In a study in Britain, it was found that over one-quarter of men were unaware of the nature or the extent of their wife’s progress through the climacteric. Most did not even know what the climacteric was, what changes it caused, and that the emotional turmoil experienced by the woman would pass. Many men were unaware that a woman in her climacteric, who is adjusting to her crisis of middle age, needs much more love, understanding, encouragement, and contact than when she was young. For many women this is a time when children have finally left home to form their own relationships and are no longer dependent upon their mother, who may be left with an emptiness in her life, which is not helped by an apparently insensitive man. The couple, for the first time for many years, have to reappraise and understand each other. They have to rediscover the companionship which characterized their early years of marriage and which has vanished.
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