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I lay awake next to my wife of 34 years at 2:14 in the morning last November and tried to remember the last time I'd touched her hand. Not her arm. Not the small of her back when I'd come up behind her at the sink. Her hand. The way I used to. Driving home from her sister's place in Santa Fe in 1992. My right hand on the gearshift. Her left hand on top of mine. We'd ride that way the whole 4 hours. I couldn't remember the last time. I lay there in the dark and listened to her breathing and I tried to count back. Spring? Last Christmas? Her birthday in February? I gave up at 2:31. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling fan and felt a kind of grief I didn't have a word for. I'm 62 years old. My name is Gilbert. Everybody calls me Gil. I've lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for 41 years. My wife is named Imelda. She goes by Mel. We met at a wedding in Las Cruces in October of 1989. She was the bride's cousin. I was the groom's college roommate from UNM. She had on a green dress. I asked her to dance to a Linda Ronstadt song. We've been married since June of 1992. I worked for the city of Albuquerque for 31 years in the water department. Started as a meter reader. Retired 4 years ago as a supervisor. Mel is a retired second grade teacher. 28 years at Lavaland Elementary on the west side. We have two grown kids. Eli, who's 30, and his wife Camila, who live in El Paso. And Naomi, who's 27, and lives 11 blocks from us with her boyfriend Trevor who I like more than I expected to. No grandchildren yet. Our house is a small adobe on the south valley. Three bedrooms. A pomegranate tree in the back yard that Mel's father planted in 1994. The fruit comes in October every year. We don't pick it. Birds get most of it. Some falls and rots in the dirt. I'm telling you this because the pomegranate tree comes back in this story and I want you to know it was already there. It was always already there. Mel and I had what I would have told anyone was a good marriage. Not a perfect one. We argued. We'd had our years. The hard ones were 2003 to 2006 when our son Eli was a teenager and getting into things and I worked nights and she worked days and we passed each other in the kitchen like roommates. We got through it. We always got through it. By the time I retired in 2021 we had what I thought of as the dessert years. Mel had retired in 2020. We'd planned to travel. We'd planned to garden. We'd planned to drive out to Eli's place once a month and to spoil him and Camila as soon as they gave us a grandchild. We did some of those things. But something started going wrong with me in the spring of 2022 and by November of 2024, the night I'm telling you about, when I lay awake at 2:14 and couldn't remember the last time I'd held my wife's hand, the marriage I would have called good had gone quiet in a way I'd been hiding from myself for almost 2 years. It started slow. Spring of 2022. I was 60 years old. Mel and I had been intimate maybe once every couple of weeks for most of our marriage. After menopause, less. Maybe every three or four. But it was good when it was. We'd been a couple who'd never stopped wanting each other. I'd come up behind her at the sink and she'd lean back into me and that was a whole conversation. We knew the language. The first time it didn't work was a Friday night in May of 2022. We'd had a nice dinner. She'd made green chile chicken enchiladas. We'd watched something on the TV. I'd been thinking about it all evening, the way a man does, and when we got to the bedroom I kissed her and she kissed me back and we lay down and it just wasn't happening. She was patient. She always was. I said "I think I'm just tired." She said "that's okay honey." She kissed me on the forehead and rolled over and went to sleep. I lay awake for 3 hours. I told myself it was the wine. I'd had two glasses. I told myself it was stress. I'd had a long week before I retired, paperwork wise. I told myself it was 60. Sixty was when it happened to a lot of men. I had buddies who'd been on the little blue pill since they were 55. But it kept happening. A month later. Then two weeks after that. Then there was a stretch in August of 2022 where we tried 4 times in 3 weeks and only once worked, and that once felt like an accident. By the fall of 2022 we'd stopped trying. Not in a conversation. We never had a conversation. We just stopped. We'd kiss at night. She'd kiss the side of my mouth. She'd touch my arm. She'd say "love you Gil" and I'd say "love you Mel" and she'd roll over and go to sleep. And I'd lie there for an hour staring at the ceiling fan. I went to my doctor in January of 2023. Dr. Iversen. White guy. Late 50s. Been my doctor for 9 years. Good man. Honest. I told him. I told him everything. Not in the language of the kitchen. In medical words. ED. Difficulty maintaining. Reduced frequency. The clinical vocabulary that lets men talk about this without dying inside. He listened. He ran labs. Testosterone. Cholesterol. Blood sugar. The whole panel. Three days later he called. "Gil. Your testosterone is on the low end of normal. 