Heartbreak or Hormones? How HRT Could Save Your Marriage Ep 58 (Part 1)

Think your marriage is falling apart? It might actually be your hormones. 

Kelly sees people walk into her office every day ready to end their marriage—sometimes without realizing that hormones (theirs or their spouse’s) might be the real issue. Dr. Diana sees it too. Together, they break down how perimenopause, menopause, and hormone imbalance can show up as brain fog, anxiety, low libido, or emotional burnout—and how many women don’t get real answers until it’s too late. 

In this episode of The Splitting Smart Podcast, Kelly Bennett, Esq. teams up with Dr. Diana Hoppe—OB/GYN, hormone expert, and best-selling author—to talk about a little-known connection between hormonal shifts and marital breakdown. If you're in your 40s or 50s and feeling unhappy in your relationship, this episode is a must-listen. 

Dr. Diana and Kelly cover: 

• Why perimenopause is often a hidden factor in relationship conflict
• How hormone changes can masquerade as marital problems 
• What to do when everything feels like too much 
• Why libido issues, mood swings, and brain fog may not be “just stress” 
• What to now about hormone therapy and how to ask the right questions 
• When it’s time to pause and check your health before filing for divorce 

About Dr. Diana: 

Dr. Diana Hoppe is a board-certified OB/GYN, best-selling author, and total rockstar when it comes to helping women feel like themselves again. She is the founder of AmazingOver40.com, a telemedicine platform focused on hormone balance and women’s wellness. 

RESOURCES: 

• DR. DIANA'S WEBSITE: https://amazingover40.com 
• DR. DIANA'S BOOK: Healthy Sex Drive, Healthy You: What Your Libido Reveals About Your Life 
• DR. DIANA'S PROGRAM: Dr. Diana’s Transform Your Body, Mind, and Energy Detox program
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE: The Splitting Smart Podcast
• FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM:  Instagram.com/saperelawfirm
• JOIN THE CONVERSATION ON FACEBOOK:  Facebook.com/saperelawfirm
• NEED QUALITY LEGAL HELP? Visit Sapere Law & Mediation
• NEED SOME ENCOURAGMENT? Kelly wrote a book just for YOU: Victim Is Not Your Name: Remembering Your True Identity In the Midst of Life Challenges

Transcript

Kelly Bennett: Well, Dr. Diana Hoppe, welcome to the Splitting Smart Podcast. So great to have you here. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Thank you for having me. This is fun. Alright, thank you. 

Kelly Bennett: It really is. Well today as we're talking about this topic of hormones and the impact on relationships and particularly marriages. I'm really glad to have you here because this is an area where, quite frankly in the divorce law world we hear people tell us all the reasons why their relationships have failed, why the marriages aren't working. But I have to tell you, I've been doing this for 35 years and I haven't once had anybody say, "I think the hormones are off," or "We've gone to the doctor to figure out what's going on. All the symptoms have been described, but I think this is something that's really overlooked.

So let's jump right into it and start with the science behind hormones and marriage. So, let's go with the basics. Can you share with the listening audience, Diana, how do hormones, particularly in women over 40, how do those impact their emotions, their energy levels, and even how we perceive our own relationships?  

Dr. Diana Hoppe: It's a great question and hormones are huge, really. When we think about the impact of hormones on our health, our wellbeing, our mental status, they're huge. And I think to make it somewhat more understandable, 'cause I really don't think we get taught about. What's happening during our menstrual cycle and what's happening with our hormones?

I wanted to share a slide with you that we could talk about that's gonna make it much easier to understand what happens during a normal menstrual cycle for a woman, and then what happens as she gets in her forties and fifties, which is when perimenopause and menopause start really causing havoc on our hormones.

On the left you can see menstrual cycle and has a 28 day cycle. So like day one to 28 is the normal duration of the menstrual cycle. Now, when we talk about the period, that's normally like when you're bleeding, that's like day one to five, to maybe day seven.

But you can see here on the pink line is estrogen is really peaking around day 12 to 13, and then you see testosterone that's in the tangerine line that is also peaking mid cycle, and then progesterone is peaking now at, we call what the luteal phase, which is about day 21. So our hormones are fluctuating.

