When Arianna began going through menopause in 2020, something inside her shifted. A seventh-generation Mormon, Arianna had been married to her husband for decades and had grown accustomed to keeping the peace at home—dutifully performing the roles of wife, homemaker, and mother to their two kids. But when her body began changing—putting on weight, losing hair—Arianna began to see her life under a new light.
“I was not prepared for how it would literally turn my life upside down,” she says. At 43 years old, Arianna realized that it was she who did the housework, she who sorted out repairs, she who made sure the fridge was always filled. And yet it was her husband who got all the credit, who was regarded as “head” of the home. “I started to really see things for what they were in my life,” Arianna recalls. “I got tired of seeing the inequity.”
With limited energy reserves, Arianna became more “intentional and purposeful” about what she wanted to do and began “setting boundaries that I was never told I had the permission to set before.” (Often, this translated to seemingly simple, but nonetheless earth-shattering, acts of resistance, such as refusing to run endless errands at her husband’s request.) She felt tired, yet intensely alive—consumed by a “raw, primal rage.”
“I don’t have this excessive amount of hormones that allowed me to care and nurture for everyone else,” Arianna says. “Now, it’s the season of caring for myself, and that is absolutely triggering to everybody in your life who’s benefited from you before that.”
The thought of leaving her decades-long marriage was terrifying, but Arianna knew it was the right thing to do, because, she says, it was “the hard thing, which is to step into an unknown.” At the end of 2023, she separated from her husband.
For much of Western modern history, menopause has been regarded as a period of physical and psychological decline. “There’s so much hysteria around menopause being the end of living, and it’s the opposite,” Arianna says. “It’s the start of a completely new chapter of your life.” In a patriarchal society that places so much emphasis on a woman’s reproductive years, “The Change” can be a moment of reckoning.
Menopause is defined as having one year without menstrual bleeding. But perimenopause, the period before menopause is more murky, lasting anywhere from seven to ten years. Around 85 percent of women experience perimenopause symptoms, which include everything from hot flashes to anxiety and depression to UTIs and vaginal dryness, yet it is frequently misdiagnosed.
It took Arianna a year and a half of meeting with various health professionals—an acupuncturist, a nutritionist, two general practice doctors, and a doctor who specializes in women’s hormonal health—before she was finally diagnosed with menopause. “We grow up as women having really no information,” she says, particularly compared with “the amount of resources, support, validation, and concern for men with erectile dysfunction.”
Health issues that impact women are notoriously understudied. There are over five times more studies into erectile dysfunction than there are into premenstrual syndrome, for instance. The lack of knowledge extends well beyond the lab: In 2023, only 33.1 percent of OB/GYN residency program directors had menopause on their curriculum. “It’s still a hangover from the days when it was put forward by men (of course) as something slightly shameful,” says Sharon Blackie, psychologist and author of Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. “We’re only really just beginning to reclaim the story for ourselves.”
Emily*, a 48-year-old professor, spent over two years on a contraceptive pill to regulate her waning periods before her primary care physician (PCP) suggested that she might be going through menopause in 2024. By this time, she had experienced a nauseating array of symptoms, like brain fog, memory loss, and vestibular neuritis (an inner ear disorder that causes vertigo; it “feels like you’re on a roller coaster and you can’t get off,” she says). Emily had started to wonder if she had early onset dementia. Her PCP, however, thought Emily’s symptoms were related to anxiety or depression, and prescribed her Lexapro.
But as her body was thrown into turmoil, Emily began to make some life changes. She broke up with her partner, a “functional alcoholic,” during perimenopause because she realized that she was “the codependent partner where I was trying to fix them and save them.” (She’d previously had suspicions about his relationship to alcohol, but during the pandemic, his behavior spiraled out of control.) Then, last year, her PCP finally tested her hormones, acknowledging that Emily was, in fact, menopausal. She was prescribed hormone replacement therapy: an estradiol patch and progesterone.