312. We could supplement, but I'd want to address some other things first. Your blood pressure has been creeping. 142 over 91 last week. Your cholesterol is on the line. Your fasting glucose is 108, which is pre diabetic territory. There's a lot going on." He said "I'm going to give you a prescription for sildenafil. Generic Viagra. Try it. If it works, great. We'll keep working on the underlying stuff. If it doesn't, we'll come back and talk about other options." I filled the prescription at a Walgreens I drove 20 minutes out of my way to get to so I wouldn't run into anyone I knew. I tried it for the first time on a Friday night in February of 2023. It worked. Not the way it used to work between Mel and me. Not naturally. Not from a kiss in the kitchen. It worked the way a tool works when you pick it up and use it. It worked enough. She didn't ask. I think she knew. Or maybe she thought I'd figured something out on my own. Maybe she thought we were back. We tried again a month later. It worked again. But here's the thing nobody tells you about the pill. It works on the mechanical part. It doesn't work on the thing that comes before the mechanical part. The wanting. The walking up behind her at the sink. The way you used to feel when she walked across a room in a green dress. The pill is downstream of the feeling. It doesn't give you the feeling back. The feeling was gone. I'd lie there next to Mel after, on those nights when the pill worked, and I'd feel a kind of distance I didn't know how to close. We'd just done something married people do and I felt further from her than I had before we'd started. I started avoiding the bedroom. I'd stay up late watching TV. I'd come to bed at 12:30, 1 AM. I'd hear her breathing in the dark. I'd lie there with my back to her. She started staying up too. Reading in the living room until I came to bed. Maybe she was waiting up. Maybe she'd given up. I didn't know how to ask. By the spring of 2024 we hadn't been intimate in 19 months. 19 months. And the closeness around it, the kitchen kisses, the hand holding, the way she'd lean back against me when I'd come up behind her, all of that had thinned out too. We were polite. We were kind. We talked about the kids. We talked about the yard. We didn't talk about us. She started touching my arm instead of my hand. That's the thing I noticed first. It became a tell. We'd be sitting on the couch watching something and her hand would come over and land on my forearm. Not on my hand. Not threading her fingers through mine. On my arm. Like a friend. I'd say "love you Mel" at night and she'd say "love you Gil" and she'd touch my shoulder and I'd lie awake and try to remember the last time she'd reached for my hand. That brings us to November. Tuesday November 12th. I had a urology appointment. Dr. Iversen had referred me 3 months earlier because the sildenafil had stopped working as reliably and he wanted to rule a few things out. The urologist's office was up in the heights. Sandia Heights Urology. New building. Glass front. Pleasant. The urologist himself was a younger man named Dr. Whittaker who I didn't connect with. He was a fine doctor. He just wasn't a talker. He did the exam. He did the questions. He said the testosterone supplementation might be worth considering. He said we could also try a different class of medication. He said we'd schedule a follow up. I was getting dressed in the exam room afterward when there was a knock and the door opened and a woman came in. She was probably 50, 51 years old. Filipino American. She had on light blue scrubs and a stethoscope around her neck. Her name tag said Mirasol. PA. She said "Mr. Gallegos. I'm Mirasol. I'm Dr. Whittaker's PA. He had to take a call. He asked me to come in and go over your follow up schedule with you." I was still buttoning my shirt. She sat down on the rolling stool and put a folder on her lap. She didn't open the folder. She looked at me for a second. She said "Mr. Gallegos. Before we do the schedule, I want to talk to you about something. May I?" I said "okay." She said "I read through your chart before I came in. I see you've been on sildenafil for 21 months. I see your testosterone is on the low end. I see the blood pressure and the glucose. I see Dr. Whittaker is talking about testosterone supplementation." She said "I want to tell you something that's not in my official scope to tell you. So I'll preface it that way. This is one woman talking to one man for a minute. Okay?" I sat down on the edge of the exam table. I said "okay." She said "my husband is 58. He went through what you're going through starting about 4 years ago. He saw 3 different doctors. He was on the pill. He went on testosterone. Nothing got at the thing that was actually going wrong." She said "I'm a PA. I read everything. I've sat in on probably 1,400 of these consultations in the last 9 years. And I started reading the research literature on what's actually happening upstream of erectile dysfunction in men over 50. And I'll tell you something I've come to believe." She said "ED in men over 50 is rarely a sex problem. It is a circulation problem. It is a nitric oxide problem. It is an oxidative stress problem. The drugs we hand out, the sildenafil and