So this is showing how there's definitely changes in hormones during the month. So this in itself, I think is somewhat eye-opening because a lot of women don't know what's happening during the month with their hormones. During mid cycle, you can see where testosterone is higher. That's when in general, we have more sex drive because testosterone is peaked at that time, and that's normally the day of ovulation. So like Mother Nature is saying, let's try to have sex during this time because that's the most fertile period of the month. And then the next part is when the ovary has now released the egg, which is ovulation, and then the ovary starts making progesterone.

So the ovary is making these hormones and it's being signaled from the brain to say, make these hormones each month in this way so that we can get pregnant. 

So this is what normally happens in a menstrual cycle every month. Now, when we think about what happens in our forties and fifties , is our periods start getting more irregular. That's called perimenopause. And so when you look at the graph on the right, this is hormone levels over a woman's lifespan.

In the reproductive years is when you're having regular menstrual cycles, they're pretty synchronous.

The lines go up. The other lines are pretty in the same modality, right?

The teenage years almost mimic what happens in perimenopause is 'cause the hormones are now being somewhat irregular. We're not making it synchronous. We're not having that 28 day cycle of the estrogen peaking and all that happening.

And you can see that estrogen is really more dominant during that time, and progesterone is decreasing. A lot of symptoms for women and when they can get start like hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, irritability, and those are just physical symptoms that they're having. They can also have problems with cognition. They can start having more, less sex drive because their fluctuating hormones. And a lot of times men will, as you know, will say, what's happening to my wife? And the women also say, what's happening to my body? Because I wasn't always this way and I, my body's changing now.

And why is this happening? 

Kelly Bennett: As we're getting  older and we're in going into the menopause stage. The body's natural function is to say, all right, we're finished having children, and now this is really morbid, but and now we're getting ready to die, so let's just switch all these hormones and cut 'em off.

Dr. Diana Hoppe: And that's actually an interesting point because before the 1900s we weren't supposed to live past 50. Okay. Mm-hmm. Evolutionarily, we weren't supposed to live that long. So when our ovaries stopped, we were done.

That was what our lifespan was. Because of technology, antibiotics, surgery, all the different innovations, we now, average lifespan for women is about 82 to 84 in the United States, and menopause is 51. So. Yeah. So that's why I want to put in perspective that we weren't supposed to really live this long.

And that's why the ovaries kind of shut down at that point. 

Kelly Bennett: Well, and so if we're living so much longer, and then obviously we'll get into the fix for the symptoms and all of this do you think technology is designed to really leverage all the way through our eighties and nineties?

Dr. Diana Hoppe: If you can think back evolutionarily Darwin and the survival of the fittest type thing yeah. The people who had diabetes blindness, that certain conditions weren't going to make it.

Right. But now we have medicines, we have different things that allow even, you know, different ways to still have a good life, even quality of life as we get older and older. And for women, and what you're trying to really emphasize is that the hormones can have a huge impact on what's happening with their emotions and their relationships.

Kelly Bennett: How do the imbalances affect women as they're going through perimenopause and menopause? What are the common symptoms that you see as you have patients come to you saying, Hey, I'm just not feeling right. What do you see in there?

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Yeah, that's exactly right. They come saying something's off. I don't feel myself. I'm gaining weight in my middle section. I can't lose weight. My sleep is all messed up. I don't feel like I'm really rested when I wake up. My brain has now gone to less focus. I don't have the same attention span.

I don't have patience. So the irritability factor there, they have less patience. So they notice that maybe they're getting more irritable about things when before they wouldn't get set off on something and now it's like one little thing and they're like, you know, yelling at their kids or yelling at their partner Just feeling off. 

Kelly Bennett: And I think the weight gain is really interesting because, you know, as you know, I know you're very healthy and you take care of yourself and fit, and that's a priority for me as well. It seems like seemingly we're not changing anything.

We're still eating really well. And why is the body all of a sudden changing when I'm still going to to my sessions with the trainer four days a week and I haven't changed my nutrition patterns, and all of a sudden there's an extra four or five pounds, all of a sudden there's an extra six or seven pounds and nothing's coming off.

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Yeah, it's very frustrating and it's frustrating for every woman, I think, and some women are not as impacted at others with regard to the hormone changes, but that's something I hear a lot is they feel like their body is changing, they're gaining weight. No matter what they do, they look at food and they gain weight.

