I can still have sex, right? As long as I can still have sex, I'm good I wouldn't call it looking forward to, though... my periods aren't that bad now, so nothing to complain about except having to pay attention to birth control?

But menopause doesn't just involve your periods. Hormones control so many other things in your body, including your sexual function. Once you know about menopause, or have friends or family who have gone through it, you sure don't look forward to it!

Sounds like an odd - dare I say stupid question.

It's like asking who wants to be in a train wreck?

My wife is in her late 40s and is peri-menopausal. Menopause is not an event as much as it is a process. As indiglo mentions, the hormonal imbalances that occur have wide ranging impacts - few of them welcome. Hot flashes, night sweats, irritability, loss of sleep - its a very trying time for both the woman and her family. Then you go from the merely maddening to the life altering - the incidence of bone loss, heart disease and breast cancer skyrocket.

If you want fewer lighter periods it seems that BC is a far better approach - but not without it's own hazards - as reported by many women on EF forums.

My ovaries and uterus were removed in my mid-40s, plunging me into an instant and severe menopause. If it weren't for my beloved estrogen patches I would be absolutely miserable. Intense hot flashes every hour, night sweats where I wake up freezing and drenched like someone threw a bucket of water on me. Water soaked through to the bottom of my mattress.

A coworker who witnessed one of my sweat-on-the-forehead- red-face flashes presented me with a fan the next day.

Strangely, I have no trouble sleeping and have maintained my cheerful disposition. (At least I like to think so.)

Also, after menopause, you have to work at it if you want to maintain your ability to have sex. Vaginal tissues thin, shrink and become less elastic and more fragile. You also become drier. I was sexually inactive for a few years after my hysterectomy and when I began again I actually bled, I was so fragile. It took more than a year of regular stimulation before there was no more blood. The slow reversal of the damage from a few years of inactivity is continuing, although I don't think I'll ever gain back the lost vaginal length.

My gyn told me that if I didn't regularly do things that increase blood flow to the vagina, I would eventually shrink enough that sex would be impossible.

I do have a friend who painlessly went into menopause. Not one hot flash or mood swing. Her experience is not the norm though.

I don't know if I'd say I hate menopause (I would if it weren't for estrogen) but I'm not sure I'm neutral about it either.

No, because my mom blamed all her craziness on menopause. I don't want to be like that.

I'm already in perimenopause, and like any other time in life it's got its good points and bad. Each person experiences it differently, but for me the worst thing is the insomnia and the cold flashes (yep, you can have those instead of hot flashes). The best is being able to go for months between periods and sometimes getting away with 2-day bleeds when they do occur. I should probably mention too that I jumped on natural progesterone when I first noticed things getting wonky a few years back, which I believe has made the process easier. So far it's been MUCH easier than puberty was for me (knock on wood).

Strangely enough, I was just talking about menopause with a female friend earlier. I was having bad cramps from my period and wondered if there were many women out there who looked forward to menopause because they wouldn't have to deal with menstrual cycles anymore. I've never actually known anyone while they were going through menopause, so frankly I didn't know much about it.

My friend told me that she had just started going through menopause and that it really wasn't something to look forward to. And reading what some of the previous posts have said, has convinced me that compared to the occasional cramp, menopause is much worse. Yikes!

I am not looking forward to it, menopause hits you hard in my family and sticks around for a few years @__@.

I don't know anyone in my family who goes through natural menopause. Most of the women on my mother's side either have to have everything taken out early or they commit suicide before it happens (not because of menopause, but other reasons). The women on my father's side remain mum about the whole thing and don't show any symptoms. If I hear anything about it, it's from friends who relate how violently abusive their mothers got while going through it.

How about looking forward to post-menopause?

The women in my family end up going through menopause due to having hysterectomies, so no I am not looking forward to that. I am only 23 and I show signs of it coming actually. I have a hormone imbalance, but I have not been tested to correct it. I just stopped taking BC, to see if I need to detox off the hormones, since my hormone levels started messing with me badly.

Not looking forward to it because I hate being overly emotional and wreck like.

Honestly, there are days where I hope I don't live long enough to see menopause, but I'm not one of those people who worries about something that's 20 years down the line. I've seen my mother go through it and it was hell for her, so if that's any indication---no thanks!