Set off warning: This text contains mentions of rape, melancholy, and suicidal ideation. If you happen to’re experiencing ideas of suicide, you’ll be able to name the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988, 24 hours a day.

Gabrielle Union and I are speaking about our durations — particularly, what occurs to them in perimenopause.

“They’re coming each two or three weeks,” I say. “Nobody warns you that is going to occur.”

“And nobody tells you what’s going to return out,” she says. “Like golf balls.”

She recommends Knix interval underwear: “They’re going to be your pal. Okay-N-I-X.” I write the title down.

Virtually each lady over 45 (like me) and definitely each lady over 50 (like Union), has entered the menopause journey. However you’ll be able to most likely rely on one hand the variety of girls in Hollywood who’ve ever publicly uttered the M-word. Union has a reasonably good thought of why that’s. “I feel to assert it’s to assert defeat as a viable lady, a worthwhile lady, as a result of that’s what the patriarchy has led us to imagine,” Union says. “Years in the past, I discovered a phrase that some misogynistic males use in Hollywood: ‘What’s her fuckability quotient?’ So if you concentrate on the fuckability quotient, being trustworthy about growing older and menopause is like taking your self out earlier than they even discover that possibly you are on deck to be booted into the pasture. You’re not going to have the identical pay; you’re not going to get the identical jobs.”

However talking of fuckability: Fuck these guys. 51-year-old Union hasn’t simply uttered the M-word, she’s shouted about it. She first shared in 2021 that she entered perimenopause — the part of fluctuating estrogen ranges that leads as much as a girl’s ultimate interval — at 37. Union says she has now been in perimenopause for 14 years.

“Menopause” refers to easily the 366th day since a girl’s final interval, after which she turns into “postmenopausal.” “I’ll get proper across the yr mark [without a period] and suppose, OK, I’m able to let it go. And he or she’s like, ‘Hey, lady, I’m again,’” Union laughs.

Predictability is actually not an indicator of the menopausal stage. To assist girls making an attempt to get a deal with on what they’re experiencing, Union is partnering with Clearblue to advertise its new Menopause Stage Indicator, a symptom- and cycle-tracking app plus 5 urine exams that measure FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) ranges to point an individual’s possible menopause stage.