Midlife Mastery Journal

What’s happening to your husband is the midlife transition, including the decrease in male hormones called andropause. He’s experiencing physical changes that nobody’s told him about, and that he probably doesn’t believe even exist. His irritability levels are increasing while his libido is dropping.

Talk about taking a bounce back into a less mature and less stable period of your life! There’s the bad news: just because you’ve reached some stability and serenity doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always going to keep it.

I think that you and I can learn some serious lessons about how not to manage a midlife transition by observing carefully the scenario playing itself out on the world’s stage.

I’m going to get philosophical here, and I think this point is vitally important: even though we can now identify a biochemical basis for the midlife transition, we must be extremely careful not to fall into a reductionist mode of thinking. We’ll do ourselves real damage if we think we can go off and find a ‘cure’ for male menopause, like hormone replacement therapy.

Midlife presents you with an invaluable opportunity to focus on those things that you decide are most important to you. As you enter the midlife transition, it’s more important than ever to have a really clear idea of exactly what those things are.