Halle Berry‘s perimenopause symptoms were mistaken for herpes.
The 57-year-old actress was convinced she was going to “skip” any symptoms associated with a woman’s hormone levels dropping and periods stopping. However, when Berry was 54 and started dating “the man of [her] dreams,” Van Hunt, she found sex increasingly painful.
“First of all, my ego told me that I was going to skip it — I’m very safe; I’m healthy; I managed to get myself off of insulin and manage my diabetes since I’m 20 years old,” Berry said to first lady Jill Biden at the “A Day of Unreasonable Conversation” summit at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on March 26.
The Bruised actor then told how the pain after sex led her to visit her doctor, who told her she had the worst case of herpes he’d ever seen, prompting her and Hunt to get tested — only for neither of them to have the STI.
“I realized after the fact that [pain] is a symptom of perimenopause [due to dryness]. My doctor had no knowledge and didn’t prepare me. [That’s] when I knew, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to use my platform. I have to use all of who I am, and I have to start making a change and a difference for other women,’” Berry said.
The Oscar-winning star said she “wants to change the way women and men feel about women during their midlife and how they feel about this — which used to be a dirty little word — menopause, perimenopause, and we in this room have to change that … it can’t just be the doom and gloom story. ”
“This is a glorious time of life,” Berry added.
Berry and Biden ended their discussion with a plea to the crowd of executives and creators to “help us change the way culture views women at this stage of our lives.”
“And we’re not exactly at the end. We’re sitting up here, two women who are clearly down the path of life, [and] we are not done. We’re just getting started in our next act,” the Cloud Atlas actor added.
