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My husband thinks I've been taking testosterone. Because I've been initiating sex four times a week. I'm 53. He watched me carefully for three weeks before he asked. I was folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon when he finally said it. "Honey. Are you on something." I put the towel down. "What do you mean something." "Testosterone? Is that a thing women do?" "I'm not accusing you. I'm just. You seem different." I laughed so hard I had to sit on the floor next to the laundry basket. Then I told him. It isn't testosterone. It's a pillow. ======== Married 27 years. Three kids, all grown. Two grandkids on my daughter's side. Brick colonial we bought in 2004. I manage a title company. He's in commercial HVAC. From the outside we were a nice suburban couple with a paid-off mortgage and a decent life. Behind the bedroom door I had become a woman who went to bed in full pajamas and kept her back to him. ======== Sex started hurting at 49. Little at first. Then consistent. Then a thing you plan your life around. I'd tighten two minutes before he touched me. My jaw would clench. I got good at faking. A small breath. A hand on his chest. A quick "mm." I stopped initiating around year one. Stopped responding around year two. By year three I had trained myself out of wanting it entirely. Which turns out to be a skill you can teach your own body. I don't recommend it. ======== The moment I really faced it was the week of my own birthday. I turned 52. My husband had been texting me all day. Little hearts. A picture of us from 1997. "Happy birthday, beautiful." I was at my desk reading the texts and I realized I wasn't going to answer them with anything real. Answering real would open a door I'd nailed shut. I ate a salad in my car and cried into a plastic fork. Then I called my mother. She said "you sound tired, honey." "I am tired, Mom." "You've sounded tired for a year." She wasn't wrong. I was tired from performing. Tired from hiding. Tired from saying "I'm fine" 400 times a week. I hung up and went back to work and smiled at a woman signing closing documents like I hadn't just fallen apart in my Subaru. ======== I did what every woman does. I went looking for the fix. Gynecologist: estrogen cream, two brands, six months. Nothing. Lubricants. Four kinds. One was worse than the problem. Pelvic floor PT for six sessions with a young woman named Jenna. A sex therapist at $220 an hour for twelve sessions. $2,640. I told her about the bracing. The faking. The four years. She had me write three conversation scripts to have with my husband. I took them home and put them in my desk drawer. I didn't use them. I paid her $220 an hour to write scripts I couldn't bring myself to speak. Then I got desperate and went to a naturopath. Patchouli candles. She took my pulse at three places on my wrist. Prescribed "cold yoni steaming" and handed me a jar of dried herbs that smelled like my grandmother's basement. I stood in my bathroom with a jar of herbs and a bowl and looked at my reflection and said out loud: "What are you doing." I put the herbs under the sink. Next to the expired Drano. They are still there. ======== Here's the part that still makes me angriest. I was at a work function at a steakhouse last fall. A vendor's wife sat next to me. Loose tongue on wine. She told me, unprompted, that her husband had been "off" that year and she'd finally dragged him to the doctor. "Got him a testosterone pellet. In and out, 20 minutes. Insurance paid for half. He's 20 again." She winked at me like we were in a club. I smiled and cut my filet and could not swallow for about 90 seconds. The next week, a client bragged about his Cialis from a "men's health" clinic. "They hand them out like Tic Tacs." When I finally asked my primary about sex being painful, I was given a pamphlet on UTI prevention. He gets a pellet. He gets Tic Tacs. He gets a wink. I got a pamphlet. ======== I gave up in February. I bought flannel pajamas at Kohl's for $19.99. Two pairs. Wore them every single night. I had officially dressed for the ending of my own sex life. ======== A woman I met at a work conference gave me the pillow. I did not think it would be a stranger. We were at a two-day training in Orlando. I sat next to a woman named Pam at dinner. 