Any woman old enough to be reading this NG was brought up in a world where Nice Girl was the only respectable option, the only way out for those who wanted to "Get a Man" -- e.g., to be allowed to participate in American culture. 

As we reach our 40s and 50s, we begin to realize how much of our energy was taken up in an effort to be Nice, and what it's cost us -- how much self-denial and self-hatred and dishonesty with ourselves and others we've engaged in for all these years. And now that we're beyond the age considered attractive by all those Men we were so desperate to Get, the Nice Girl act doesn't work anymore anyway. 

How much of the irritability, depression, mood swings and general nastiness of the meno years is actually hormonal, and how much is just reaction to the realization that we've spent the first two-thirds of our lives buying a lie? 

Verdant

I think it goes the other direction. I have two friends who are older than I and neither of them had any
symptoms at all. They just stopped having symptoms. So that's what I expected mine to be like. When
this newsgroup started up, I was astonished at what people are willing to subsume under the umbrella
of meno. So I think we are creating our own symptomology, in some sense, that then needs to be
treated.

What symptoms would you doubt are truly menopausal ? 

I don't have any friends who have been symptom free. In some cases they've had mainly physical ones,
in others mostly mental.  In my family ALL of the women had major nervous breakdowns and it made no
difference whether they were leading happy stress-free lives or had external causes for depression. Most
of these women were of my grandmother's generation. They lived through the traumas of both World
Wars, had their houses bombed in the Blitz etc. and took it all on the chin. Then the meno came along
and crash: committal and electric shock therapy. I was sailing along congratulating myself on remaining relatively sane and depression free but suddenly developed commonly reported physical problems. They, in themselves, have affected my state of mind. 

As I see it, we are back to word usage. I prefer to use menopause to refer to the physical changes and
symptoms but "change of life" to refer to the probably far more important psychological effects of
reaching the doorway to the second half of my life. 

Maybe the very fact that we are here discussing every aspect of this time in our lives does mean that we
run the risk of including some symptoms under the meno umbrella which don't really belong there. A
topic like yeast infections comes to mind.  I haven't been here as long as you, but my overall impression
is that most newbies first visit with a physical symptom which is worrying them but often stay because
they realise that there is so much more to this transition than bleeding, hot flushes and nausea. Possibly
it is the fact that we are the generation which had to face up to the challenge of feminism with _all_ of its
implications which is making us think and feel the need to share here. I know my somewhat older
female friends have very little interest in the socio-psychology of it all. 

Joanna

This is confusing though--to many people 'change of life' does mean meno. 

 I haven't been here as long as you, but my overall impression is that  most newbies first visit with a physical symptom which is worrying  them but often stay because they realise that there is so much more to  this transition than bleeding, hot flushes and nausea. 

I guess that this is part of my quibble. For some women, menopause is the first time they really get in
touch with their own wants and needs. That's great. But that doesn't mean getting in touch with your own
needs and feelings is necessarily a meno thing. 

Another one is joint pain. I'm sure there are women who have meno-related joint pain, but mine is due to
aging, I believe, and some other things that I may discuss later. A lot of this is cumulative abuse rather
than meno-specific. (They co-occur temporally, but that's due to chance, IMHO. Or it *can* be. I'm not
saying that it's necessarily so.)

Yes indeed and if I get into discussion I define my terms. 

I guess that this is part of my quibble. For some women, menopause is the first time they really get in touch with their own wants and needs. That's great. But that doesn't mean getting in touch with your own needs and feelings is necessarily a meno thing. 

I agree with you. I can accept that for many women the meno may be the first time they really get into understanding their bodies, especially the endocrine system. I think the wants and needs are more to do with ageing than the actual meno.  I do recall waking up one day in November 1996 after a 21st birthday party at an Oxford College.  I'd been the only guest over 30. I'd been mixing happily with young people a lot both socially and at university (where I was doing a Masters) for a few years since getting divorced. I suddenly had this flash of realisation that I was rather bored with trying to keep up with young interests and caring about my physical appearance quite so much because my dates were younger than me. I knew I needed to embrace the ageing process, see the good in it and cease to fight it. 

Another one is joint pain. I'm sure there are women who have meno-related joint pain, but mine is due to aging, I believe, and some other things that I may discuss later. A lot of this is cumulative abuse rather than meno-specific. (They co-occur temporally, but that's due to chance, IMHO. Or it *can* be. I'm not saying that it's necessarily so.)