Right? They can't even eat the same amount they did before because now they're gaining weight. Some of that has to do with as we age, our metabolism slows down so we can't eat the same calories and still maintain the same weight. But if we do weight training, building more muscle mass, having more protein in our diets, there are different ways we can combat some of that weight gain.

And then hormone therapy, which we'll talk about a lot later in the show, there's ways we can make the hormones more balanced, which also makes it easier to get better sleep, which then decreases cortisol and it makes your body be able to lose weight when it wasn't able to before

Kelly Bennett: That's such a it's like a domino effect.

It's what it sounds like, what it sounds like. So, have you seen women come to you who think maybe their marriages are failing? And tell me what that looks like to you, because I hear different things when folks come into me. My marriage is failing, right? Mm-hmm. You hear very different things through your lens, right?

So what do you hear and how do you address that as a physician? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Yeah, I think it's a great question because if we could have divorce attorneys and OBGYNs work together like you're doing, we would probably save a lot of marriages. But they sometimes don't see it as a marriage problem. They just see it as they're more upset at their husband. They don't want to have sex. Like they used to have a good sex drive now it's like the last thing they really care about. They're so tired and they're stressed out and they're not feeling themselves.

So of course you wouldn't want to have sex when you're not feeling yourself, you feel like you're gaining weight, you feel ugly. You feel like, ah, my husband's pissing me off too. Right? Although they're more irritable because the hormones are impacted, and so it's kind of like, no, it's not anyone's real fault.

It's just what's happening and understanding that is what's key to like saying to both partners, "Hey, let's take a look at what's happening hormonally, because this might give awareness as to why there might be some relationship problems, especially certain parts of the month if a woman is still having her menstrual cycle.

Kelly Bennett: And that's interesting too, and we'll talk about the tracking piece of this in a little bit, but i, I bet people don't realize that if they started to sit back and look at when in the relationship, you start to have the most arguments, the most irritability with each other, the fit, right. It would be interesting to see, and I'll bet you would see that there's a rhythm that goes on there, right?

There's, there's a little pattern happening there. I gotta tell you from all that I've learned from you so far on this I'm changing when I have couples come into me, they come into me for, as a lawyer to represent one or the other. Or they come in together to mediate with me. And in both scenarios, I always ask them, are we sure this is what we want to do? Have you made every effort to save the marriage? Right? Because some people will rush into it without having given it more thought. But guess what I'm adding to this? Those questions are now, what efforts have you made? Not just asking, have you gone to marriage counseling, marriage therapy, you know, obtained spiritual counseling, all of those kinds of things. But what have you done on the medical side beyond the psychology? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: That's really brilliant coming from the legal aspect and the lawyer, because you're not just saying, I want your money, I want to just process your divorce. You're saying, let's see if there's a way we can salvage this relationship because maybe there's just a discrepancy in basically how we're dealing with each other. Exactly right. During the perimenopause is also when your children are now becoming teenagers, which adds a whole other aspect, right? Because they have their hormonal fluctuations. My daughter's driving me crazy, she doesn't listen to me, my son's testosterone... he's just, you know, he's off doing whatever. And then your husband is just kind of saying, well honey, what's the problem? Why don't you want to have sex? I don't even wanna be here because everyone wants my time and I'm just, I'm outta control, right? 

Kelly Bennett: Yeah. Why would I want to have sex? Don't you see what's going on here? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: The house is a mess. The kids aren't doing what I said. And, and you don't, you don't help me around the house.

Right? 

Kelly Bennett: And PS I feel like crap. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: You can say I, I don't feel my best because I'm just not sleeping and I'm not losing weight. I feel like I'm frustrated. Everything is, and I'm not saying all women go to the severity, but there are a lot that come to me during that time that say, I don't know what's going on. I'm really feeling helpless.

I go to the doctor and the doctor says, it's just normal. Your labs are normal. The labs can be normal. It's because it's emotionally, the rollercoaster of the hormones are changing. So it's kind of like you have to go deeper than just say, oh, well the basic labs say this.

And that's where the tracking sheet really comes in because it tells you like, when are you feeling those worst times, like a lot of women can have PMS premenstrual syndrome, especially seven to 10 days before their cycle. So if she knows that and her partner knows that, maybe her partner might say, well, maybe I'll help her around the house a little bit more.

I'll try to minimize any kind of stressors that she might have and that would be really a great relationship mending because then she would say, oh, he's really helping. This is great. Right.

