop explaining away neglect. And eventually, they stop trying to fix dynamics that were never reciprocal to begin with. It doesn’t always lead to divorce, but it often leads to confrontation, with the truth of what they’ve been carrying and what they’re no longer willing to tolerate.
This is the emotional reckoning of midlife that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. We’re handed endless articles about night sweats and sleep hygiene, but very few people are willing to acknowledge the real cost of living in a dynamic that diminishes you.
And when you’re no longer distracted by the pace of a younger life, when the fog begins to lift, it can become painfully obvious that your life isn’t structured around your well-being, it’s structured around your coping.
I’m not suggesting that a relationship can’t survive this chapter. Many do, and many become stronger because of it. But for others, menopause doesn’t create a crisis, it reveals one.
And if you’ve been mistaking that revelation for a medical issue, I want you to know it’s okay to pause and ask a harder question. Not what’s wrong with you, but what have you outgrown?
Not every feeling needs a prescription. Some deserve a conversation.