How to support your wife through menopause

What I wish someone had told me about perimenopause

 
Building TALIA taught me things I never expected to learn. I went into it thinking I was building an app to help my wife. What I actually got was an education. And it's left me feeling strongly about something: menopause doesn't just affect the women going through it, it also affects everyone who loves them. Husbands, partners, kids, friends. Everyone needs educating, but I'm particularly passionate about helping men understand it better.

What actually helps

You'll be told, correctly, not to try and fix it. Every guide says this, and every guide is right, and it's still one of the hardest things to hear if you're a fixer. You want to make it better for her. You can't. What you can do is pay attention, stay present and get the two of you talking to someone who actually knows what's happening medically. For the clinical basics, you can start here:

• NHS — Menopause and perimenopause
• The Menopause Exchange — A Man's Guide to the Menopause

Once I understood what Kate was dealing with, I went looking for an app to help her manage it, but I couldn't find one I trusted.

Why I couldn't trust what was out there

I've spent 25 years building apps, mostly loyalty programmes, building systems whose entire purpose is to collect people's data and use it. So when I started looking at menopause and perimenopause apps, I read them the way I read my own industry, and I didn't like what I found. Free apps holding a woman's most sensitive health information, funded by that same information, sitting on servers I had no way of checking. I wasn't going to hand Kate's data to a system I understood too well.

By the time I went looking, we'd already lived through the first few years of perimenopause blind, with no idea what was happening or why. Kate was on HRT by then, but keeping track of it all, what was working, what wasn't, what needed to change, was still a mess of memory and guesswork. That's what I was actually trying to solve for her. So I built the opposite of everything I used to build. No server. No account to breach. No data leaving the phone at all.

What we built from lived experience

TALIA is a private, on-device app for tracking perimenopause symptoms, HRT and changes over time, so you can see what's working, stay consistent and walk into any appointment with evidence that can't be ignored.

TALIA tracks over 70 recognised symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, covering far more ground than most people realise: physical, sexual, emotional, cognitive, sleep and temperature-related. In practical terms, TALIA gives you and her:

• A private record of her symptoms, across all of it — not just the ones everyone's heard of, like hot flushes and night sweats, but brain fog, joint pain, anxiety, low mood, disrupted sleep, tinnitus and changes in libido too. All just as common, all just as real. This also includes things rarely talked about, like UTIs and vaginal discomfort, dryness, irritation, tightness, that can affect everyday comfort and intimacy and are frequently not connected to menopause at all, by either partner. Topical vaginal oestrogen is a recognised, doctor-prescribed treatment that many women find makes a real difference. If this sounds familiar, it's worth her raising it specifically at her next appointment.
• Period tracking — changes to her cycle are often an early sign of perimenopause.
• Sleep tracking — one of the ways doctors can tell which hormones are shifting and causing problems, so we built a simple, effective way to track it.
• Reminders that keep her medication and HRT consistent. This was critical for Kate, so we made sure it works across all the varied and complex HRT routines and schedules out there. The reminders and body application map take the mental load off her, on top of all she's already managing.
• Supply tracking & key dates - a reminder to reorder a prescription, her PPC, coil replacment or restock a supplement before she runs out.
• A pattern view over time, showing what's actually changed and when, rather than the two of you guessing. Used well, it can also flag triggers like work stress, alcohol or a change of routine, so the bigger picture helps you both manage it together.
• A structured report she can hand to her doctor, instead of trying to reconstruct six months of symptoms in a ten-minute appointment.
• Tracking for other meds and supplements too — Kate takes several for sleep and general wellbeing, so she asked for those to be managed in the app as well.

This is what we built from living through it ourselves: our way of trying to make the transition a little easier, with a tool. Not advice, not a diagnosis, not a community. There's plenty of that out there already.

Help a woman you care about get TALIA on her device, so she can build a private record and have better conversations with her doctor, based on evidence rather than memory.