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.

We put a lock on our bedroom door to keep out the kids. We scheduled weekly sex like it was an all-hands meeting. We explored pleasure à la the 1970s — blindfolds and feathers and lots of massage oil. We signed up for an online Esther Perel course, and followed her orders to go out dancing or truly savor some high-quality chocolate to attune to our erotic selves and bring them back to our unerotic bedroom. None of it worked. And worse, I began faking enthusiasm. The more I tried to cultivate my desire and present it to him like a science-fair project, the less I felt it.

Had I always been this powered down, this hard to please? My mother had sent me a box of my personal effects from the basement of my childhood home, which she, ever the pragmatist, was clearing out in anticipation of her eventual death (at the moment I am writing this, she remains perfectly healthy). When I opened the box, I found a few cherished mementos — my high-school drama-club jacket, my pink jewelry box with the spinning ballerina, a ticket to see Lauryn Hill at a venue that had long since been renamed for some big tech company — and journals, dozens of them. Each detailing the thoughts of a young girl, then teenager, coming of age in the late ’90s.

Naturally, they were riddled with desire. The desire I had for my friend Arianna, who I kissed one drunken night sophomore year of high school. For my first boyfriend, Ryan, whom I ached for almost constantly, until he cheated on me with a friend, then I cheated on him with my other friend’s stepbrother. The journal entries (and songs, and poems, oh my!) were proof that I had once wanted — clearly and emphatically.

I clung to this as I tried to study my way out of our “sexless” marriage, puzzling over the assignment: If two loving people build a home and a family together, but only have sex every six-to-eight weeks, how can still be happy?

I read Jancee Dunn’s How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids and Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage — if they could do it, so could I! I bought a new vibrator, the one with the sucky part that looks like a Dune sandworm. I found a very narrow genre of porn that turned me on without inspiring too much horror. I waxed my bikini line.

It didn’t take long for a new problem to arise: All this work we were putting in to improve our sex life was not sexy. It was exhausting. I considered some alternatives: Rebecca Woolf’s gorgeous memoir All Of This offered one — my husband’s untimely death, but that felt grim and unlikely. Another, polyamory, felt like adding an independent study to an already unsustainable schedule.

While I wanted to rediscover my desire — or at least I thought I did — trying to do so had become just another entry on my to-do list, one more source of shame. I started to wonder if desire just wasn’t for me. Around this time, a female friend, married even longer than I have been, told me that she didn’t see the point of ever having sex again. That she’d prefer it, really. In that moment, I finally felt the longing I’d been searching for. Only it wasn’t for sex — it was for the fantasy of letting it go.

Then I came across the idea of a sex sabbatical. Not a strike, or a giving up, but an intentional break. My husband, bless him, was highly receptive. What, at this point, did we have to lose? By then, I realized, most of the sex we were having was what Myisha Battle, certified clinical sexologist and author of This Is Supposed to Be Fun, calls “duty sex,” and every time I let myself engage in it, wanting only to make someone I love happy, I became more confused, more buried. With a reprieve from that, I started to see my history with sex for what it was. It wasn’t just the humdrum boner killers of modern family life that were my decelerators; it was the cumulation of my life experience. I had worked tirelessly to ignore what I wanted — no wonder I couldn’t find it in a worksheet.

Without the pressure to attempt sex, I let myself put down the self-help books and pick up others, like Amanda Montei’s Touched Out. I realized that the years between those pining poems and meeting my husband were filled less with satisfaction and more subservience. There, I found memories not of wanting but of wanting to be wanted, of banal misogyny — giving blowjobs to guys who did not know my name; lying prone while boys drew pleasure from me like a syringe, muffling my own with a mixture of confusion and self-loathing. For years, I had been continuing to meld these instincts with the good and loving ones I had toward my husband, and I could no longer tell them apart. My husband, though not without his own physical vulnerabilities — it was years into our relationship before I saw him swim without wearing a T-shirt — didn’t carry these things with him. He showed up to the bedroom with a condom in his pocket; I dragged in a whole dang suitcase.

