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"I'd given up on the bedroom, honestly." That's what my husband said, half-asleep, an hour after we'd actually had sex for the first time in seven months. He said it into my shoulder. His eyes were closed. I don't think he knew he said it out loud. I lay there staring at the ceiling fan listening to a man I've been married to for 26 years finally tell me the truth about what the last two years had been for him. ======== Seven months. I'd been counting too. I'd been counting since April. The day after Easter I realized my husband and I hadn't had sex since September of the year before. Seven months. Not a dry spell. Not "we're both just busy." A slow, quiet, mutual agreement neither of us had ever spoken out loud. ======== I'm 53. He's 55. We have a daughter who's a sophomore in college and a son who's a senior in high school. We have a split-level house, a leaking garbage disposal, and a joint Netflix account with sixteen profiles on it for reasons I can't explain. From the outside, we're fine. From the inside, we were two roommates who remembered the password to a room we'd both stopped going into. ======== The pain started when I was 48. Not a lot at first. Enough to make me brace. Enough to make me schedule it for Saturdays so I could recover Sunday. Enough to make me fake it so he'd finish faster. Enough to make him eventually stop reaching. He stopped reaching first on weeknights. Then on Saturdays. Then on anniversaries. I thought he'd lost interest. I thought he'd found somebody else, honestly. I checked his phone twice like a woman I never wanted to be. There was nothing. There was nothing because he hadn't stopped loving me. He'd stopped reaching because he could feel me bracing every time he touched me. He just didn't know how to tell me that. ======== My rock bottom was a bathing suit. Beach vacation last July. Our family had rented a house on the Outer Banks with my sister's family. I brought three bathing suits. And three cover-ups. I didn't take the cover-up off all week. Not once. Not on the beach. Not at the pool. Not in the kayak. Not in the hot tub at night. My husband never commented. He'd stopped commenting on my body a long time ago because he'd figured out I flinched when he did. The last night of the trip, I stood in the bathroom of our rented beach house and looked at myself in a cover-up at 10pm. I wasn't looking at my body. I was looking at a woman who had covered her body for seven straight days in front of a man who had promised to love it until he died. I locked the bathroom door. And I sat on the floor tile and cried into a beach towel. He knocked once. "You okay in there?" "Yeah. Just tired." He didn't knock again. ======== I'd tried everything. Three gynecologists. Estrogen cream. Estrogen suppositories. A $90 powder from an integrative doctor that tasted like actual dirt. I drank it for six weeks. I don't know what was in it. I'm not proud. Then I tried an Instagram intimacy coach. $250 per Zoom session. She had good hair and a soft voice and a custom Zoom background of a zen garden. Session one, she told me to "make a list of things I was grateful for about my body." Session two, she told me to "touch myself in the mirror for five minutes before bed." Session three, she told me to "write a love letter to my vagina." I wrote the letter. I wrote it sitting at my kitchen table at 10pm with a glass of wine. I didn't know what to say. I ended up writing "I'm sorry" sixteen times in a row and then I folded the paper and put it in the trash under the coffee grounds so my husband wouldn't see it. I canceled the fourth Zoom session. ======== Here's the thing that made me angriest. My boss is 62. His wife doesn't work. He came into the office last spring holding up a little orange prescription bottle laughing about how his urologist had "just mailed him another three-month supply of ED pills with no copay." He was laughing. Mailed. Three-month supply. No copay. I'd just paid $1,000 out of pocket that year on things that hadn't helped. I'd taken a half day off work to see a menopause specialist two hours away. My boss's ED pills showed up in his mailbox like a magazine subscription. The difference isn't biology. It's priority. ======== I gave up in June. Not "I'm leaving" gave up. "This part of my life is over" gave up. I told myself a lot of women my age live without a bedroom. I told myself we had a good marriage. I told myself I could go the rest of my life without ever being touched on the mouth again. I told myself that for about six weeks. Then I stopped telling myself that. Because I couldn't live in that sentence. I just hadn't figured out what to do instead. ======== My hairdresser