Prepare for the Arrival of Our Lady of Chaotic Hormones
The Santa Monica couple and their three children stood awestruck in front of Michelangelo’s David at the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Florence, Italy. Inspired by the piece’s rare beauty, the 39-year-old mother urged her two older children to sketch the sculpture in their journals. But her husband, who abhorred the pressing crowd and the steamy July heat, nixed the idea because he wanted to move on.
His veto incited his wife to rage. “I bit his head off.... I just jumped on him like there was no tomorrow,” said the woman, who asked her name not be used, as she now regards the outburst last month as an embarrassment. “Of course, two hours later, I started my period and he said, ‘Well, that explains it.’ I wanted to reach over and smack him, but it was true.”
The woman had what some physicians and social scientists call a “premenstrual outburst.” Premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, had so exacerbated her irritability, hostility and tension that it was as if a switch had been thrown, unleashing a fury out of proportion to her unsuspecting husband’s offense.
Indeed, not even a vacation in Italy can diminish some women’s PMS, the symptoms of which can include bloating, weight gain, headaches, fatigue, backaches, change in sexual interest, poor concentration, increased appetite, moodiness, anxiousness and increased irritability, tension and hostility. Between 30% and 40% of women experience PMS, usually seven to 10 days before their menstrual flow begins.
Theories about the cause of PMS abound and have to do with various changes in a premenstrual woman’s body chemistry. No theory, however, is conclusive.
Just how PMS affects a woman’s relationship with her husband or boyfriend is unclear. But a survey released last week by the National Assn. of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health, a professional organization based in Washington, D.C., and IVillage, a Web site dedicated to women’s issues, suggests that men don’t want to get too cuddly with Our Lady of Chaotic Hormones.
A total of 1,538 U.S. men (older than 18 and in a stable, exclusive relationship with a woman for at least a year) and 1,562 women participated in the telephone survey. Men were asked to comment about their partners, while women were asked to comment on how their female friends and sisters’ PMS affected their relationships.
“We found that 68% of men noticed strained relationships with their wife or girlfriend due to PMS,” said Susan Wysocki, president and chief executive of the nurse practitioners group. “One woman suffering from PMS said to me, ‘I just felt like yelling at my husband and he was just being his usual sweet self. So I yelled at him and I felt horrible.’”
One can assume such men don’t feel so great either. Forty-one percent of the men surveyed reported that PMS increased tension with their partner, 46% said it diminished their partner’s happiness and 34% said it decreased their own happiness. About a third said that PMS negatively affected their sex life and increased conflict. A little more than a quarter said it caused them to spend less time with their partner.
Seventy-eight percent of women whose best friends or sisters exhibit symptoms of PMS say their relationship is affected negatively. Sixty-seven percent reported noticing their loved one’s diminished happiness. Nearly a third of women reported increased tension in the relationship due to their friend’s or sister’s PMS while almost one-quarter of women said they fought more due to a friend’s or sister’s PMS.
The great majority of women--78%--whose best friends or sisters exhibit symptoms of PMS said their relationships were affected negatively. Nearly a third of women reported increased tension in the relationship due to their friend or sister’s PMS while almost one quarter said they fought more due to a friend’s or sister’s PMS.
There is a paucity of research about PMS, its causes and cures. A few psychologists have investigated what tactics might help couples weather the hormonal and emotional storms that appear to accompany PMS. In 1993, David N. Dixon, a professor of counseling psychology at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and co-researchers divided 30 married women who met the criteria for PMS into two groups.
Fifteen of the women were placed in one group and, along with their husbands, asked to record physical, behavioral and emotional symptoms during the wife’s premenstrual phase of her cycle for three months. The other group of women charted their symptoms solo. At the end of three months, the researchers found that the couples’ group rated marital satisfaction significantly higher than the control group.
“Just having the husband become aware of the symptoms the wife was experiencing seemed to help a lot,” Dixon said. “Rather than attributing the cause of a particular problem to personality or a permanent characteristic of the person, couples attributed the cause to PMS. I speculate the husbands became more empathic.”
Lonnie Barbach, a clinical psychologist based in San Francisco, said she counsels couples to mark the calendar for those days when PMS will hit and asks them to avoid discussing subjects that are sources of conflict. (Remodeling plans, for instance, would probably rank at the top of dangerous topics.) When an emotional outburst occurs on the marked days, a woman is better able to say, “I’m sorry, I’m premenstrual,” Barbach said. She is better able to use her “head to influence her emotions,” because she is aware that her emotional reactions may have nothing to do with her husband or kids.
“Partners also become more sympathetic if they know when PMS is going to happen because they are not getting blamed and they deal with the tension better if they know they are not the object of the moods,” said Barbach, author of “The Pause: Positive Approaches to Perimenopause and Menopause” (Plume, 2002). A reciprocal situation, she said, is her own: “The man I live with gets depressed a lot and I can be solicitous as long as I know that it’s not me, that I am not the object of his moods.”
Normally, the woman who was traveling in Italy with her husband and children marks her calendar so she can better understand her mood swings. But she also has an irregular menstrual cycle, which compromises predictability.
In the end, all was fine in Florence. Once her husband understood that her rage was partly PMS and partly because she did want the children to draw the statue, he capitulated. “In the end, the kids did sketch David,” she said, “because we had to wait in line to get into the basilica anyway.”
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Birds & Bees is a weekly column about relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at kathykelleher@adelphia.net.