What was inside? The ghost of every sexual encounter I’d had, 99.9 percent of which had resulted in a boy or man orgasming and, until I was in my late 20s, zero resulting in mine. But it was also the headlines; about Diddy; about the good guys of my childhood who turned out to be very bad; about a girl who was raped, then forced to have the baby that was the result of that rape. It was looking at my daughter’s face, wondering what men would do to her. Even when I practiced the “erotic self-care” that Esther Perel had assigned me, when my husband told me I looked great in my new sweater or reached out for me across the gear shift of the car, all of this came rushing in.

Once I recognized my resistance to sex for what it was, I grieved. I didn’t have to tell myself anymore that I should be wanting sex — a thought that had come every time my husband suggested it and I declined or trooped through. Now, I saw how terrified I was of it, how much it had mutated from those early days of pleasure and curiosity into something I did to serve others. I couldn’t separate my own desire from wanting to be desired.

In The Dry Season, a memoir of her year redefining pleasure while abstaining from sex, author Melissa Febos has a different relationship to sex, one of addiction. But, as I read her story, I thought, Wasn’t I addicted too? To the cycle of avoidance and shame and sometimes rage that at that point enveloped my every interaction around sex. Perhaps mine wasn’t an addiction — it was just a well-worn path I kept walking, its groove deepening every time I refused to see it for what it was. As Febos says, “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could give myself permission to stop.” That permission, for me, was the first sign to myself that my pleasure was important, that it could be uncovered.

When I asked Battle about whether she sees this phenomena in her sex-coaching clients, she told me that she often recommends such intentional celibate periods for couples, that it gives them the opportunity to ask and answer questions about how they want their sex life to be when they return to it. “It’s like the stress and anxiety around sex can be so prevalent, and it just sits right on top of desire like a brick,” she told me. “And when you take that brick off and you start doing other things that feel fulfilling by yourself or in the relationship, then desire has a sneaky way of coming back.”

With so much time and mental space not worrying about getting an A in married sex, I saw my desire for what it was. Something that had been stamped out of me. No wonder, I thought, that after all that, plus two children needing my body so desperately, I felt done. I did not want to abstain from sex; I wanted to abstain from what it reminded me of. Untangling those two things seemed almost impossible — similar to how I’d watched so many women try to unlearn their obligation to care for others before themselves while holding on to what they deeply loved about that care.

And this is also what I learned when I did not have sex with my husband, on purpose, for half a year: that I missed it. That I liked it. That I wasn’t an estrogen-starved husk devoid of a sex drive. I did not want to never have sex again. I wanted to never feel obliged to have it. I wanted it on my own terms, which I would never discover through someone else’s playbook.

During the sabbatical, I talked to my husband about my experiences. “I don’t think I understood,” he whispered in the dark as he held me. His arms, I noticed, felt good. “I didn’t know it was remarkable,” I replied, “that it needed to be understood.” I wrote back to the girl who had scribbled in those journals, setting my timer for ten minutes and trying not to let my pen stop moving, telling her that the world was, yes, a bit shit, but it wasn’t her fault. My husband, to his great credit, thought about his own legacy of substituting sex for intimacy, and forced to forgo his go-to, found other ways to feel seen and loved.

I still don’t know if my sex life is a success by some metrics, but I do know that my desire has slowly crept back in. It wanes, yes, and gets knocked down by a news story, then comes coursing back stronger than ever, only to take a hiatus again to deal with a bout of family flu. Sometimes, I muster it to make my husband happy, but I don’t feel the addict’s shame spiral — I give it freely, as an act of love. I am happy for everyone who is out there, massage oil on the bedside table, working their asses off at eroticism. But for me, I could only start healing once I understood that sex isn’t an assignment, frequent sex the only destination. It’s a messy, meandering journey. And sometimes you’ve gotta get off the train to remember where you’re headed.