Metro: 'I'm a millennial - please stop sending me perimenopause memes'

Tier 3: Supporting source (media, company, or community), never used alone for health claims
Publisher: Metro.co.uk · Published: July 13, 2025 · Accessed: September 11, 2026

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[13 July 2025] Writer Nicole James: 'My friend sent me my first perimenopause meme about a year ago, when we were 41.' She double-tapped it 'out of courtesy, not really knowing what it had to do with me.'
After three or four more memes she asked the friend directly, 'Are we in perimenopause??' The friend answered: 'We are! It starts at 35-38.' When James asked 'Who said?' the reply was: 'Everybody.'
James describes the perimenopause conversation exploding around late 2022 alongside celebrity menopause coverage, and her own social feeds flooding with ads and content 'the second I turned 40.'
Her objection is to the meme register and to diagnosis-by-identification, not to the science: 'half of the strangers in my algorithm have been so quick to grab the diagnosis and slap it on all of their problems - to the point where it's starting to feel like an identity.' Weight gain? Perimenopause. Forgot your keys? Perimenopause.
She also raises the over-attribution question: 'what if your symptoms aren't perimenopause? Or at the very least, what if they're not only perimenopause?'
Her closing ask is explicitly for better material, not silence: 'I'm at least asking for better memes. After all, we're millennials, we invented memes. We gotta do better than this.'
She frames the refusal to laugh along as a legitimate position, comparing it to how men are permitted to go 'kicking and screaming into midlife' without being pathologised for it.