Tina, a 33-year-old techie from San Francisco, Tina is currently experiencing artificial menopause, a byproduct of a complete double cystectomy as part of treatment for her stage 3/4 endometriosis. The changes she’s experienced around her sex life aren’t bad, but different.
“I was always the higher sex drive partner and now I feel like my partner and I match more similarly — which has honestly been a plus,” she says. While she now needs more lube than before, Tina reports she’s seen “no change in ability to have or frequency of orgasms.”
While some people find the physical and sexual changes unbearable on their own, in a lot of cases, menopause can lead to temporary mood shifts caused by fluctuating hormones and in some cases, worsening of pre-existing mental health issues like depression.
“When you’re going through menopause, many times, you aren’t ready to face some of these changes and it can feel like your body is breaking up with you,” Dr. Ferdinand says. And as women, we are often conditioned to push through the discomfort and dark times.
“My perimenopausal depression started when I was 42,” says Alle, a novelist living in Seattle. “It made me feel useless around the house, which resulted in a great deal of stress on my husband. By 46, I was yelling constantly at him — in front of our children — and several times, I came way too close to hitting them.”
Having sought professional mental health treatment and “every other remedy I could find,” Alle’s doctor finally recommended she opt in for surgical menopause, AKA a hysterectomy AKA removal of the uterus, to cut short her symptoms — an “insta-pause” as Alle calls it. She says she found instant relief after the surgery, becoming, in her words, more “functional.” She started to rebuild a romantic life with her husband.
All this is to say, there is no one “normal” way to experience sex after menopause. Your libido may completely plummet, increase 10 fold, or stay about the same. But there are plenty of ways to define what pleasure and sex looks like, regardless of what your body is going through.
Communicate your needs to your partner and sit with whatever discomfort may come up, physical or otherwise. Try expanding your understanding of the word “sex.” Maybe it doesn’t include vaginal penetration — or any type of penetration — anymore. It can simply involve intimate acts, like hugging, kissing, cuddles, and sensual back rubs.