the testosterone, they manage the symptom. They don't address the system that's been wearing down for 20 years to get a man to this exam room." She said "the system underneath, it's the same system that's making your blood pressure climb. The same system that's making your glucose climb. The same system that's making you tired in the afternoon. Erectile dysfunction in your age range is almost always the canary in the coal mine for a wider vascular and oxidative pattern that's been progressing for 2 decades." She said "and when you understand that, the question changes. It stops being how do we get this guy harder. It starts being how do we support the system underneath so that the body can come back online." I sat there and listened to a woman I'd met 4 minutes earlier explain my life to me. She said "the way the system works, you have a molecule your body produces called nitric oxide. That molecule is the master switch for blood flow. It tells your blood vessels to relax and open. When it's working, blood flows where it needs to go, including everywhere it needs to go in a 62 year old man. When it's not working, the signal gets destroyed before it can reach the vessels. Vessels stay tight. Blood doesn't get where it needs to go." She said "what destroys the nitric oxide is oxidative stress. The same oxidative stress that's been wearing down every other vascular system in your body. It's a kind of rust that's been forming inside you for decades. The Viagra doesn't do anything about the rust. It bypasses one mechanism by pushing on a different mechanism. It works around the problem. It doesn't address the problem." She said "I gave my husband a 90 day trial of something 18 months ago. He didn't tell me he was going to take it. I just left a bottle on the kitchen counter with a sticky note and I said try this for me. He took it. He's been taking it since." She said "the difference, Mr. Gallegos, isn't just the obvious thing. That came back too. The difference is he reaches for my hand again. He sleeps next to me with his hand on my hip. He kisses me in the kitchen. He's the man I married 30 years ago. The Viagra never gave me that. The pill gave me a mechanical husband. The thing that addresses the system underneath gave me back the man." I felt something break loose in my chest. I said "what is it." She said "it's a pomegranate extract. Specifically a brand called Alevia. Pomegranate has compounds called punicalagins. Some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. There's solid mechanism research on what they do for the very oxidative stress that's been destroying your nitric oxide. There's tissue level research on what they do in penile tissue specifically. There's a 24 percent salivary testosterone bump in one study. There's blood pressure data. Blood sugar data. The same system pomegranate supports is the system that's wearing down across all those areas." She said "it's not a magic bullet. It's not faster than the pill. It took my husband about 7 weeks before he felt anything. But what it does is different. It doesn't bypass the problem. It supports the system underneath. So when the body does what bodies do, it does it because the body is working, not because a drug is forcing it." She wrote something on a yellow sticky note and handed it to me. She'd written alevia.com slash pom slash 5. She said "90 day money back guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back, you get your money back. No risk to try." She stood up. She picked up the folder. She put her hand on my shoulder. She said "Mr. Gallegos. The pomegranate tree my mother had in her back yard in Manila when I was a child. She used to break the fruit open with her hands at the kitchen table and tell us it was the fruit of life. I didn't know what she meant. I'm starting to figure it out." She walked out of the exam room. I sat there for probably 10 minutes. I drove home with the yellow sticky note in my shirt pocket. When I got home, Mel was in the back yard. She had a basket. She was picking up fallen pomegranates from the ground under her father's tree. The tree was loaded that year. There were probably 30 fruits on the ground, some split open, some intact. I stood in the kitchen and watched her through the window. She was kneeling. She had on jeans and one of my old work shirts tied at the waist. Her hair was pulled back. She looked the way she'd looked at 36, kneeling in the same yard with our kids. I felt something I hadn't felt in 19 months. It wasn't sexual. It was earlier than that. It was the feeling I used to have at the sink. The feeling that came before the kitchen kiss. The feeling that meant I wanted to walk across a room and touch the person I'd built a life with. I walked outside. She looked up. She said "Gil. Look at all these. The tree went crazy this year." I knelt down next to her. I picked up a pomegranate. I said "Mel. I want to tell you something." She stopped what she was doing. I told her about the appointment. About Mirasol. About the sticky note in my pocket. About 19 months. About the hand holding. About the fact that I'd been hiding from her for 2 years because I didn't know how to come back. I cried in the dirt under