I see my joint pains as due to ageing and not meno. I would class conditions due to hormone level changes as meno related and other conditions as age related. The fact that they _may_ coincide depends on many factors. Women who enter peri-meno in their 30s are less likely, I'd have thought, to associate the general changes in an ageing body with the meno. 

Some people have talked about settling in, hunkering down. My life changed dramatically in my early 40's and continues to be in flux. If it goes as I plan, I see a lot more change ahead.

I was in the same situation, divorced when I was 43. My life has been in flux ever since and I cannot see it settling down. I wish it were otherwise as everything in me is screaming out for tranquillity, no decision making and so on. I do think this partly hormonal and partly simply ageing. 

I don't connect any of my changing with meno, really. It has more to do with where I was in my life before, and the options that I had. It wasn't any sudden realization of "Oh my god, this is not the life I wanted!", but more taking advantage of a combination of situations that developed naturally. I don't even think it was a midlife crisis, or if it was, it was one where the crisis part lasted about 2 minutes.

Same here. If a particular combination of circumstances had not occurred when it did, I could have been divorced several years earlier, or could still be married now. It was that event that changed my whole way of life and it had nothing whatever to do with the meno. The only part of it which felt like a crisis was when the bank made a transfer error on the day I moved house! Perhaps the clerk had a hot flush and pressed the wrong key..but it wasn't _my_ hormones!
Joanna

Yes, I've had other things happen in mid-life, but I have the added benefit of dealing with a very large number of different people every day at work, and I can clearly see that many of the things on the list of symptoms are shared by middle-aged men (my husband among them), thus not -truly-menopause symptom.

My husband has night sweats, and started these around the age of 44 or 45.  He'll be 51 this month, and while they've slowed down considerably, he still gets them occasionally, and to a *much* greater degree than I ever have.

Most men are also irritable and have mood swings.  It is not unusual for a normally jovial, friendly man to come in here with a snarl in his voice, and an impatient attitude.  (This often has nothing to do with why he has had to stop by the office, and one or more of them has commented that he's having "a bad day".

Men also have trouble sleeping at night at midlife.  Worries about growing children or business pursuits are mentioned as the culprit.

Loss of libido?  Yes, I've noticed that, but it doesn't bother me (for me), nor do I blame perimenopause.  (Good grief, have you not noticed the number of ads on TV for ED these days?  And if you read up on this at all, you will find that loss of libido is extremely common in men at midlife.)

I've never suffered from dry vagina or painful intercourse.

I've -always-suffered from feelings of dread, etc.  Actually, this has gotten better as my children have grown up, and I have less of a problem than I did, say, 10-15 years ago.

If you think "brain fog" is just a female thing, then you must not be paying attention to any middle-aged men.  They lose their track of thought or grope for a word every bit as often as we do. Same goes for "disturbing memory losses".

Men ache at middle age, too.  My husband has sore joints, aching muscles, etc., as often (if not more so) than I do.

Breast tenderness--I had that.  It was -nothing-compared to the pain one feels after the milk comes in after delivering a baby. It also passed after a few months, and was nothing I couldn't deal with easily.

My husband has had an increase in migraine frequency in middle age.  I don't have any more headaches than I used to.

I've had no extra gastrointestinal distress than I did when I was younger.  In fact, when I was in my early 30s I was diagnosed with IBS, and I suffer far less now than I did then.

I'm not bloated any more than I was when I was younger.

I'm not depressed, I haven't developed allergies, my basic body shape is still the same, and I haven't put on any weight in the past 5 or 6 years.

My hair is not thinning (though my husband's is, for sure), nor are my fingernails brittle.  In fact, my hair and fingernails are wonderful right now--fast growing, strong, healthy--much like they were during my pregnancies.  If this is due to perimenopause, I would certainly -not-take anything to "correct"
it.

I'm not going through any of the other symptoms as I haven't experienced any of them -at all-.  If I have the occasional day when I feel picked on and/or short-tempered, that happens to everybody, and has happened throughout my life.  I don't believe in blaming peri-menopause for every little thing that happens in mid-life, as I think most of it is the normal aging process. I've had "discomforts" during different phases of my life, and have certainly not gone running to the doctor for a presription to fix the discomforts.  They've always just run their course, whether in my 20s, 30s, or 40s (I'll be 48 in July).

I post here because I enjoy some of the people that I've 'met'. It's great to be able to talk to intimate strangers (for lack of a better term) about past history, current problems, etc.,  without worrying that my next door neighbor might be told.  It's also nice to get the perspective of people who were not born and raised in my same little corner of the world.

Marilee