Hormonal Phase Gap: The Mechanism

By Rhu Strand, Functional Wellness Practitioner and Workplace Wellness Consultant

When I published the Hormonal Phase Gap here on my Field Notes, I described a pattern I kept noticing: her hormonal wave against his hormonal flatline. These quiet misreadings and misunderstandings grow out of the gap that sits between them. Since then, I've been diving deeper into the Hormonal Phase Gap. I've been reading around it, testing it against what I'm hearing, and I want to share what this closer look has revealed.

Understanding the Hormonal Phase Gap

The academic language for this area is "couplepause," and more recently "doublepause." These terms describe couples navigating menopause and andropause simultaneously. This shift is genuinely useful. It moves the conversation away from treating hormonal change as one person's private medical situation. Instead, it recognises that a couple often lives through this together.

However, a recent editorial raised a concern worth considering. The authors warned that this couple-focused framing risks "oversimplifying complex relational dynamics by assuming sameness." They treat both partners as though they're moving through roughly the same experience at roughly the same time. In practice, that's not the case.

That word, sameness, carries a lot of weight. It names the gap without explaining it. Nobody in that editorial has yet described what the difference between the two experiences looks like hour to hour, day to day, and inside a real household or even the workplace. That's the piece I've been noticing.

Observations from Real Life

I want to clarify what this is and what it isn't. I'm not describing findings from a clinical caseload. I'm early in this work, and this pattern hasn't come from years of client sessions. It comes from watching couples I know personally move through this stage of life. It also stems from my own life experiences and from conversations within the menopause group I co-run. In that group, the same shape of misunderstanding keeps surfacing in different households, described in almost identical terms by women who have never met each other.

This is an observation, not a study. I'm naming it as a pattern worth documenting properly, hoping it eventually gets tested with the rigour it deserves. It's not a conclusion I've already reached.

The Mechanism Behind the Gap

Oestrogen in perimenopause doesn't decline in a straight line. It surges and drops unpredictably, sometimes within the same week. This unpredictability is why perimenopause produces genuine good days alongside genuinely difficult ones. There's a wave here, visible to anyone paying attention, including the person living it.

Testosterone in andropause behaves differently. It falls slowly, by roughly one to two percent a year, across decades. Current research shows that this decline isn't only about age. Factors like sleep, stress, and environmental load also play a part. There's no wave to speak of. No good day to hold up against the bad one. Just a long, quiet flatline that's almost impossible to notice from the inside, because there's no contrast to observe.

When you put these two patterns in the same house, the maths of misunderstanding writes itself. Her good day makes his flatness look like a choice. His flatness makes her low day seem like it came from nowhere, aimed at him. Neither partner is misreading their own experience. They're misreading each other's because nobody ever told them the two patterns don't move the same way.

There's a further layer worth including here: cortisol sits underneath both patterns. Under real strain, it can sharpen the wave for her and deepen the flatline for him. This is worth its own piece another time.

Misunderstandings and Their Impact

This isn't a piece about sexual dysfunction, which is where existing couplepause and doublepause research has focused its attention. The Hormonal Phase Gap sits much earlier than that. It's about the everyday misreadings, the small accusations neither partner meant to make. These happen long before a couple ever gets near a conversation about intimacy. If the misattribution is left unaddressed, it may well be part of what stops that later conversation from happening at all.

It's also not a diagnosis. It isn't a claim that either partner's hormones are the sole cause of a relationship's difficulties. It's a pattern I keep seeing, offered as a possible piece of the picture—not the whole of it.

Why Understanding This Matters

I've noticed, including in recent writing on perimenopause and relationships, that the conversation is starting to acknowledge that women often blame their partner for hormonal mood shifts rather than recognising their biology. That's real progress. But it still only tells half the story. It looks at her side of the room and stops there. It doesn't ask what he's misreading in her or what she's misreading in him at the same time, for entirely different physiological reasons. The Hormonal Phase Gap is an attempt to describe the whole exchange, not just one half of it.

None of this needs to remain a private, individual struggle worked through quietly in one therapy room or clinic at a time. If both partners understood early that they were watching two entirely different hormonal rhythms, rather than reading something personal into each other's behaviour, I suspect many of these arguments would simply not need to happen.

Moving Forward Together

I'm setting this down as a working pattern, not a finished answer. It deserves proper testing by people with the tools to test it adequately. I'd still love to hear from anyone working in this space who recognises it. Until then, I'll keep watching for it in the couples I know, in the conversations in my group, and here on Field Notes as the thinking develops.

If you've read this and recognised your own household somewhere in it, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. Remember, understanding the Hormonal Phase Gap can be a crucial step in reclaiming your health and vitality.

Rhu x

References

1. Pakpahan, C. and Castelo-Branco, C. (2025) 'From Couplepause to Doublepause: Naming the Gap in Holistic Sexual Health Care for an Aging Group', Clinical and Experimental Obstetrics & Gynecology, 52(8). Link

2. Understanding the Secular Decline in Testosterone: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Clinical Perspectives, International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Link

3. 'Love in the Time of Perimenopause', Psychology Today (May 2026). Link