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There were a pair of flannel pajamas Greg had bought Susan for Christmas in 2013. They had been a joke. Plaid. Old-man flannel. The kind of thing a woman wears when she is officially not in the market. He had given them to her in front of his family because his sister had asked her in October what she wanted for Christmas and Susan had said "comfort." Greg had taken her at her word. He had laughed at his own joke. She had laughed. She had unwrapped them and put them on and they had all had pie. That first night she had worn them to bed and Greg had pulled her toward him on the couch and said, in her ear, "These are uncomfortable. Take them off." For ten years those pajamas had lived in the bottom of the drawer. They had been a costume she put on when her in-laws came over to make her father-in-law laugh. Three years ago they moved to the top of the drawer. Three years ago they became the thing she wore to bed every night. Greg had stopped pulling her toward him on the couch. Greg had stopped looking up when she got into bed. He brushed his teeth, he scrolled his phone, he turned off the lamp on his side. The flannel pajamas were a uniform now. She had bought three more pairs. Susan was forty-seven. Greg was forty-nine. They had been married twenty-two years. They had two kids in college. They had a dog and a four-bedroom house and a Honda CR-V Greg drove and a Subaru Outback Susan drove and a Tahoe boat at a lake forty miles north. They had been not touching each other in any way that counted for three years and they had not, in those three years, had a single conversation about it. Susan had been the one who had stopped first. She knew because she remembered the night. It had been the fall of 2022. She had been forty-four. She had been at the dining table working on a budget. Greg had come up behind her in the way he had been coming up behind her for nineteen years and he had put his hands on her shoulders. She had stiffened. She had not meant to. It had been a body thing. Her shoulders had risen up under his hands the way they had been rising up around her ears at her desk for two years. He had felt her stiffen. He had taken his hands off. He had said, "Sorry babe." He had gone to bed. The next night, when she had gotten into bed, she had been in the flannel pajamas. She had not made a decision to put them on. She had just put them on. He had looked up. He had not said anything. He had not pulled her toward him. That had been three years ago. The thing nobody had said to Susan in those three years was that she had not stopped wanting him because she had stopped wanting him. She had stopped reaching because her body had been clenched at the shoulders for two years before the dining room moment and the clench had become her whole way of being in a body. She had been an executive director at a nonprofit. She had been an unpaid project manager for her aging mother. She had been the one who handled the boys' college applications. She had been the one whose calendar had eight notifications between 7 and 9 every morning. Her body had been on alert at every minute of every day for years. By the time her husband had put his hands on her shoulders in the fall of 2022, the body had registered a hand as a threat because the body had registered everything as a threat. She had not known any of this. She had thought she had become a woman who did not want her husband anymore. She had thought it was an age thing. She had thought it was a long-marriage thing. She had not known her body had stopped because her body had been clenched for so long that the part of the body that did the wanting could not come online. Greg had not known either. Greg had thought he was repulsing his wife. Susan was in bed at 1:14 AM on a Sunday night in February. Greg had been asleep for two hours. She was scrolling. She had been scrolling at 1 AM for years. She did not know how to fall asleep without scrolling because she did not know how to make her body lie still anymore. She had clicked on a chatbot a friend had mentioned at book club. She had typed into it: "My husband and I have not had sex in three years. I do not know how to bring it up. I think I am the one who stopped." The chatbot had taken a moment. It had written back: "I am not a therapist. I want to offer one thing for you to consider. Women who carry executive function for households for many years often develop chronic sympathetic nervous system activation. The body, in this state, will down-regulate the systems that require the parasympathetic state — including arousal. This is not about your husband. This is not about your marriage. This is about your body having forgotten how to come down. The work is somatic. There is an app called Liven with a program called the Neurobalance Protocol that addresses this specifically. The quiz at the front takes three minutes." Susan sat up in bed. She took the quiz at 1:31 AM in the dark in flannel pajamas next to a man she had been not touching for three years. Her Dysregulation Score was 80. She started the protocol the next morning at 5:45 AM in the kitchen before Greg came down. She did not tell him. She did the nine minutes for six weeks before anything changed in her body. The first thing she noticed was that the shoulders dropped. Not all the time. Sometimes. In the afternoon they would just be lower, like somebody had let them out. She would feel them and think: there they are. In week four she stopped putting on the flannel pajamas one night. She had been getting dressed for bed. She had pulled them out of the drawer. She had paused. She had put them back. She had put on a t-shirt. She had not made a thing of it. She had gotten into bed. Greg had not noticed because he had not been looking up for three years. In week six she did look up at him from across the kitchen on a Saturday morning. He was at the counter making coffee. She watched the back of his head. She watched his hands moving. She felt, for the first time in three years, that she was looking at her husband and not at her co-parent. She did not do anything about it that morning. In week eight, on a Tuesday morning, Susan was in the kitchen at 7:14 AM. Greg was at the coffee maker pouring his cup. She walked over to him. She put her hand on his lower back, the way he had put his hand on her shoulders three years ago. He did not turn around. He said, very quietly, into the coffee maker: "Sue." She said, "Hi." He said, "Hi." She said, "I have been doing something." He said, "I can tell." She said, "I'm sorry." He said, "Don't say sorry." She said, "I thought it was you." He said, "I thought it was me." She said, "I would like to start again." He said, "Okay." He did not turn around for another thirty seconds. When he did turn around he was crying. He had not cried in front of her since his father had died in 2017. He kissed her hair. They stood in the kitchen for a while. The dog walked between their legs. They both laughed. It has been four months. Susan does the nine minutes every morning. She told Greg the second week of March on a long walk that what she had figured out at 1:31 AM in the flannel pajamas was that she had not been a woman who had stopped wanting him. She had been a woman whose body had been clenched at the shoulders for so long that the parts of her body that wanted things had been shut off because the body had been busy being on guard. The nine minutes had taught the shoulders to drop. The dropping had let everything else come back online. The flannel pajamas are back at the bottom of the drawer. If you have been in flannel pajamas for years, or in a t-shirt that has been your husband's for years, or in anything that is your uniform for not wanting to be touched — there is a question your gynecologist has not asked you. The quiz is the same one the chatbot pointed to. The link is below. She wishes she had searched for it the night her shoulders rose under his hands. 💙