Kelly Bennett: Right, right. Right. Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world, but way it just doesn't occur to us especially when we have a physician saying, well, the labs look, the labs look fine.

You know? Yeah. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Just deal with it. Just go home, have a glass of wine. Right. Or go on antidepressant or, well, you know, sex drive decreases over time and just deal with it. I mean, but there's so many things we can do. There's so much that we can make life so much better as we get, as we talked about, living to our sixties, seventies, eighties.

Right? There's so much we can do to make that time so much better than, than what we were told. 

Kelly Bennett: That's right. And that's what I mean by the technology, the medical technology that's available. So, okay, well before we jump into that, let me throw some statistics at you and let's talk about this for a second.

There was a 2015 study by the American Sociological Association and that study revealed that right now about 69% of divorces, well, 2015, so 10 years ago. But about 69% of divorces in the United States are initiated by women. I thought that was pretty interesting.

 So to give you a further stat here, between 1990 and 2019, something really interesting changed. In 1990 8.7% of all divorces in the United States occurred among adults who were 50 and older. By 2019, that percentage had grown to 36%. 36%. So we have an area in the law called the gray divorce, and that's referring to the older older, which I would like to not be considering in that group. We should just say the blonde divorce. But anyway, the gray divorce is what it's called. And I will tell you that in 2020 in Covid on the law side, we saw an influx about three months into Covid of calls for divorces of folks 65 and older, and we actually had three active cases where both the husband and the wife were in their eighties seeking a divorce.

Crazy, right? So yeah, so right now we've got 69% of the divorces in America are being initiated by women. And in as of 2019, the percent of the adults over 50 going through a divorce has jumped from 8.7% to 36% or higher. So there's a lot of speculation going on in medical and science journals as I've read 'em.

 So don't hold me to it, Diana. You know how to read those better than I do. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: But I think there's different reasons for this, right? And that probably as you said, speculation as to why. I mean, Covid was something that was completely foreign to all of us and that we had to be locked up literally like sequestered in our houses.

And when your husband's with you 24/7 a lot of women are going to say, this is not what I wanted. He's supposed to go off to work. I could do my stuff, or I go to work and we can separate and then come back and rejoin. 

The kids are home 24/7 and it's just like, okay, this is not what I signed up for.

Kelly Bennett: You're spot on. That's exactly what we were hearing and where a relationship was already weak. And honestly, we had somewhere the husband in, I can think of in several of these cases was already being unfaithful and now he's stuck in the same house and he is still trying to do a sneak around.

I'm not going to say these were rocket scientists who were deciding to do these things. Anyway, so, but when I looked at the different reasons or speculations that were given of why is have we had this huge jump in divorces of people 50 and older?

What I didn't see was any discussion of hormonal imbalance. Nowhere at all. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: And that is a huge thing. Go back to that graph that I showed you, women in their forties in general are perimenopause, right? And then menopause, is about the average age in the United States is 50-51. And those hormones are changing. And women in menopause, if they're not on any hormone replacement therapy, they're going have a little more testosterone relative to what they used to have.

So I think there's different reasons why women start potentially having more voice . And they may have less tolerance also during that time. They've worked their butts off doing what they're doing, and now the kids have gone to college and that adds a whole other level of, now what do we do with each other?

And that's where a lot of women also say, what do I want to do with my life at this point? Some want to start over, which I think is great, but I don't think a marriage needs to crumble because of hormones.

And that's where I think you're, this whole discussion is what's so important because as this element is a huge, a huge part of this, what's going on?

Kelly Bennett: Yeah. Well and you know, we believe within the culture of our law practice and our mediation practice that divorce isn't something to be considered lightly. Marriage isn't something to throw away unless it's inevitable, right? And, and it's just irreparably broken down. And so that's why we ask those questions.

Are you sure? Right. And, and even when we do get people divorced sometimes they reconcile, you know? And so that's good. But this is something that I think is one, another area, like I said before, that we really need to be considering and just making sure, because it's such a life change, you know, especially if you've had a long-term marriage.

Dr. Diana Hoppe: The other thing I wanted to bring up, which is another fact I don't think that couples think that much about, but it has to do with the sex drive and what's happening with vaginal tissue for a woman , and as she goes through menopause and even perimenopause, she might have more pain with intercourse. She has vaginal dryness.

