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My gynecologist asked "how often are you having sex these days?" I said four times a week. She raised an eyebrow, wrote something in my chart, and said "then I won't worry about dryness anymore." I was sitting on the paper-covered exam table in the blue gown. I was 53. Two years earlier I'd been in that same chair telling the same woman I was avoiding my husband because it hurt. She'd handed me a sample tube of KY. Two years later she was writing something in my chart because my answer had caught her off guard. ======== I want to tell you what happened in between those two visits. Because the space between "I'm avoiding my husband" and "four times a week" is where this whole story lives. And I want you to know that space doesn't take twenty years. It took me seven months. ======== I'm 53. Been married 27 years. Two kids, one still in college, one launched. A husband named Mark. A life that looks completely fine from the outside. Inside, two years ago, I was sleeping six inches from my husband every night thinking he'd stopped loving me. ======== The pain started at 49. Same story as every woman I've ever met in my age bracket. Sharp at first. Then dull. Then a kind of burning aftermath that lasted the next day. I'd schedule sex for Saturday nights. I'd take ibuprofen at 9pm. I'd moan at the right times. I'd count to 200 in my head. I'd roll over and pretend to sleep. Mark, who is not a stupid man, picked up on it. He slowed his reaching. Then he stopped his reaching. Then he stopped reaching on birthdays and anniversaries too. By the time I was 51, we were having sex maybe once every two months. By the time I was 52, it was once every four. I didn't count until it had already gone. ======== My rock bottom was a wedding song on the radio. I'd been driving home from Target on a Tuesday afternoon. "Have I Told You Lately" came on the radio. Our wedding song. We'd walked down the aisle to it in 1996. I'd pulled the car over in a CVS parking lot and cried for twenty-five minutes with the song on repeat. I'd hit the button to play it over and over. Four times I played it. Then five. Then six. I wasn't crying because of the song. I was crying because I could not remember the last time my husband had looked at me the way he'd looked at me at the altar. I sat in the Target parking lot with the engine running and my hand over my mouth. A man in a safety vest walked past my car and knocked on the window. "You okay ma'am?" I nodded. He walked on. I drove home. I put the groceries away. I made dinner. Mark didn't know about the parking lot. Mark didn't know about a lot of things. ======== I'd tried everything. Three gynecologists. Estrogen cream. Estrogen suppositories. Two bottles of expensive lube that came in little velvet bags from a women's wellness subscription. Vaginal dilators. An acupuncturist in a strip mall. Her office smelled like incense and lemon cleaning spray. She put needles in my feet for six sessions. She told me "energy" was blocked in my "pelvic bowl." I paid $110 a session and left with the faint smell of incense in my hair. I took a shower every time before bed so Mark wouldn't smell it on my pillow. The worst one was the hypnotist. A woman I'd found on Google. She had a velvet armchair and a little fountain. She told me to close my eyes. She told me to picture a blue door. She told me to walk through the blue door. I sat in that chair for 20 minutes picturing a blue door. Eventually she said "how are you feeling." I said "fine." She said "that's $240." I paid her and walked out to my car and sat there for twenty minutes wondering what I had just bought. ======== Here's the thing that made me angriest. My uncle at Christmas. Last December. He's 72. Had a prostate procedure two years ago. Fully recovered. Fine. At Christmas dinner, over the turkey, apropos of nothing, he announced to the whole family that his new urologist had just "prescribed him a stack of Cialis that would last him till 85." He laughed. My aunt laughed. My mother laughed. My father slapped him on the back. My cousins laughed. I laughed too. Because what else are you going to do at a Christmas dinner when your 72-year-old uncle is laughing about a lifetime supply of prescription erections. I had not had sex with my husband in three months. I'd spent $4,000 in the last two years on things that didn't work. My uncle got a "stack that'll last till 85" covered by insurance. The difference isn't biology. It's priority. ======== I'd given up by March. I'd stopped doing the things women do when they care about being seen. I'd stopped wearing perfume. I'd stopped shaving my legs in winter. I'd stopped looking in mirrors while getting dressed. I told myself I'd just grown up. I told myself the bedroom part of marriage wasn't guaranteed. I told myself I had enough. I was lying to myself so thoroughly I'd almost bought it. ======== The discovery moment was a stranger in an aisle at TJ Maxx. I was looking at throw pillows. Just looking. I wasn't planning to buy anything. An older woman next to me was looking at the same row. Maybe 64. Silver pixie cut. Denim jacket. She picked up a green velvet pillow, looked at it, put it back. Then, without looking at me, the way strangers sometimes do in aisles, she said "throw pillows are a scam. The only pillow in my house that matters is the one I ordered online and hid in my closet." She laughed. I laughed. She kept going. "Changed my marriage. 