For most of my life I believed that loving someone meant making things better.

If the person I loved was struggling, my job was to find a solution. If there was a problem, I should fix it. If something could be researched, organized, planned or improved, then that was how I showed love. I also carried another belief, although I never consciously examined it.

I saw intimacy as a reflection of the health of our relationship.

When we felt close physically, I assumed everything else between us was fundamentally okay. If intimacy changed, I assumed our relationship had changed too. That belief shaped the way I understood love for years.

Then my wife entered the menopause transition.

At first, I approached it like every other challenge we’d faced together. I read books, listened to podcasts, and followed specialists. Surely there would be an explanation for what was happening and, once we found it, life would settle back into something familiar.

Instead, every answer seemed to lead to another question. Symptoms changed from week to week. Treatments worked for some women and not for others. A good day could be followed by one that made no sense at all.

Our intimacy changed as well.

That was the part I struggled with most because I couldn’t separate what was happening to her from what I believed it meant about us. I found myself wondering whether I’d done something wrong, whether I’d missed something important, or whether we were slowly drifting apart, toward becoming nothing more than roommates.

Without realising it, I wasn’t only trying to understand the menopause transition. I was trying to recover the relationship I thought we were losing.

Through all of it, my instinct remained the same.

“What can I do?”

It took me far longer than I’d like to admit to realize that this wasn’t always the question that mattered. Some situations don’t offer quick solutions, and my determination to find one sometimes added to the weight we were already carrying.

Doing nothing felt uncomfortable. Sitting beside someone I loved while she struggled, knowing I couldn’t make it stop, left me feeling as though I was failing in one of the most important parts of being a husband.

Only later did I realise how closely I had tied love to usefulness. If I couldn’t improve the situation, I assumed I wasn’t helping.

One afternoon, after another conversation that had gone nowhere, I found myself mentally searching for another article to send, another expert to follow and another appointment to suggest. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps my wife already had enough information. What she needed from me was something different.

She needed someone willing to go through the menopause transition with her.

That sounds obvious now. But it changed the way I approached our relationship. We still attended appointments together. We still talked through treatment options. I still read everything I could find. The difference was that I stopped believing the next piece of information would somehow restore life to the way it had been before.

What changed was that the conversations that brought us closest weren’t always the ones where we found an answer. Sometimes we simply understood each other a little better. Or perhaps we admitted that neither of us knew what came next. Often times the most helpful thing I could do was stay in the conversation instead of trying to bring it to a conclusion.

That experience also changed the way I thought about intimacy.

For years I had been treating it as a measure of the health of our relationship. Hormones, sleep, anxiety, pain, exhaustion and body image all influence physical closeness. None of those experiences, on their own, define the strength of a relationship.

Today intimacy still matters deeply to me.

I still value it. I still miss it when it’s absent. But now I understand that it can’t carry the entire weight of a relationship.

There are days when love looks like holding hands in a waiting room, sitting through another difficult conversation, or accepting that neither of us has an answer.

Those moments taught me as much about love as intimacy ever did.

Looking back, I spent a long time trying to solve the wrong problem.

The menopause transition didn’t teach me how to fix everything.

It taught me that loving someone and solving their problems are not always the same thing.

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