I’ve already written about perimenopause before, and that was all good and well, but a year later, as a proud ADHDer and mid (but pleeeeaaassse, almost toward the end) peri experiencer, and person in love…there is so much more to say.
It doesn’t arrive gently. It doesn’t tap you on the shoulder and say, “hey, things might feel a little different for a while.” It’s much more of a full-body takeover, zombie shit going down, Night of the Living Dead, apocalypse energy, and whatever that one was with Sigourney Weaver that was scary as shit.
And what I know is, it is all for good reason, but gee whizz what a freaking rollercoaster ride that often feels like the perfect time to blow up your decades-long relationship as it occurs.
Don’t get me wrong, some of them need blowing up, some need restructuring and some, bless them, maybe perfect as they are.
I want for all you folks to know as much as you can so you can make the right decision for you though.
Because what I see happening a lot is people landing on “it must be the relationship” without having the full picture of what’s happening in their body and brain at the same time. And when you don’t have that context, everything can start to feel very black and white.
There is actually a fair bit coming out now around the link between oestrogen and dopamine. Lisa Mosconi writes about this in The Menopause Brain, and ADHD clinicians have been naming it for years. When oestrogen shifts, dopamine regulation shifts with it, which impacts focus, memory, motivation and emotional regulation. So the systems that were already working quite hard don’t land the same way anymore.
If you’re neurodivergent, that’s not a subtle shift. It can feel like your brain is glitching in real time. Losing words, forgetting what you were doing, getting overwhelmed more quickly, noticing your tolerance in conversations shrink. And if you’ve spent years masking, adapting, compensating, keeping things moving, those strategies don’t hold up in the same way.
Perimenopause has a way of interrupting that. Not loudly, but physically. A kind of “I actually can’t keep doing this” that isn’t negotiable.
So what tends to happen is not that new problems appear, but that existing dynamics become harder to carry quietly. The mental load. The emotional labour. The imbalance that may have always been there but was previously manageable.
There’s research around midlife that speaks to this, Lachman describes it as a period of reassessing roles and expectations, but I think when you layer perimenopause and neurodivergence on top, that reassessment doesn’t stay in your head. It lands in your body, and it can feel urgent.
It shows up in all relationships where someone has a uterus
I see it across heterosexual and queer relationships, dynamics where one person is in perimenopause and the other isn’t, and also where both partners are in it at the same time. That brings its own kind of intensity, because both people’s capacity can be shifting in different ways, at different times, without the usual stabilising patterns to fall back on.
So from one side it can feel like everything is too much and something has to change, and from the other it can feel confusing, like the rules have shifted without warning. And when both people are inside their own version of that, it becomes very easy to misread each other.
Sex and intimacy often get caught in this as well. The idea that desire just disappears doesn’t line up with what we know. Emily Nagoski and Rosemary Basson both describe desire as responsive to context. When you factor in neurodivergence, that context already includes sensory load, mental load and emotional safety. Perimenopause shifts that baseline again.
So if your system is overwhelmed, if your brain has 47 tabs open, if your body feels unfamiliar, it makes sense that desire doesn’t show up in the same way. That’s not a failure. It’s information.
And all of this is happening in the middle of real life. Parenting, work, often complex family systems, sometimes multiple neurodivergent people in one household, sometimes both partners navigating their own internal shifts at the same time. Lavie’s work on cognitive load shows how quickly capacity drops when too much is competing for it, and for many people that capacity has been stretched for years.
Perimenopause doesn’t create that load, but it changes how much you can carry.
So when it starts to feel like everything is falling apart, it’s often not that things are breaking. It’s that the system you’ve been operating in no longer matches the capacity you have available.
And that’s the point where something needs to shift. Not always the relationship itself, but how it’s structured. The expectations. The roles. The assumptions about who carries what.
Because trying to get back to who you were before tends to create more strain.
What seems to make the biggest difference is when there’s a shared understanding that this isn’t just a relationship problem, it’s an intersection of biological, neurological and relational shifts happening at once.
From there, you get more choice in what you do next. Because this isn’t random, and it’s not you just losing it… well, not always 😉
What makes the biggest difference?
When there is a shared understanding that this isn’t just a personality change or a relationship problem, it’s an intersection of biological, neurological and relational shifts happening at once, sometimes for one person, sometimes for both.
From there, there is a lot more room to make decisions that are actually aligned, rather than reactive. Because this isn’t random, and it isn’t negative. It’s necessary. “The Change,” as my Mum says, is less of a gentle transition and more of a full system reset. And on the other side of it is you… with a much lower tolerance for bullshit and a much stronger pull toward what actually feels true.
