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This is a picture of the dinner in San Francisco that saved my marriage. My husband and I had dinner with another couple last weekend. By the end of dinner I'd ordered something off my phone under the table that I think might have saved my marriage. I need to back up because this is going to sound ridiculous. I'm 54. My husband Tom is 56. We've been married 28 years. For the last two of them, we've been roommates. Menopause hit me at 51. I won't go through the whole list because if you're reading this you probably know it. Night sweats. Waking up at 2AM soaked. Brain running through every single thing I'd ever done wrong. Jaw clenched so tight by morning my temples would throb until lunch. Anxiety that sat in my chest all day for no reason. And the part nobody warns you about — the complete shutdown of any sex drive. Like a switch got flipped and the woman who used to want her husband disappeared. Tom moved to the guest room about 18 months ago. Not because we were fighting. Because every time I moved at night, he woke up. Every time I got up to change my pajamas or pee or lay there scrolling because I couldn't sleep, he was up too. He has a 6AM commute. He couldn't keep doing it. We told ourselves it was temporary. It wasn't. We stopped touching. Stopped saying goodnight. We'd eat dinner watching TV and barely talk. We were two tired strangers running a household. I'd tried everything. HRT for eight months — patches and pills, both. Gave me bloating and migraines and didn't fix the sleep. Melatonin in every dose. Magnesium glycinate I'd been taking for three years that did absolutely nothing. CBD. Black cohosh. A $300 cooling mattress topper. A meditation app I never opened past day three. My gynecologist looked at me at my last visit and said "This is menopause. Some women have it harder. We can try a different HRT formulation in six months." She was sympathetic but out of ideas. I'd basically accepted that this was my life now. So last weekend Tom and I had dinner with our friends Lisa and Mark at this little Italian place in North Beach. Lisa and I went to college together. We've been close for 30 years. She'd hit menopause around the same time I did and we'd compared notes for years over wine. Both of us miserable. Both of us sleeping apart from our husbands. Both of us watching our marriages drift. I hadn't seen her in about four months because she and Mark had been traveling. The second she walked into the restaurant I knew something was different. She looked ten years younger. Her face was relaxed. She was holding Mark's hand walking to the table. They sat down and Mark immediately put his arm around the back of her chair and she leaned into him without thinking about it. I stared at her. I said "Lisa. What is going on with you. You look incredible." She laughed. Mark laughed. They looked at each other in this way that I hadn't seen them look at each other in maybe five years. She said "Okay we have to tell you something." I'll try to write what she said the way she said it because I don't want to lose any of it. She said "Six months ago Mark and I were planning a separation. We weren't telling anyone. We were just done. The sleeping apart had become permanent. I hadn't wanted him to touch me in over a year. He was working late every night because he didn't want to come home. We'd already talked to a lawyer about how to do it without traumatizing the kids." Tom and I both put our forks down. She kept going. "I was scrolling a Facebook menopause group at like midnight one night. Couldn't sleep, obviously. And I saw a post from Jennifer Hartwell. Remember Jen from the dorms?" I said "Of course." "She'd written this long post about how she'd been suicidal from menopause. Like genuinely suicidal. She'd done a wellness retreat in Sedona that completely changed her life. She didn't go into a lot of detail in the post but she said her marriage was back, her sleep was back, she felt like a person again." She said "I'd never spent that much money on myself in my life. The retreat was $2,500 plus flights. Mark and I were already planning to spend ten times that on a divorce. So I told him I was going. I didn't ask. I said I was going." Mark jumped in here. He said "I figured she was going to come back relaxed for a week and then we'd go right back to where we were. I'd already made peace with the divorce. I wasn't angry about it. I was sad." Lisa said "I went for five days. Breathwork in the morning. Sound baths. Meditation. Hiking in the red rocks. Healthy food. The whole thing. By day three I was sleeping through the night for the first time in seven years. The jaw thing was gone. The anxiety was gone. I was crying at every meal because I couldn't believe I was feeling like myself again." She said "I came home a completely different person. Mark thought I was on something." Mark said "I genuinely thought she was on something. I asked her if she'd done ayahuasca." Tom and I were laughing but in this stunned way. Because Lisa was right there in front of me looking like the woman I went to college with. Lisa said "But here's the thing. It didn't go away. I came home and I kept sleeping through. I kept feeling good. Two weeks later I wanted Mark again for the first time in over a year and we both cried about it like teenagers. I figured eventually it would wear off and the menopause would come back. It didn't." She said "After three months I had to know what had happened to me. Because it wasn't normal for a wellness retreat effect to last that long. I emailed the wellness director, this woman named Dr. Perrin, and asked