figured it out for me. I was in her chair for highlights the Wednesday after my bathing suit breakdown. She's 60. She's been doing my hair for twelve years. She knows my marriage the way hairdressers know marriages. I don't know what I said that day. I think she could just see. She'd finished my highlights, walked me to the shampoo bowl, and was washing my hair when she said, with her fingers in my hair, not looking at me, "Sarah. I'm going to tell you something and you can tell me to mind my own business." I said "what." She said "I was where you are three years ago. My husband sleeps better than he has in a decade. The reason is a pillow. I'll write it on your checkout slip." She didn't say another word about it. When I paid, she handed me a post-it with the word "Moodie" on it. She squeezed my hand. "That's it. Look it up." I sat in my car in the parking lot and looked it up. ======== I read the website with my hands shaking a little. 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 five 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 sitting in the parking lot of my hairdresser's salon. ======== The box arrived on a Thursday. I hid it under the bathroom sink behind the extra toilet paper. I waited four days. I was afraid. Afraid it wouldn't work. Afraid my husband would laugh. Afraid I'd built up a hairdresser's post-it note into a miracle and the miracle would disappoint me. On Monday night our son was at a basketball game with friends. The house was empty. I put the pillow under my hips. I put on a t-shirt I hadn't worn in four years. And I waited for him to come upstairs. ======== He came up to bed around 10:30. Saw the pillow. Saw me. Did a little thing with his face I've been watching for 26 years where he doesn't want to hope for something. He lay down next to me. I reached for him first. I hadn't done that in two years. About fifteen minutes in, he stopped moving. Pulled back. Looked at my face for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, "What changed." Just those two words. Not a question really. More like he was reading the air in the room and naming what he was reading. I said "I'll tell you later. Don't stop." He didn't stop. ======== An hour later he was half-asleep on my shoulder. And he said it. "I'd given up on the bedroom, honestly." He said it without meaning to. His eyes were closed. His breathing was slow. I lay very still so he'd keep talking. He didn't keep talking. He was already asleep. But he'd said it. Twenty-six years of marriage and he'd said it. I cried with his head on my shoulder without making any sound. I cried for the seven months. I cried for the two years before that. I cried for the man who had slowly trained himself out of reaching for his wife because reaching felt like hurting me. And I cried because he hadn't actually given up. He'd just stopped asking. ======== Week one we had sex twice. Week two I stopped wearing the t-shirt to bed. Week three he started kissing my shoulder when he walked past me in the kitchen. Just one small kiss on the shoulder each time. Every single time. Month two he booked a hotel in Charleston. No occasion. He just booked it. Month three we both admitted, out loud, in the car on the drive there, that we'd each thought the other one had stopped wanting this. ======== The husband-confession moment came in Charleston. Rooftop bar the night before our last day. He'd had two drinks. He was looking at the skyline. He said, without turning, "I need to tell you something I didn't tell you the night of the pillow." I said "okay." "When I said I'd given up on the bedroom. That wasn't the whole thing. I'd given up on us. I hadn't told anybody. Not even my brother. I was going to wait until the kids were out of the house. Then I was going to figure out what to do. I don't know what I would have done. But I'd started thinking about it." He took a long drink. "You came back. I didn't think you were going to." I didn't say anything for a minute. Then I said "me either." We sat there on a rooftop in Charleston not talking. The bartender brought us a candle because our first one had blown out. ======== I'm telling you this because if your husband has stopped reaching. If you've been covered up on a vacation. If you've started thinking about what the second half of your life looks like without this part. 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 your husband has quietly given up, this might be the thing that brings him back. P.S. I wore a bathing suit with no cover-up at my sister's pool last weekend. My husband looked at me from across the pool like he was looking at a woman he'd just met. I drank my iced tea and pretended not to notice. He didn't pretend he wasn't noticing.