Screen gem Halle Berry said that her process of menopause created friction in her dream relationship with Van Hunt because sex felt like “razor blades.”
Berry was brutally candid in her discussion of sex and intimacy with host Drew Barrymore as they navigated menopause and what that did to their intimate sexual parts.
Halle Berry had to learn how to have sex all over again
“We struggled with finding a way to have sex again,” she admitted on the Drew Barrymore talk show, and “getting rid of the dryness, making it more enjoyable, because it got pretty rough for a minute.” Berry, who began dating Hunt in September 2020, said there were “six or seven months” where having sex felt like “razor blades.”
The 58-year-old Berry said that, at age 54, she tried to go to the bathroom one day and that releasing her urine was so painful that Hunt rushed her to the hospital. Berry added that her genitals had become so swollen that she could not close her legs because of the pain.
“When I was 54 years old, I had just met Van,” she recalled. “I manifested this man and we were having the best time. I finally met my person and it was amazing.” However, one morning, Berry “tried to go to the bathroom” and felt excruciating pain. “I couldn’t go. It was so painful … it took me almost 10 minutes to just empty my bladder because it was so painful,” she recalled. “And substances were down there that I had never seen before and I thought, ‘What is this?'” The Oscar winner knew something was wrong and Hunt, 54, drove her “right to the doctor” because her nether region was “so swollen.”
Doctor admits misdiagnosis
The original diagnosis of herpes put a strain on the very relationship that Berry had dreamed of being a part of. It led to what she said was 72 hours of being embroiled in the blame game about who gave it to whom.
The problem was alleviated when the doctor called afterward to say that Berry was misdiagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.
“He said, ‘You do not have herpes,'” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘OK then, what is it?’ And this was the defining moment for me: He said, ‘I don’t know, that’s what it looked like.’ And that sent me on my own reconnaissance and my own researching and that’s when I came up with Dry Vagina Syndrome, that women have when they are in perimenopause,” she explained. “And I had all the symptoms of what that felt like.”
Berry continued, saying that perimenopause is the “transitional time around menopause” and can include several symptoms that are “caused by the changing levels of hormones in the body” — including mood changes, night sweats and vaginal dryness — according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