And of course when it hurts, no one really wants to have sex, right? Then the husband might say, well, let me look at other sources, you know, or that whole aspect of our marriage is now gone, and then that can cause infidelity or can be that just the sex life just goes away completely. And again, there's things to do to make that so much better, but you have to go to the right doctor and have a doctor that listens to you and then addresses the problem because it's not really a problem, it's just a part of life.

And that we can definitely help in that aspect with making things a lot better.

The patient doesn't like to talk about it that much, and some doctors don't want to address it because it opens up a can of worms and they don't have time. They may have seven to 10 minutes with that patient and they just want to refill the prescriptions, go through the motion.

The last thing they want to do is talk about your relationship. Because that's going take way too long and they're not going have the resources to deal with it. I always ask my patients about their relationship. Are they sexually active? Are they intimate? How is the relationship going?

Are you just roommates? Because sometimes that's what happens. They're just passing in the dark, kind of like roommates or friends. It's sometimes the woman who has less sex drive, it's sometimes the man who has less sex drive. 

And then you have to say, okay, so how can we rectify it? And I do agree not all marriages should be saved. That is, my parents got divorced and I believe they needed to be divorced. There's a whole another aspect that we need to look at that could be potentially causing some of the issues in the relationship.

Kelly Bennett: This Is kind of a funny question. I hadn't thought of it until now as you were talking about this, but with doctors being rushed because they're working within a system where there's, they've just got too many things to do.

But what happens at the medical school level. Now I went to law school a long time ago. You probably went to medical school a long time ago. Has much of that changed in as far as the education of future physicians on being, getting them comfortable about talking about hormones and sex drive and the impact to the relationships as they're practicing? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Yeah, we get very few hours on menopause and what's happened with hormones. I mean, I think if you look at it like maybe four to eight hours during how many years of medical school. T he relationship and sexuality, I mean, it just kind of brushed aside.

We don't get enough of that in medical schools now, maybe there'll be changing as time goes on, but when I was in medical school, very little was on nutrition. Two. I mean, there's so many things in lifestyle and just basic things that were not discussed because so much emphasis was placed on other aspects of science.

Kelly Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. I, that's what I suspected because as a practicing vegan, I run into the nutrition piece quite frequently when speaking with treating physicians, because it's just not even a consideration as much because there wasn't any education on it. It seems like physicians are really kinda left to self-educating at this point on nutrition and it sounds like also on the hormone replacement therapy, libido, all of these things. Okay, so let's talk for a second about your book. So your wonderful book, wonderful book. I'm going to show it here. All right. So Healthy Sex Drive, Healthy You. Everyone should get this book. I will have the link to it in the show notes. You can get it on Amazon if you don't go to the show notes.

Look up Dr. Diana Hoppe on Amazon and you can get this wonderful book. It's really written well,, Diana, I love it because I could relate to your writing style in the sense that you and I could both write books, very technical, right? I could sound just like a lawyer and you wouldn't know what the heck I just said.

Right? And same thing on the clinical side. And what's so nice about this book is it's relatable. It's understandable. I don't feel like I went back to, you know, chemistry class and right. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: I liked physical chemistry, but not organic chemistry. 

Kelly Bennett: Right. So anyway, so here's where you're really talking about libido as a health indicator, right?

So it's a marker of a number of things. And so can you talk a little bit about how, what healthy libido is a marker of what that indicates and what low libido really means for us? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Yeah. Well, part of the reason I wrote the book is I was doing clinical trials with the medication for decreased sex drive in women.

It was a medication that now is available for premenopausal women. It's called Addyi, A-D-D-Y-I, Flibanserin was the other name of it. But basically I was interviewing women as to why they were having less sex drive and you know, because then they could get the medication. And it was very interesting to me to see how many women had less drive and to be on the medication they had to also have a good relationship, etc., but they just didn't want to have sex. But I saw ways that women would try to get out of having sex because they just didn't want it. They'd pretend like they were on their period the whole time. Right. So they would like tampon papers in the, in the garbage, in the bathroom. So the husband thinks, oh, she must be on her cycle again. She's having irregular bleeding. Or she might get up earlier and stuff. But it's very interesting and that's what got me to write the book because I was like, there's no books about women libido.

It was like they had books about how to have, you know, amazing sex and the Kundalini yoga or whatever, you know? Yeah. But there's no book about basic sex drive. So that's what made me motivated to write the book. And then I saw that part of a healthy life is having a healthy libido. Now libido doesn't mean having sex five times a day or something like that.