“I feel like I suffered unnecessarily for two years,” Emily says. “Why did the word ‘perimenopause’ or ‘menopause’ never come up? This is a provider I’ve had for 20 years.” Receiving inadequate healthcare was infuriating, and yet, once she was finally diagnosed with menopause, Emily was left feeling “happier and more self confident than I ever have been.”
She began taking trips on her own, island hopping around New Zealand, something she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing solo 20 years ago. “I was boy crazy for most of my life,” she says. “It’s incomprehensible to me now—the crazy shit I used to do, [how much men] drove my decision-making when I was still a fertile person… I really don’t care if I ever have sex again.”
Across interviews, women described similar experiences: wading through the murky darkness of misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, before finally reaching clarity—a place of stillness and calm and light. While research is still limited, studies indicate that postmenopausal women may have more emotional control because the amygdala (the part of the brain associated with emotional processing) becomes down-regulated in a selective way.
Menopause “has a very strong function in resetting us,” says Blackie. “We haven’t got the striving that characterizes the first half of life–that desperate need to construct a character, a profession, a relationship.” In fact, many women wake up one day and “being nice is no longer a life goal,” Blackie says. “The whole weight of responsibility that we have for nurturing everybody else is vanishing along with the hormones.”
In 2024, film depictions of 50-something women reinventing their life trajectories with defiant age-gap relationships (Babygirl, The Idea of You, A Family Affair) dominated pop culture. Similarly, in All Fours, Miranda July’s “Great Perimonause Novel,” the unnamed protagonist—a 45-year-old artist—sets up a new life in a motel nearby her family home and rediscovers her sexuality.
It’s worth noting, however, that the real story isn’t always so “sexy,” says Blackie, who urges menstruating people to “consider very carefully their mental state” before making rash decisions. “Wait and see how much of it you can get through until you’re sure that that’s what you want,” she says. “Something has got to be left behind. But it’s not always the first obvious thing that you look at.”
Kate*, a 51-year old paralegal and single mother, found herself decentering men from her life when she began going through perimenopause at 42. At first, Kate thought she had a brain tumor, but when her libido tanked, she figured something else was going on. She had a “super hot gym boyfriend,” but the effort to shower, shave, and put on lingerie all “for 20 minutes of sex” no longer felt worth it.
Through the subreddit r/menopause, Kate realized that she was probably going through menopause. But when she went to her her general practitioner, she says he refused to give her hormone treatment and instead offered her Xanax.
“I’m still pretty mad at the way the medical community and society in general treats women,” Kate says. “They don’t care about us unless we’re pregnant. We’re baby ovens to them.” Kate stopped seeing her gym boyfriend. She thought ahead to the second half of her life and asked herself how she wanted to spend it: “What do I like to do? What does make me happy?” The answer wasn’t men.
Today, Kate lives alone and spends her time focusing on her hobbies: going to the gym six times a week, tending to her plants, and traveling with groups of women she meets online. “It’s like [on] an airplane: You’ve got to put your mask on before you can help other people,” she says. “If I’m not taking care of myself with my health and my fitness and my finances and my job, I can’t help my daughter or anybody else.”
For Arianna, menopause had the opposite effect on her libido: It actually increased. While she isn’t currently dating, she’s enjoying her newfound independence. During her separation from her husband, she spent four months alone in a one-bedroom Airbnb rental, dancing around the place in her underwear. “It was electrifying,” she recalls. “It was like living somebody else’s life for the first time.”
Since then, Arianna has come into her own. A few months after her divorce was finalized, she headed out on a solo trip to Mexico—the first time she has traveled internationally by herself. She’s started connecting with other women through Facebook groups, including a few who share her Mormon background. And Arianna, who now goes to nightclubs alone, dreams of starting a dance club. She even got her first tattoo on her forearm—it reads “free at last.”
Arielle Domb is a journalist and a photographer based in London who investigates health, sex and subculture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, VICE, Vogue, Cosmopolitan and more.
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