I recently attended an event at the University of Toronto called “Midlife, Myth-Free: Empowering Truths about Menopause & Perimenopause” featuring Dr. Sheila Wijayasingha of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. She is the medical director of primary care outreach at Women’s College Hospital and a leading voice on midlife women’s health.
What an eye-opener.
Every year, thousands of marriages unravel in law offices and courtrooms, with husbands making the same complaints:
We just don’t get along anymore
She’s always angry
I can’t do anything right
She’s always irritable
I can’t deal with her chronic anxiety
She’s emotionally distant
She’s foggy and forgetful
Her libido has disappeared and we haven’t had sex in ages
She just doesn’t seem like herself anymore, etc.
In response, the wife reports that she feels misunderstood, unappreciated and rejected.
They both feel their marriage has broken down and is irretrievable.
We lawyers often use the language “irreconcilable differences” in court documents when asking for a divorce decree.
But is the marriage really over because of irreconcilable differences?
This university lecture shined a light on why I have been so busy as a divorce lawyer and mediator/arbitrator all these years. Women, their husbands, their doctors and their therapists have all missed the signs. But times are changing. We now have a growing body of medical understanding of perimenopause and menopause. The medical evidence is revealing a hidden and unknown truth: the symptoms of perimenopause mirror, almost point for point, the very complaints that drive couples into my office and ask for a divorce.
Put another way, an untold number of relationships are ending over a medical condition that is treatable, manageable, and profoundly misunderstood.
Most people, including most physicians until recently, thought of menopause as simply hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness. Dr. Wijayasingha explained to the audience that there are 30 to 40 symptoms associated with perimenopause and menopause that link dramatic behavioural changes to a woman’s biochemistry. Estrogen receptors exist throughout the entire body, in the brain, the heart, the joints, the bladder and the skin. When estrogen levels begin their fluctuation during perimenopause, the effects ripple through virtually every part of her system.
Clinically, this is all based on hormonal changes. But the lived reality for couples and families is very different. It affects the woman’s mood, it tears relationships apart and it ends marriages.
Dr. Wijayasingha had heard – in her clinic – the very same complaints that I have heard for over 30 years in my law office:
- Mood changes
- Anxiety
- Withdrawal
- Brain fog
- Emotional volatility
- Irritability
- No sex
When presented to a divorce lawyer, this list reads as a breakdown of marriage. When presented to a perimenopause-literate physician, it reads as a textbook case of hormonal transition requiring medical support.
Unlike adultery, violence or financial abuse, perimenopause doesn’t announce itself. It arrives gradually, often beginning in a woman’s late 30s or early 40s. Dr. Wijayasingha cites the average age of menopause in Canada is 51, and that perimenopause can begin at 35, or even earlier. The transition lasts, on average, 4 years, but for many women, it stretches to 7-10 years. That means a woman may spend the latter part of her marriage experiencing symptoms she doesn’t recognize as hormonal, in a marriage where her partner has no clue what is happening to her and in a healthcare system that, until recently, was poorly equipped to help.
The healthcare problem runs deep. As Dr. Wijayasingha pointed out candidly, only 7% of health research funding in Canada is directed toward women’s health and menopause represents a small fraction of that. The result is that generations of physicians were trained either to dismiss these symptoms or to attribute them to stress, aging, depression, or relationship dissatisfaction. Even worse, women are told to have a glass of wine and relax. They are routinely sent home with anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills.
Is it any surprise, then, that so many women never connect their emotional and physical deterioration to hormones? And if the wife doesn’t know, and her husband doesn’t know, and sometimes her doctor doesn’t know – the marriage becomes the default explanation and so what is the solution?
Divorce.
Lawyers are retained. Financial disclosure is exchanged. They attend mediation or court. The legal paperwork is completed. The matrimonial home is sold. A parenting schedule is established. The family is restructured. The lawyer’s file is closed.
The University of Toronto lecture made clear that we are at the beginning of a significant medical, cultural and public awareness shift. Canada is training more family physicians in menopause care. The Menopause Foundation of Canada offers symptom trackers. Evidence-based treatment options from hormone therapy to vaginal estrogen to lifestyle interventions are more refined and accessible than ever. The stigma is slowly lifting.
But this shift is happening almost exclusively within medical and women’s health circles. It has not yet penetrated the spaces where marriages are made and broken: the wife’s doctor’s office, the couples therapist’s office, the family law firm or the kitchen table conversation at 2 a.m.
Imagine a different world – one where marriage preparation included basic literacy about hormonal transitions across the lifespan. Where couples’ therapists routinely screened for perimenopause when women in their 40s presented with emotional dysregulation, low libido, and sleep disruption. Where husbands and male partners were educated that the woman they love may, for a period of years, experience profound physiological changes that are nobody’s fault and are entirely treatable.
For a Family Mediator/Arbitrator like me, there is something devastating about a marriage ending because a woman’s estrogen levels fell and nobody recognized it in time, about a family divided because the very symptoms that could have been addressed with a simple estrogen patch, a low-dose birth control pill, a magnesium supplement, or a frank conversation with a knowledgeable physician were instead interpreted as evidence of marriage failure.
As Dr. Wijayasingha said: perimenopause is “predictably unpredictable.” Some months, hormone levels are higher. Some months, lower. The symptoms wax and wane. A woman may feel like herself one week and barely recognize herself the next. To a husband watching from outside, this looks like volatility, emotional withdrawal, or indifference. It is none of those things. It is biology.
Anecdotally, before I went to law school, I graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology. Call that a reversal of fate.
If you are a divorce professional, please join us on June 15 DCAO.ca to discuss The Gray Divorce with me and Menopause expert Andrea Donsky, RHN. There are only 40 tickets to purchase at https://dcao.ca/events/film-night-the-first-wives-club/
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