Male Menopause: What's in a Name?

The reason for Andropause or Male Menopause is to signal the end of the first part of a man’s life and get him ready for the second half. Male Menopause is not as many fear the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. It is the passage to the most passionate, powerful, productive, and purposeful time of a man’s life.

The term “male menopause” is of course inaccurate. The word “menopause” was championed by French doctors in the 1870s, combining two Greek words—menses (“periods”) and pausis (“stop”). Men don’t have a period, so they don’t stop having one. I chose to use male menopause when I wrote my books on the subject because I found there were so many parallels between what women and men go through. The main difference is that men can continue to reproduce following this change of life, where women cannot. There have been a number of names which have been used to describe this important life transition: male menopause, Andropause, viropause, the male climacteric, penopause, and andropenia. All indicate that there is a change or ending that happens in male functioning. Increasingly I’m using the term Andropause (andro from the Greek word meaning “male” and pausis from the word meaning “stop.”) It also concentrates on the fact that there is a decline in male hormones, specifically the androgens (andro, “male” and gen “to give), like testosterone at this time of life.

I often think this time of life as climbing up a mountain. At some point we reach our highest level and begin coming down the other side. It’s not surprising that we are scared of the changes that come with the down-side of the mountain. For most of human history we died when we reached the bottom. As late as the turn of the century the average life-span was only 47 years. Those of us who reach 50 can expect to live another 30 years. Lots of us will live to be 100 or more.

There is a second mountain for us to scale, one that allows us to be more relaxed and less ambitious, more playful and less serious, more accepting and less demanding of ourselves and others. However, in order to get to this second mountain, we must go through the Male Menopause valley. We can’t jump from peak to peak.

In order to successful navigate this second mountain we have to realize that it is quite different than the first. One of the most shocking, and disturbing, aspects of this shift is that our whole sense of manhood changes. It’s as though the polarities of life had suddenly reversed themselves. It’s a time to construct a new definition of what it means to be a man, a challenge that is mystifying to many of us.