Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Liubomyr Vorona
Topics: Health, Life, Sex and Relationships, News
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Health, Life, Sex and Relationships, News
Middle-aged women are ditching their husbands for an unexpected reason.
As of last year, marriage rates were up and divorce numbers were down, CNN reported, but there's a specific type of divorce that's now said to be on the rise.
This is something known as 'menodivorce' and yep, you guessed it, it's linked to women being perimenopausal or going through the menopause.
One woman who experienced this was Melissa McClure, who left her husband of 14 years when she was perimenopausal.
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Per Mayo Clinic, perimenopause is 'the time before menopause when your body is getting ready to stop having periods'.
"We spend our entire adult lives taking care of our husbands or partners and children," Melissa shared with USA Today. "We give so much of ourselves to other people as nurturers that we lose ourselves in the process."
She insisted that leaving her husband 'wasn't a midlife crisis but an awakening'.
According to a UK-based survey conducted by the Family Law Menopause Project and Newsom Health Research and Education, which launched in 2022, seven in 10 women blamed perimenopause or menopause for the breakdown of their marriage.
Another study by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research found that, as of 2019, divorce rates in adults 50 and older accounted for one in four divorces, up from this age bracket making up one in ten divorces in the US in 1990.
The average age a woman reaches menopause in America is 51, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Sameena Rahman, an OB-GYN and sex and menopause specialist, broke down why women are divorcing their husbands when they hit this stage of their lives.
"One of the things I hear about is the irritation they may feel with the person that they've been with for the longest period of time," she told Good Morning America, adding: "Sometimes it's the way they chew or they way the look at them in certain ways."
Dr Rahman continued to tell USA Today: "They might still love their husbands or partners, but they also hate them and no longer can put up with things they had been putting up with."
She said that perimenopausal and menopausal women experience a whole range of symptoms, like a loss of libido, at the same time, life begins to get more stressful, which eventually takes its toll on them.
Backing this theory, Katy Viva, a mom-of-three who left her husband last year, said: "I don’t know if [menopause] caused the divorce. But I will say that menopause made me unwilling to put up with the bullsh*t anymore."
She had been married to her spouse for 24 years.
Katy continued: "Life is too long, not too short. I’ve got time left in me, and I don’t want to spend it with someone that I don’t respect who doesn’t love me."
Experts advise couples to seek additional help, like therapy, to improve communication and support, as well as treatment to help with menopausal symptoms.