The Second Spring: A Short Story About Intimacy After Menopause

Ruth had been sleeping on the very edge of the mattress for almost a year, and she wasn't sure George had noticed.

He had, of course. Thirty-two years of marriage teaches you to read the shape of the person next to you in the dark. But he'd decided, in the way he decided most things, that it was best not to make a fuss.

It had started with the night sweats. She'd wake at two in the morning drenched and furious, throw the duvet off, and lie there wide awake until five. Then the mood swings, the brain fog, the feeling of being a stranger in her own skin. Her doctor had said "menopause" in a tone that suggested it was all perfectly ordinary, which Ruth supposed it was, but it didn't feel ordinary from the inside.

And then there was the other thing. The thing she couldn't bring herself to mention to anyone.

The last few times she and George had been intimate, it had hurt. Not a little. Enough that she'd gritted her teeth and waited for it to be over, and then lain awake afterwards feeling sad and old and somehow guilty. After the third time, she'd stopped letting it get that far. She went to bed early, or late. She found reasons. And she slept on the edge.

George, meanwhile, had his own private worries. He was sixty-one. Things didn't work quite the way they used to, and some nights he wondered if Ruth had simply stopped finding him attractive. A belly, reading glasses, the occasional snore that she claimed could wake the neighbors. He couldn't blame her.

So they did what a lot of long-married couples do. They stayed kind to each other, and quietly retreated.

It was their granddaughter, of all people, who broke the silence.

Hannah was twenty-four and studying to be a nurse, and she'd come to stay for a long weekend. Over Sunday lunch, while George was out in the garden, she'd watched Ruth flap a napkin at her own flushed face and said, "Gran, are you doing anything for your menopause symptoms?"

Ruth had nearly choked on a potato. "That's not really a lunch conversation."

"Why not?" Hannah said. "Half the people on the planet go through it."

And then, because Hannah was kind and direct and clearly wasn't going to be embarrassed, Ruth found herself telling her. Not everything. But enough.

Hannah listened without blinking. "That's really common," she said. "It's called vaginal atrophy, or GSM. Low estrogen makes the tissue thinner and drier. It doesn't usually get better by itself, but it's very treatable. There are moisturizers and lubricants, and there's a low-dose estrogen your GP can prescribe that works locally. You don't have to just put up with it."

Ruth stared at her. "Why has nobody ever told me this?"

"Because nobody talks about it," Hannah said. "Which is ridiculous."

The GP appointment took courage. Ruth wrote her symptoms on a piece of paper in case she lost her nerve, and read them off in a rush. The doctor, a brisk woman in her fifties, nodded throughout and said, "Right. You're about the fourth person this week." She examined Ruth, explained the options, and wrote a prescription for a low-dose vaginal estrogen. She also suggested a water-based lubricant and a regular moisturizer, and said Ruth should come back in three months.

"And talk to your husband," the doctor said, as Ruth was leaving. "Men worry too."

That evening, Ruth found George in the shed, sorting seed packets into old biscuit tins, and she sat down on the upturned bucket he kept for visitors.

"I've been avoiding you," she said. "In bed. I should have told you why."

George put the seeds down.

She told him about the pain, and the embarrassment, and the night sweats, and the edge of the mattress. She told him about Hannah and the doctor. Her voice wobbled a bit at the end.

George was quiet for a while. Then he said, "I thought you'd gone off me."

"Oh, George."

"I'm serious. I thought it was the belly." He patted it ruefully. "And I've had my own... troubles, if you know what I mean. I thought maybe that was why."

Ruth laughed, then cried, then laughed again. "We're a right pair."

The treatment took a while to work, a few weeks before Ruth noticed much difference. In the meantime, they did something they hadn't done in years: they took their time.

George, who had always been a bit of a rusher, learned to slow down. They rediscovered the long kisses of their twenties. They took baths together, which involved a good deal of laughing about knees and the size of the tub. Some evenings they simply lay together and talked, and Ruth found that the closeness she'd been missing wasn't really about sex at all. It was about being turned toward each other again.

George went to his own GP, too, grumbling the whole way. He came home with a leaflet and a sheepish smile.

When things did come back together, physically, it was different from before. Slower, gentler, more talking. In some ways, Ruth thought, it was better. They had nothing to prove and nowhere to be.

That spring, George planted sweet peas along the back fence, the same variety he'd grown the year they got married. Ruth teased him about being sentimental.

"Second spring," he said, pressing the soil down around the seedlings. "Seemed appropriate."

She moved back to the middle of the bed. He noticed, and didn't make a fuss.

The takeaway

Menopause changes the body, and painful intimacy is one of the most common and least talked-about symptoms. It is very treatable. What helped Ruth and George was getting proper medical advice, talking honestly about both partners' worries, and slowing down to rediscover closeness on new terms. Read our guide to intimacy after menopause for couples.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are invented.