By Sarah Wheeler

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images

Last June, I turned to my husband as he toweled off from the shower, steam fogging his glasses, and asked him for a break from sex.

“Like, for forever?” he replied.

“No — how about six months? Think of it as a sabbatical.”

A year before, we’d been gifted a rare night away and splurged on a hotel suite with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Like most long-standing couples with young children, we knew what we were supposed to use this time for: rekindling the magic, making romance — sex, in other words. But, also like most long-standing couples with young children, we had found ourselves in an erotic rut that had already marred past getaways with the stain of unmet expectations.

Instead of “doing it,” we sat across from each other on the expensive love seat and read our lists of “accelerators” and “decelerators” out loud. If you are a liberal intellectual woman nearing menopause, you’re probably already familiar with this parlance — they’re other words for turn-ons and turn-offs, respectively — popularized by Emily Nagoski in her best-selling, empire-spawning book, Come As You Are. This book, and the accompanying workbook full of reflections and exercises, had become our latest Hail Mary. At this point, my husband and I had been together for almost 20 years. Gone were the days of my accelerators being “waking up” and “seeing you in a shirt.” We were parents to two children; we had survived years of deep COVID-pandemic isolation, stepping on each other’s toes in our home offices, and our mutual regression to soft pants. We had long since slid into the nebulous category of “sexless marriage” — at least by some definitions. Even when we managed a monthly bang, it was not, it seemed, good enough.

My list of decelerators was long, my accelerators brief (”Mexico,” for example); my husband’s, the opposite. He still wanted me, seemingly all of the time. My wantings were few and far between, one or two days a month when my hormones commanded me to fuck anything I could find — but only if we were both showered, well rested, on top of all of our work, and magically freed from young interlopers. This incompatibility, I knew, meant trouble for a relationship. Something was clearly wrong with me. I was fussy. I was frigid. I was failing as a wife, and also, by some strange logic of my own, a mother. So, like a good girl, I got to work.