Anxiety is a big passion-killer, and the middle years can produce a whole range of anxieties – problems with your children, worries about your ageing parents, suspicions that your husband might be interested in another woman, or even that he might have a heart attack during love-making. Any one of these would be enough to make you feel like saying, ‘Not tonight, dear, I’ve got a headache’.
Depression can reduce both men’s and women’s levels of desire to absolute zero. If your depression is directly related to the fall in your level of oestrogen, then there is a good chance that HRT can make you feel your old self again. It’s therefore very important, if you see your GP about feeling depressed, that you also tell him about your other menopausal symptoms, so that he can link the depression to the menopause. If you don’t, he may simply prescribe antidepressants, and if your problem is caused by a drop in oestrogen, then anti-depressants will do nothing at all to tackle the underlying problem, and may just make you feel very much worse.
Stress and tension are common during the middle years, and can be made worse if you and your husband find it hard to communicate with each other. Women have conflicting roles at this time. Perhaps you are trying to reconcile the problems of being, simultaneously, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a daughter and perhaps even a mistress. Each role makes quite different demands on you. Your mother may have perfected the art of ‘putting you down’, and making you feel still a child. Your grandchildren, on the other hand, probably think you are very, very old!
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