58. Escrow officer out of Tampa. Somewhere around the second glass of wine she said "can I tell you something." "You have the exact face I had three years ago." "I'm going to write something on a napkin." She wrote "Moodie" on a cocktail napkin. "Look it up when you get home. Or don't." "But I don't know any woman my age who has found that napkin and regretted it." I tucked the napkin into my badge holder. I ordered the pillow from my hotel room at 11:40. In a hotel bathrobe. Watching HGTV on mute. ======== 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 from a Marriott bed with the HGTV marathon playing on mute. ======== The box came when I got home. I hid it in the linen closet behind the extra comforter. The first night I put it under my hips, he came up to bed humming. He has been a humming man since I met him. He stopped humming around 2021. That night he was humming again. He didn't know why. I did. I'd been fluttering around the kitchen all afternoon in a sundress I hadn't worn since 2019. I'd lit a candle. Touched his back when I walked past him. Four years of no signals. One afternoon of signals. He was humming. He came up to bed and saw the pillow and did not ask. Five minutes in he pulled back and looked at my face. "Is this okay." "Yes. Yes. Yes." He said "you feel different." I said "I am different." I was trying not to cry. I just wanted to be a woman in her own bed with her own husband. Not performing. Not bracing. Not waiting for it to be over. A woman. ======== Week one I initiated twice. I hadn't initiated in four years and suddenly I was initiating twice in a week. Week two I initiated three times. I walked up behind him while he was brushing his teeth on a Wednesday and wrapped my arms around him. He froze. He had toothpaste foam on his mouth. He said, around the foam, "right now." I said "right now." We were 15 minutes late to our own dinner reservation. Week three I initiated four times. Morning before work. Wednesday night after "Survivor." Friday afternoon because I had a half day. Saturday morning because Saturday morning. Week four I initiated four times again. My husband started watching me. Not in a bad way. In a way I can only describe as "confused tenderness." Like a man who could not quite believe the luck he was in. Which brings us to the laundry. ======== It was a Sunday. I was folding towels on our bedroom floor. He walked in and stood in the doorway for about 20 seconds. "Honey. Are you on something." "What." "Testosterone. Is that a thing women do?" "I'm not accusing you. You just. You seem like a different person." I lost it. I fell over sideways onto a pile of washcloths and laughed until I was crying. He sat on the edge of the bed. Half-smiling. Half-worried. When I could finally speak I said "it's a pillow." "What." "It's a pillow, Tom." I went to the linen closet. Brought it to the bed. "This. The thing under me on the nights that have been different." He stared at it. "That's it. That's all of it." He sat there quietly. "So you haven't been. You're not. You're just you." "I'm just me. Without the pain." He dropped his head into his hands. I thought he was laughing. He was crying. My husband. Who has cried three times in 27 years of marriage. He was crying about a pillow. "I thought you'd changed. I thought you'd decided to change. I thought I'd gotten very lucky." I sat down next to him. "I didn't change, baby. I came back." He held my hand for about ten minutes on the edge of that bed. The laundry didn't get finished. ======== I'm telling you this because if you're where I was. I need you to know what I didn't know. Your body isn't broken. It isn't old. It isn't "just aging." It isn't the thing your mother is telling you it is. It's a geometry problem. There's a pillow that costs $129 that fixes it. That's the whole thing. ======== If your husband has stopped reaching. If you brace. If you perform. If you haven't initiated in longer than you can count. Try the pillow. Moodie gives you 100 nights. In your own bed. With your own husband. If it isn't the thing, send it back. No questions. No emails. No hoops. 👉 https://trymoodie.com/products/moodie-couples-pillow 100-night money-back guarantee. Discreet shipping. The box just says Moodie. He thought I was on testosterone. I was just on a pillow. Same result. P.S. Our anniversary was last week. He took me to the same Italian place where we went on our first anniversary in 1998. Walked in holding my hand like we were 25. The hostess called us "you guys" like we were dating. He ordered us a bottle of something I didn't recognize and did the small wink at me he used to do when we were young. I did not brace. I did not fake. I ate my pasta and I touched his leg under the table and I felt like the wife I was supposed to have been for the last four years.