her to be honest with me about whether they'd given me anything during the retreat that I didn't know about." Lisa pulled out her phone. "This is the email she sent back." She read it to us at the table. Dr. Perrin had written that yes, every guest at the retreat got a small tray on their nightstand every evening with tea and two gummies. The gummies were magnesium bisglycinate. She said most guests didn't even read the card and took them with the tea before bed. She said the meditation and the breathwork helped, but the gummies were doing about 80% of the work. I said "Lisa. I take magnesium. I've been taking it for three years. It does nothing for me." Lisa said "I said the exact same thing. I'd been taking magnesium glycinate from Whole Foods for two years before the retreat. Did absolutely nothing." She said "Dr. Perrin had me look at the back of my old bottle. Not the front. The back. Sure enough — the supplement facts said magnesium glycinate AND magnesium oxide. That word 'and' was hiding the fact that most of what I'd been swallowing was oxide. She told me the body absorbs about 4% of oxide. I'd been basically eating chalk for two years." Tom said "Wait what?" Mark nodded. "Look it up on your phone right now. I bet whatever your wife has been taking has oxide on the back." I pulled up my phone right there at the table. Found my magnesium on Amazon. Tapped to see the supplement facts. Magnesium from magnesium glycinate AND magnesium oxide. I just stared at it. Three years. Every single night. Telling myself magnesium didn't work for me. And it was mostly oxide. Lisa said "Dr. Perrin sent me an article that explains the whole thing. Why the bisglycinate form actually works. How most brands hide the cheap form on the back of the label. The brand they use at the retreat is in there. I've been taking it ever since I got home. Six months now." Mark said "She's been taking it. I've been taking it. I started taking it a month after she got back because she was sleeping so well next to me that I started sleeping better from her not thrashing around. Then I tried two of hers one night and now I steal them every night." Lisa said "Mark and I sleep in our bed. Together. Every night. We're back. I don't even know how to explain it. We're back." She told us about the mechanism the way Dr. Perrin had explained it to her. Bisglycinate is magnesium bonded to two glycine molecules. Your body recognizes it as an amino acid instead of a mineral. So it's gentle on your stomach and crosses the blood-brain barrier and goes directly to your nervous system. Once it's there it activates GABA receptors. Those are the off switches in your brain. Your thoughts slow down. Your muscles start to relax. Then it triggers your brain to produce its own melatonin and your natural sleep cycle resets. She said "Almost 70% of Americans are magnesium deficient and have no idea. And in menopause it's even worse because when estrogen drops, magnesium drops with it. Most of us in this stage of life are completely empty and we don't know it because we think we're taking magnesium when we're actually taking oxide." I sat there with my phone in my hand looking at the supplement facts on my old bottle. Under the table I pulled up the article Lisa had been talking about. I read the first three paragraphs while Tom asked Lisa more questions. I scrolled down to the brand Dr. Perrin uses at the retreat. I tapped it. I ordered a bag right there at dinner without telling Tom. When the check came Tom asked Lisa one more time. "Is this real? Be honest. Is your marriage actually back?" Lisa looked at Mark and said "We had sex three times this week. I'm 55 and I had sex three times this week. It's real." Mark turned bright red and shrugged. We hugged them goodbye outside the restaurant. Lisa squeezed my hand and said "Just try them. Two weeks. That's all it takes." In the Uber on the way home Tom said "Did you order them?" I said "At the table." He said "Good." That was three weeks ago. I started taking two gummies before bed the night they arrived. First night I slept until 5:30. Woke up to use the bathroom and went right back to sleep. No 2AM wake-up. No drenched pajamas. Second night I slept through. The whole night. By the end of the first week I was sleeping seven hours straight every night. My jaw wasn't tight in the morning. The buzzing anxiety I'd been carrying around in my chest all day for two years was gone. Tom moved back into our bed on day nine. He didn't ask. He walked in one night with his pillow and got in next to me. We laid there in the dark and I started crying and he held me and said "You're sleeping. You're actually sleeping. I can hear you breathing." We had sex three nights later. I won't describe it because that's between us but I will say that the woman who used to want her husband came back. I thought she was gone forever. She wasn't. She was empty. Yesterday Tom told me he'd ordered a bag for himself because he doesn't want to keep stealing mine. I texted Lisa this morning to thank her. She wrote back "I told you. Two weeks. Welcome back." I'm sending this to every friend I have who's in menopause. I'm sending it to my sister. I'm sending it to women in my book club who I've watched drift from their husbands the same way I drifted from mine. If you're in menopause and you're sleeping apart from your partner, or your intimacy has disappeared, or you can feel your marriage drifting and you don't know how to stop it — read this. 👇 Here's the article Lisa sent me. The brand Dr. Perrin uses at the retreat is linked inside. It's the one I'm taking. It's the reason my husband is back in our bed.