her father's pomegranate tree. A 62 year old man crying in the dirt. She got down on her knees in front of me and she put her hands on my face. She said "Gil. I knew." She said "I knew. I just didn't know how to ask either. I thought you didn't want me anymore. I thought I was the problem." We cried in the dirt for a long time. There were ants going around us. A neighbor's dog was barking through the fence. A delivery truck went by on the street. That night I ordered the pomegranate. It came on a Thursday. I took the first one Friday morning with my coffee. I didn't feel anything for the first 8 days. But on day 9 I held Mel's hand in the parking lot of the Smith's grocery store on Coors. She was loading bags into the back of the Subaru. I came up beside her and I took her hand. She looked at me. She didn't say anything. She held my hand all the way to the cart return. Day 16 I slept with my hand on her hip. I hadn't done that in I don't know how long. Day 23 I came up behind her at the sink while she was washing breakfast dishes. I put my arms around her waist. She leaned back against me. We stood there for a long time. Not doing anything. Just standing. Week 6 I noticed my morning blood pressure readings, which I'd been taking every other day at the kitchen counter, had dropped. 142 over 91 had become 131 over 84. Week 8 my pants were looser. I hadn't been trying to lose weight. I'd lost 6 pounds. Week 10 was a Tuesday night in late January. Mel and I were in the bedroom. We hadn't planned anything. We hadn't said anything. We were just there, in our bedroom, like a married couple. And it happened the way it used to happen. Without a pill. Without thinking about it. Without me lying there afterward feeling further away than I'd felt before. After, Mel cried. Not sad crying. The other kind. She said "Gil. I thought we were done. I thought we were done with that part of our life." I said "we're not done." She said "I know." She put her head on my chest and she put her hand on my hand and we lay there until I fell asleep. I saw Dr. Iversen 6 weeks after that. My blood pressure was 128 over 80. My fasting glucose was 97. My testosterone, which I'd had retested on a hunch, had come back at 367. Up from 312. He looked at the chart. He said "Gil. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I don't need to know what it is. I just need you to keep doing it." I told him anyway. He wrote it down. He said "I'm seeing more and more of this. The men who get to the underneath are doing better than the men I have on testosterone supplementation. I'm not supposed to say that. I just said it." I'm telling you this story because there's a man reading this who's lying awake at 2:14 in the morning next to a wife he hasn't held the hand of in months. There's a woman reading this who's married to that man and who's stopped reaching for his hand because she thought he didn't want her anymore. It's not what you think. It's not that the love is gone. It's not that you've gotten old and this is just what happens. The system underneath has been wearing down for 20 years and the body is asking for support. Not for a workaround. Not for a pill that pushes on a different mechanism. For support of the system that's actually struggling. Alevia Pomegranate is what Mirasol the PA wrote on a sticky note for me. Standardized to the punicalagins, which is the part of the fruit that actually does the work. She told me most other brands skip that part because it's expensive to standardize for. I checked. She was right. You can order it at alevia.com/pom/5. They have a 90 day guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If your body responds the way mine did, you keep going. If you take it and you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back in the box and they refund every penny. That's the deal. That's the only kind of deal worth taking on something like this. I'm 62. I have a wife of 34 years. I held her hand at the grocery store yesterday. P.S. Mel started taking it in December. She didn't have a reason. She just watched what was happening with me and she ordered her own bottle. Her sleep is better. Her hands are warmer at night. She said this morning her hot flashes are less intense than they used to be, which I didn't even know was something pomegranate did. Apparently it's something pomegranate does. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is real. I called and asked because I am the kind of man who calls and asks. You take it for up to 90 days, and if it's not for you, you ship the bottle back and they refund you. No fight. Mirasol said "you have nothing to lose." She was right. P.P.P.S. Mel and I drove out to Eli and Camila's place in El Paso last weekend. I drove. Mel sat in the passenger seat. About an hour into the drive she put her left hand on top of my right hand on the gearshift. Just like 1992. Just like Linda Ronstadt on the radio. She didn't say anything. She just left her hand there for 3 hours. I didn't say anything either. I just drove. That's what this stuff is. It's not a number on a chart. It's the things you get back. The hand on the gearshift. The kitchen kiss. The wife you came back to. 👉 alevia.com/pom/5