 It doesn't mean being crazy sexually like that. It means being intimate with your partner and being, it could be intercourse. It could also just be because you have intimacy just by touching or kissing or hugging or things like that. When you feel resentful to your partner or angry or you don't feel good about your body. So there's a lot of parts that go into libido, like self-esteem, communication, stress, oh my god, stress. Mm-hmm. Which one? And it's getting only worse when as our, as life just makes things crazier. But stress is definitely like a, the 24/7, that women are just like, the last thing I want to do is think about sex because I can barely even take care of what I need to do in the household. Right? 

I mean, they're 24/7 trying to just juggle everything and then they wonder why the sex drive went down and the husband's like, well, you used to be like, we could do this, you know? And she's like, I just don't really want it, you know, do something to help me. 

Her hormones are fluctuating and the levels are changing, and the, and the husbands don't know that because they're not in medical school. They don't have this education, and they're wondering like, what happened to my wife? She used to be all fun and happy, and now she's kind of cranky and irritable.

Yeah. 

Kelly Bennett: And so that really should be a big warning sign that something's just not right. In other words, I'm hearing you say don't accept low sex drive as okay or normal because it's not really how we were designed to be. Right. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: And there are times when your sex drive will be higher.

Okay? So when you look at the menstrual cycle, we talked about that graph, testosterone peaks are in the same time that that estrogen for ovulation occurs. So testosterone peaks the same time. So mother Nature kind of made it so that, let's think about sex, let's think about being intimate. Mm-hmm. Because that's what the egg's released.

So that would be a way to further our evolutionary, our genes. Right. So we can procreate, so that we can continue our species. Right. The second part of the month when progesterone's being made is not, is kind of when your, your body's more chilled, progesterone's more of a calming, and most women aren't thinking about sex in that period of time.

But, but then you can also think about stresses in life. Let's say a parent is aging or dementia or something, some crisis occurs and stuff. I mean, there's a lot of things that can cause stress and put that into the relationship.

And so for women, it's not like they really want to initiate sex. It's more like they'll do it and they'll get definitely aroused, but it's not like the forefront of their mind. Whereas men are a little different, their testosterone levels are pretty much high their whole lives, and they start declining at age 30, 10% each decade.

Right. A man is more like a steamroll. He's going to go straight. It's rolling. We're going. It's all good. A woman is going to say, wait a minute, did I get the lunches for the kids?

What about the soccer game? What about the thing I was at that meeting. What about this? And so sex isn't something that she's really even that involved with sometimes. 

Kelly Bennett: With a low libido...

so we look at that as a okay warning, something's going on. Often it's all these hormones that are not doing what they're supposed to do or that we're losing them. And you know, the imbalance, I guess. 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Hormone rollercoaster during perimenopause, and then the lack of hormones with menopause.

Kelly Bennett: Right, right. Okay. So when we're in menopause it is normal to think, okay, well maybe it's just my hormones, but if there is a lack of libido there are some medical problems beyond hormones aren't there that that might signal? 

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Right? It could be a hypothyroidism.

Different things that could be potentially causing the lack of energy, the loss of spark for life. It could be depression. There's a lot of things that you have to evaluate when you look at someone not feeling right or not feeling themselves right. You do have to look at, is there any imbalance, maybe minerals, vitamin D, vitamin B, what's happening with their chemistry, liver function, glucose levels.

So it's not just the hormones, but the hormones are a big part. But then you have to look at is something else that might be driving this to be less. Yeah. As we age, our thyroid gets less functional and so may have lower thyroid levels, which has caused less energy, also less drive, etc.

It's a complex thing, but I think if you find someone who can take the time and work with you and also look at your relationship parts of what's going on, because if there's resentment, if there's some issues that still aren't being rectified because of anger from something in the past, you know, that is something that women have a very strong memory about things, right?

Kelly Bennett: Yes. That's for sure.   

Dr. Diana Hoppe: Sometimes we tend to like count and say, well, you didn't do this and you didn't do that, and you didn't do that. Right. And men. Well, I don't even remember that. Well, why is that still even in the equation. Like, I thought we passed that. So like marriage counseling, like you were talking about and just the couple kind of coming back together and saying, where are we now? And how can we make this better?