The purpose of the Andropause or Male Menopause is to mark the end of the first part of a man's life and get him ready for the second phase. Male Menopause is not as many fear the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. It is the opening to the most passionate, powerful, productive, and purposeful time of a man's life.

The term "male menopause" is obviously inaccurate. The term "menopause" was championed by French doctors in the 1870s, combining two Greek words-menses ("periods") and pausis ("stop"). Men don't have a period, so they don't stop having one. I chose to use male menopause when I wrote my books on the subject because I found there were so many similarities between what women and men go through. The main difference is that men can continue to reproduce following this change of life, where women's reproductive life ends. There have been several names which have been used to describe this important life transition: male menopause, Andropause, viropause, the male climacteric, penopause, and andropenia. All indicate that there is a change or ending that occurs in male functioning. More so than before I am using the term Andropause (andro from the Greek word meaning "male" and pausis from the word meaning "stop.") It also concentrates on the fact that there is a decline in male hormones, particularly the androgens (andro, "male" and gen "to give), like testosterone during time of life.

I often think this time of life as climbing up a mountain. At some point we reach our highest level and begin coming back down. It's no surprise that we are scared of the changes that come with the down-side of the mountain. We died when we reached the bottom for most of human history. The average life-span was only 47 years of age at the turn of the century. Those of us who reach 50 can expect to live another 30 years. Lots of us will live to be 100 or more.

There is a second mountain for us to scale, one that lets us to be more peaceful and less driven, more playful and less serious, more accepting and less demanding of ourselves and others. But, in order to get to this second mountain, we must pass through the Male Menopause valley. We can't jump from peak to peak.

In order to successful navigate this second mountain we have to recognize that it is quite different than the first. One of the most shocking, and disconcerting, aspects of this shift is that our whole sense of manhood changes. It's as though the polarities of life had suddenly reversed themselves. It's a time to create a new definition of what it means to be a man, a challenge that is mystifying to many of us.