By: Isabella Vienna
Picture a practitioner. Twenty-five years of practice. Three countries. Thousands of hours sitting with people in their most raw and vulnerable moments, walking alongside them through grief, loss, transition, the kinds of life changes that shake everything loose. Someone who has built a career on paying attention to what people are going through.
Now picture that same woman realizing that she had never once looked at the man beside her and asking how he was doing with any of it.
That’s where Michelle A. Hardwick’s story starts. And it’s exactly why Menopause Wingman: The Emotional Handbook for Partners exists.
A Single Sentence That Cracked Everything Open
Michelle A. Hardwick wasn’t looking to write a book when she joined a Zoom networking call to talk about her work emotionally supporting women through menopause. She wasn’t expecting anything to shift. And then Richard spoke.
“You should write a book,” he said, “if I’d had a book like that, my marriage might have survived.” One sentence. Twelve words. And Michelle A. Hardwick felt the full weight of it land within her.
Because she recognized it. She had been that wife. Utterly consumed by the intense and ever-changing experience of facing menopause alone, the grief about what she was losing, the loss of control, the exhaustion, the moments so dark. (UK research has found that female suicide rates are highest in midlife, the years when many women are going through menopause.) Michelle A. Hardwick lived inside those dark moments herself, and it is precisely that lived experience that gives this work its depth and meaning. She emerged from postmenopause with a profound understanding and an absolute conviction that no woman should walk that road alone.
Her husband John, had been standing right beside all of that. Bewildered. Trying to keep everything together. Never once did he ask how he was doing.
What followed was a profound realization, a myriad of emotions arriving all at once. Shock. Sadness. A little shame. A sudden piercing clarity.
Also on that call was Heather, a publisher. By the end of the conversation, the book had a green light.
What the Men Actually Carried
Building the book meant gathering and collating the honest voices of men across multiple countries who were willing to speak honestly about what it had been like. What she found confirmed everything Richard’s words had first awakened in her.
These men were in the dark. Yet underneath was something far more tender: a quiet, almost desperate wanting to help. They didn’t want their partners to suffer. They simply had no language for what was happening, no information, and nobody to turn to. Many were holding on, trying not to take the hard words personally, trying not to disappear even when nothing they did seemed right.
And living inside so many of those stories was the same unspoken question: what do I do? How do I help the woman I love when I don’t even understand what she’s going through?
That question, sitting quietly in relationship after relationship, is exactly what the book is trying to reach.
Why This Conversation Has Been Missing
Menopause has been framed, for generations, as something women endure privately. Something you don’t make a fuss about. And because it was framed that way, husbands were naturally excluded from the conversation, not out of malice but out of a cultural norm so deeply embedded that most people never thought to question it.
With roots in North Wales, half Swiss (her mother was born in Zurich), and now living in County Cork, Ireland, with her husband John, Michelle A. Hardwick grew up in a household where menopause was never spoken about. She lived through the consequences of her mother’s experience without anyone naming what was happening. Her father wasn’t part of it. Nobody was. And she carried that exact same unconscious pattern into her own life without realizing it until Richard’s comment brought everything into sudden and startling focus.
And there is something else Michelle A. Hardwick is keen to make clear, something she feels is often misunderstood. The reason so many women don’t consider their partner during menopause isn’t indifference. It isn’t selfishness. It’s that menopause is utterly consuming. The sheer volume of physical symptoms, emotional upheaval, hormonal chaos, and psychological change leaves almost no room to look outward. It is one of the most potent and demanding journeys a woman will ever make. Simply getting through each day can take everything she has.
Michelle A. Hardwick built her practice across three countries: New Zealand, Wales, and Ireland. Each one is a complete restart. Each one was a community that didn’t know her yet. Each one is a place where she learned something new about how people love, struggle, and find their way through.
The reality she’s pushing back against is straightforward. Menopause doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens inside relationships, families, and homes. The partner is living it too, just without a name for what they’re experiencing and without anyone asking how they are.
Intimacy Is Where It Gets Most Challenging
Of everything in the book, Michelle A. Hardwick says the intimacy chapter generates the most emotional response. It isn’t difficult to understand why.
Men tend to need intimacy to feel loved. Women tend to need to feel loved in order to be intimate. Menopause lands in the middle of that dynamic and turns it completely upside down. A woman’s body can feel like it’s working against her. Add exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and intimacy can start to feel like one more demand on a body that has nothing left to give. That withdrawal isn’t rejection. Michelle A. Hardwick is clear about this. It’s survival.
For the partner on the other side, though, the withdrawal feels personal even when it isn’t. It can be lonely. Confusing. The intimacy roadmap that worked before simply stops working, and nobody handed them a new map.
Her chapter doesn’t offer a checklist. It opens a conversation. Different timing, different kinds of connection, more communication, more patience. The point, she says, is that intimacy doesn’t have to end. It gets to evolve.
What She Wants Left Behind
Michelle A. Hardwick is building workshops, programs, and spaces where men can raise the questions they’ve been too uncertain or too proud to ask anywhere else.
The audiobook is in production, and her husband John is narrating the men’s voices and their experiences alongside hers, because she believes hearing a real man speak honestly and from the heart about this will reach people in ways that words on a page sometimes can’t.
The book has already been drawing significant attention. Loretta Dignam, Founder of The Menopause Hub, Forbes Top 50 Over 50 honouree and Ireland’s leading menopause advocate, describes it as giving partners “the tools, language and confidence to become allies rather than bystanders.”
Alongside the book and the audiobook, Michelle A. Hardwick works one-to-one with women moving through the emotional complexity of menopause, the anxiety, panic, fear, and overwhelm that can arise during this profound life transition, as well as with partners who want to show up more fully for the person they love. For those seeking that deeper support, she can be reached through MenopauseWingman.com.
The legacy she’s working toward is simple to describe, and every conversation, every couple, every partner who picks up this book is already part of it.
She wants younger generations to read the book before they need it, so that when their time comes, they’re already equipped, already present, already capable of showing up differently than previous generations did.
And she wants the men who trusted her with their stories to pass those stories on to other men. Younger men. Men standing at the beginning of something they don’t yet have words for.
That’s the whole point. This was never meant to be faced alone, by either of them.
Picture that same practitioner now. Paying more attention than ever. Asking the questions nobody thought to ask, and this time, making sure nobody has to answer them alone.
Menopause Wingman: The Emotional Handbook for Partners by Michelle A. Hardwick is available now on Amazon and soon as an audiobook at MenopauseWingman.com. Because no woman should face this alone, and no partner should either.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical, therapeutic, or relationship advice. Readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional or licensed practitioner for guidance related to menopause, mental health, intimacy, or relationship concerns.
