Male Menopause and Irritable Male Syndrome: What You Can Do to Help Your Man 

Dear Dr. Diamond,

I am forty-eight and have been married 26 years.  I’m noticing that I am unusually cross and nasty with my wife who I love very much.  It just comes out unexpectedly before I realize it.  Then it is too late.  I feel like apologizing, but somehow I never do.  I can see the hurt in her eyes and I feel terribly guilty.  I don’t understand why I do this.  Can you help me?  John

Although Irritable Male Syndrome and Male Menopause can occur at any age, it is quite prevalent at mid-life. What is it about mid-life that causes men to become angry?  Why do they take it out on the person they say they love the most?   These are the kinds of questions I hear from women who are trying to understand what is going on in their relationship.

In order to understand what is going on with men at mid-life, we have to recognize that mid-life is a difficult time for women as well as men.  In fact, middle age is the worst time of life for most people.  An international study of 2 million people from 80 nations found that men and women in their 40’s were more likely to be depressed and weren’t as happy as other ages.  The researchers found happiness levels followed a U shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives and leaving us most miserable in middle age.

Interestingly, in the U.S. they found a significant difference between men and women with unhappiness reaching a peak at around 40 years of age for women and 50 years of age for men.  I think this is one of the reasons that women are often “blind-sided.”  The unhappiness men feel surfaces at different times than it does for women.  The woman’s happiness has been on the upswing for 10 years and all of a sudden her man tells her he’s unhappy and wants to move out.

The researchers found the same U-shape in happiness levels and life satisfaction for 72 countries from Albania, Argentina, and Australia to Iceland, Iraq, and Ireland, to the United States, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.  When asked what he thought caused this mid-life unhappiness, lead researcher Dr. Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick in England said he wasn’t sure.  “My best conjecture is that people eventually learn to quell their infeasible aspirations,” he says. “They manage to get their expectations into line with what they can actually achieve.”

Many men feel unhappy and, not understanding why, blame their partners.  It can be helpful to know that the mid-life slump in happiness may be affecting everyone and won’t be solved by leaving their wives or finding another partner. “It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans,” says Dr. Oswald.  “For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50’s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20 year old.”

Oswald concludes with hope that if people can understand what is doing on with men and women at mid-life, it might help them get through this stage without wrecking their relationship.  “Perhaps realizing that such feelings are completely normal in midlife might even help individuals survive this phase better.”

I tell men and women that being unhappy doesn’t mean someone is to blame.  Mid-life is like adolescence in that respect.  Remember when we were going through puberty? We could go from very up to very down without anything happening.  It helps to remember that mid-life is just a downer for many of us.  Hang in there and you’ll find life getting sweeter as you get older.

Don’t ever let your man convince you that you are the cause of his unhappiness.  I tell people, “It’s your life, not your wife, that needs to be fixed.”

The real causes of mid-life woes are related to the losses that many men feel and their inability to talk about them, change what can be changed, and accept what we must.  Not all men experience all these losses, but most men experience many of them:

• Hormone levels are dropping.
• Sexual vigor is diminishing.
• Erections are less frequent and less firm.
• The beautiful image we had of our partner when we first fell in love is replaced by one who looks much older and less attractive to us.
• Our own image of youthful vigor and physical prowess has changed to one where we see a “dottery old-man.”
• Children are leaving home.
• We long to follow them, but feel trapped in a life we’re not sure we chose.
• Parents are getting sick and dying..
• Retirement seems less and less possible.
• Friends are having their first heart attacks and cancer scares.
• Hopes and dreams are fading away.

Although mid-life men and women may both be unhappy, men more often express their unhappiness through anger.  Women more often express their unhappiness through sadness.  Men “act out” their pain and often blame those closest to them.  Women “act in” their pain and often feel guilty and blame themselves when things go wrong in the relationship.  Women are more likely to talk about the losses they are experiencing.   Men tend to keep their feelings bottled up.

“How can I get him to open up and talk to me?”  This is one of the most common questions I get from women.  It isn’t easy, I know.  But here’s a simple thing you can do.  Go for a walk.  Over the years, I’ve found that men are more comfortable with “side-side” communication, rather than communicating “face-to-face.”  He’s more likely to open up when you’re walking and you’re not looking into each other’s eyes.

There may be a biological basis for the different ways the sexes deal with their feelings when they are under stress.  We’ve all heard of the stress response in which our bodies prepare us for “fight” or “flight.”  When a wild animal burst into the camp of our hunter-gatherer ancestors they would either fight the intruder or run for their lives.  Until recently we assumed that the way men and women dealt with stress was the same.

But fight or flight is only part of a bigger picture, according to Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., a psychology professor at UCLA.   Taylor and her colleagues found that stress can elicit another behavioral pattern they call “tend and befriend”–especially in females.  Taylor’s team found that, during tough times, stressed females spend significantly more time tending to vulnerable offspring than males.  They also found that women reached out to female friends and relatives more.

Men, particularly, as they age have fewer close friends and have more superficial connections with family than is true for women.  My wife tells me that the best thing I ever did for our marriage was joining a men’s group.  She believes, as do I, that the “befriending” I experience in my men’s group helps keep me from being so angry around my wife.

I’ve also gotten much closer to my adult children as well as our grandchildren.  Life can get lonelier as we age.  Being involved with young people, “tending” them, not only keeps us feeling young, but it gives our lives meaning and purpose.  Often midi-life men who seem mean, are hungry to be of help to others.  We feel mean and ugly when we don’t feel we have anything valuable to contribute.  Being deeply involved with friends and family can be the most important antidote to IMS and male menopause that we have.

You may want to write down your own thoughts.  How do you feel when he blames you for his unhappiness?  What losses has your man experienced?  What losses have you experienced?  As they ask in AA recovery circles, what’s helped you to accept those things that can’t be changed, to change the things that you can change, and the wisdom to know the difference? Please share your comments below.

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