27 degrees. Some brand with a weird name. Moodie I think. My friend found it first. Now both of us use it." Then she walked off. I stood there with a blue pillow in my hand for probably three minutes. I put the blue pillow back. I looked up "Moodie pillow 27 degrees" in my car before I pulled out of the parking lot. ======== I read the website for twenty-two minutes in my driver's seat. The engine off. The windows up. My hands a little cold. Here's what it said, in plain English I could actually understand. After menopause, vaginal tissue thins. Every doctor had told me that. They hadn't told me the next part. When tissue thins, the geometry of sex changes. Lying flat pushes one specific wall of tissue against bone. That's where the friction comes from. That's where the pain comes from. It isn't dryness. It isn't hormones. It isn't in my head. It's an angle. For four years I'd been trying to fix the friction with creams. Which is like trying to stop a door from scraping by oiling the hinge. When the problem is the door's hanging at the wrong angle. ======== The pillow is made at one exact angle. 27 degrees. It lifts your hips into the spot where sex stops hurting. Firm memory foam that holds under body weight. Soft cover. Looks like a throw pillow. The box just says "Moodie." Nothing else. I ordered it in the TJ Maxx parking lot. ======== The box sat in my closet for two days. I was scared. I'd been scared before. I'd been scared every time a new fix showed up on my credit card statement and didn't work. On the third night, a Thursday, Mark came home from work with Thai food. We ate at the kitchen island. He made me laugh about something his coworker had said. That night I put the pillow under my hips and waited. He came to bed around 10:30. Saw the pillow. Didn't ask. Didn't say anything. He just kissed me the way he used to before we had words for anything. About eight minutes in, he stopped moving. Pulled back. Looked at my face like he was reading a sign he'd stopped believing was real. Then he said, very quietly, "Look at me." Just that. "Look at me." I looked at him. I'd been looking past him for four years. I looked at him. He didn't say anything else. He just stayed there, looking at me, while something between us came back without either of us naming it. ======== Week one we had sex three times. The first week. I didn't even think that was possible. Week two I started shaving my legs again. Not for him. For me. He noticed. He didn't say anything. He just touched the back of my calf once when I was walking past him. Week three I put perfume on for a Wednesday. Not a date. A Wednesday. Month two we were having sex four times a week. Sometimes more. Which is how I ended up at that annual gyno appointment answering the question honestly. ======== Back to the gyno. She raised the eyebrow. She wrote something in my chart. She said "then I won't worry about dryness anymore." I laughed. I said "I wasn't worrying about it either." She put her pen down. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said "what happened." Not in a clinical way. In a woman-to-woman way. I told her. The whole story. The KY sample two years ago. The TJ Maxx aisle. The pillow. The angle. She listened without writing. When I was done she said "I'm going to ask you the brand again." I said "Moodie. The box just says Moodie." She wrote it down on a little sticky note. Not in my chart. On a separate sticky note. Then she folded the sticky note and put it in her lab coat pocket. "For a friend of mine," she said. "Mm hmm," I said. We both smiled. ======== My best friend came over for wine on a Friday six weeks after that appointment. She's 55. Married 30 years. Her husband Richard is a good man who I'd noticed had stopped putting his hand on her back at dinner. We were on my back deck. She'd had two glasses. I'd had one. She said "I don't know what you and Mark are doing right now but he keeps doing that thing at parties where he finds you with his eyes from across the room. Richard used to do that. He doesn't anymore." I set my wine down. I said "I have to tell you something. And I'm only telling you because I love you." I told her. The whole thing. The parking lot. The angle. The box. She didn't laugh. She wrote it down in her phone. She went home. Two months later she texted me "I owe you a bottle of something nice." ======== The husband-confession moment came at a vineyard. A Saturday afternoon in late spring. We'd driven out to the Finger Lakes for a weekend tour. The kind of trip you take when the kids are gone and you're trying to remember what you used to do together. We were between tastings. A riesling at the first stop, a cabernet franc at the second. There was a wooden bench outside the second winery looking down at the rows of vines. We sat there with our glasses. Mark wasn't looking at me. He was looking out at the vines. His thumb was tracing my wedding ring where his hand rested on my knee. He said, quietly, "I had a list last year of things I was never going to have again." I didn't say anything. "I'd added sex to the list in March. I'd added being wanted by my wife to the list in April. I'd added kissing you on the mouth in May." He took a breath. "I've been erasing things off that list one by one since June." He kept looking at the vines. His thumb kept tracing the ring. I didn't explain. He didn't ask me to. ======== I'm telling you this because if you've been lying to your gynecologist. If you've been lying to yourself. If you've been crying in a parking lot to your wedding song. You're not broken. Your body isn't old. It's a geometry problem. There's a pillow that costs $129 that fixes the geometry. That's the whole thing. ======== 👉 https://trymoodie.com/products/moodie-couples-pillow 100-night money-back guarantee. Discreet shipping. The box just says Moodie. If you want to change the answer you give your gynecologist next year, this might be the thing. P.S. At my sister-in-law's 60th birthday party last weekend, my husband pulled my chair out for me at dinner. He hadn't done that in 15 years. Nobody at the table noticed except me. I sat down. I said thank you. He said "of course." We kept eating. Some things you don't have to explain.