Male Menopause

Around the time that most of the women I know suddenly sprouted a luxuriant moustache, exotic tales of what our husbands and partners were getting up to began to circulate. One friend, whose husband is probably the most successful writer of my generation, has had an annual summer party packed out with film stars, Booker winners and assorted intellectuals. These now found themselves dragooned into listening to our host’s prolonged rendition of 1970s rock-music on his new electric guitar. The sight of seeing a highly intelligent and gifted man make a prat of himself was too much even for those envious of his success; and the party has now been cancelled.

Another wife realised something was badly wrong when the headlights of her husband’s car hit the kitchen wall at knee-level instead of waist-level one evening. He had sold the Volvo and bought a red, open-topped sports car. (Apparently over 80% of such cars are sold to sad sacks who believe this throbbing mechanical extension makes them look young and virile not old and desperate.) Then there was the bloke who once the hair started to leave his head and reappear in his ears and nostrils ditched his nice cotton jumpers and turned up at the school gates in a leather jacket, the sartorial equivalent to having “F*** Me” tattooed on your forehead. All of these were, we agreed in tones of regret, compassion or weariness, symptoms of the male menopause. They were having an Austin Powers moment, and no au pair or bank-account was safe, until the couple eventually settled down to His and Hers tweezers.

Yet now it appears that this concept is a myth. While the female menopause undoubtedly exists, the stroppiness of the middle-aged man has nothing to do with declining levels of testosterone. According to Professor John McKinlay, a leading authority on men’s health who last week caused huge controversy at the British Fertility Society conference in Aberdeen, drug companies are cashing in on a false notion that men need hormone replacement therapy to boost their flagging sex-drives. Where women’s fertility declines dramatically after 35, that of men drops off at less than 1%. Having studied 1,500 men in Massachusetts, the Professor has concluded that the decline in sex-drive, muscle tone, and feelings of depression and sweatiness of middle-aged men are due to unhealthy lifestyles. Heart disease and diabetes are the real culprits, and £600 annual courses of Testogel to replace supposedly drooping levels of testosterone is “a therapy in search of a condition.”

If the andropause, which has been commonly diagnosed in about 50% of men over 50 since the 1930s is indeed a myth, it poses some uncomfortable questions for both sexes. Women can just about stand evidence of Basil Fawlty-style pottiness, discontent and restiveness if it can be blamed on something as blameless as declining hormone levels rather than, say, their own increasing girth and habits. We are all increasingly obsessed with the idea that every round peg that does not fit into the square hole must have something physiologically wrong with them. I have lost count of the times brilliant but eccentric people (including my own daughter) have been diagnosed by well-meaning fools as “having mild Aspergers’ Syndrome.” Anything, you see, rather than face up to the causes of their boredom, which might range from rudeness to a lack of stimulus at school.

I don’t have much truck with discourtesy and the kind of behaviour that makes people feel small and hurt. The bigger, stronger and cleverer you are, the more you owe it to others to lift them up rather than crush them down. However, there’s no doubt either that many people, when they come face-to-face with their own mortality, can decide that they have wandered into a life that makes them bored and miserable and that they had better try to change it before it’s too late. Often, that includes a marriage or a professional life that has become stale, and fighting free of it causes behaviour than can look and feel like extreme selfishness. Raging against the dying of the light by buying the sports-car you longed for but couldn’t afford when young, or playing in an amateur rock-band is actually quite a benign way of navigating your way through a mid-life crisis, compared to divorce and early retirement. Though the solution is not to run off with a Brazilian transsexual and raise ostriches, like one ex-husband and former accountant I know, someone who reaches their 50s without a major reassessment of their past and possible future self isn’t fully alive. It’s what you do with that reassessment that matters, not just the fact that it needs to be made.

We are all going to live and work a great deal longer than previous generations. If giving up your well-paid job to work for a charity, restore a French farm-house or start a new family seems much more exciting, though less honourable and brave than maintaining the status quo, then it’s time we stopped blaming it on hormones rather than character and situation. Chemistry is not destiny, and moral choice is not dictated by biology. If the male menopause is indeed a myth, there will be no excuse for what Shakespeare called “shifting into the lean and slippered pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side,” rather than having the energy and guts to change your life. Or for believing that powdered rhino horn and other unnecessary medications will turn you into the sexual equivalent to the Hulk. Professor McKinlay deserves praise for raising the possibility that we have once again been conned by our credulous belief in medical science.

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When on holiday, is your idea of relaxation a) scuba-diving with sharks b) a ceaseless round of gossip and aquatic horseplay with your closest friends c)lying on a sun-bed and reading a good book?

According to psychologist Dr. Glen Wilson of the University of London, my marriage is in grave danger. A Teletext survey of the 1 in 10 people who admit to regretting their choice of travelling companion, 51% said it was their husband, wife or partner who had ruined their holiday. Working couples spend so little time together that it is not until the annual fortnight away that the dreadful truth about their incompatibility emerges. Dr. Wilson has just devised a test to see whether you are compatible and my husband and I, despite having a thousand other tastes in common, would fail it.

My idea of the perfect holiday is lying absolutely still by a swimming pool and reading, whereas his is adventure, culture and novelty. On my honeymoon, I was forced to trudge up and down the Himalayas in my trousseau; I have spent week-ends wandering resentfully round ruins in the broiling heat and dragged through mud and mire of every bog in Europe on what he calls a walk and I something unprintable. My husband used to get rid of his girlfriends by inviting them to go camping with him, an experience so frightful that they immediately gave him the heave-ho on their bedraggled return to civilisation. This, of course, was never a possibility in my case. Every year we used, like the husband and wife in my new novel, Love in Idleness, to have a hellish fortnight punctuated by furious rows and recriminations about our very different ideas of what constituted a holiday. Then a simple solution occurred to us, without the aid of psychologists, quizzes or other aids to harmonious marital life. We take it in turns to do what each person wants on alternate days.