Somewhere between our first kid and our second, I stopped wanting sex. It took me most of a year to admit that to anyone, and the anyone turned out to be my phone.
The stretch we were in
I love my husband. This was never about him. It was about two kids, four and almost two, and a life that had turned into a shift schedule. On weekends we made a great team, and for a while that was the whole relationship. We could run a four-year-old’s birthday party like a catering company and then have zero non-kid thoughts to trade by dinner. Weeknights were worse. Dinner, baths, books, the toddler’s fourth trip out of bed, dishes, packing the daycare bags, and then two people on a couch at 9:40 with the baby monitor glowing on the side table. He’d put a hand on my leg and I’d start doing math on how many hours of sleep I had left. Six and a half, if the baby stayed down. I did that math so often I could do it without looking at the clock.
The pull was the thing I missed. That thing where you look at the person across the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher in a t-shirt he’s had since before we met, and feel something move. Mine flatlined somewhere around the second round of sleep regressions, and I spent close to two years waiting for it to wander back on its own. We talked about it, more than once, and he listened and said the right things, and then Tuesday came and the week ran the way it always ran.
Finding them
That night ended at a bag of gummies called Kinky Cubes. Buying them was my own idea, start to finish, and that mattered. If my husband had bought them, it would’ve landed like a complaint. So: kid finally quiet on the monitor, me deep in the Kinky Cubes reviews, the glowing ones and the annoyed ones both, hunting for the ones actually written by women instead of by men shopping for their wives. The women kept circling the same two words, warm and present. I couldn’t remember the last time either word described me. The company says if they do nothing for you, you keep the bag and get your money back. Fine. Worst case, I’d wasted a week. I ordered at 1:14 in the morning and then lay there wondering what it said about me that I’d just bought candy to fix my sex life.
It showed up in under a week, mailer crushed at one corner, bag inside fine. I hadn’t mentioned it to my husband, so he was the one who pulled it out of the mail and held it up with one eyebrow doing all the asking. Inside the pouch are sixteen soft cubes. Mango, with a little heat on the back end. The bag says two each, gives it about half an hour to kick in, and tells you to skip them if you have heart or blood pressure issues. It looks like candy you’d hide from your kids, and that’s exactly what it became.
The first Saturday
We picked a Saturday. Kids down by 7:45, a small miracle. Kitchen half cleaned, then abandoned. Coffee maker already set for the morning, because that’s who we are now. We each chewed two at the counter like teenagers about to get caught, he made a joke I’m not repeating here, and I laughed for real, out loud. Then we put on something on Netflix neither of us cared about and waited, both pretending we weren’t waiting. I checked the microwave clock twice in ten minutes.
Minute thirty came and went and I was still just watching TV. But somewhere around the time we gave up on the show, I realized I was sitting closer to him than where I’d started, and I hadn’t decided to move. My skin had opinions again. He put a hand on my arm and the sleep math never started. I was just there, on the couch, with my husband, liking it. The rest of the night went where our nights used to go, and for once I was there for all of it.
We’ve used them a handful of times since, and every night’s been a little different. One Friday I mostly got warm and talkative, and we fell asleep tangled up without it going anywhere. That still beat the version of us three feet apart on separate phones. Another night landed a lot closer to that first Saturday. Each time, reaching over got easier, and reaching over was the thing we’d been stuck on all year. More than the sex ever was.
What stood out
They worked on me. I’ve bought things before that only ever seemed to do anything for him while I sat there feeling like the packaging. This one landed on my side of the bed first. The second weekend, I was the one who got the bag out, and that has literally never happened with this kind of product.
Half of it, I swear, is the deciding ahead of time. Choosing a night means both of us said yes hours before anything happens, and we spend the whole evening carrying that around. By the time the kids were down we’d been flirting in passing for two hours, over laundry of all things.
They taste good, too. It’s a piece of candy. I’ve choked down enough chalky horse pills in my life to appreciate the difference. And the warm feeling was gone by morning, every time. I woke up my regular self at 6:15, when the two-year-old announced the day.
The downsides
They do nothing for tired. We tried them once after a night where the baby had been up at 4:00, and no gummy on earth fixes being done as a person by 8:30. I felt the warmth arrive and had nothing to spend it on. We watched half a movie and went to sleep.
The other catch is lead time. Two cubes each and half an hour of waiting is planning, full stop. Nobody’s grabbing anybody at the sink. It goes on the calendar, same as the sitter, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about that.
Would I buy them again
For parents like us, the ones whose drive just went missing somewhere between daycare drop-offs and 5 a.m. wake-ups, yes. Our marriage was fine the whole time. The wanting was the missing piece, and the gummies gave it a way back in on the nights we made room for it. After enough of those nights, the pull started showing up on its own, on random Tuesdays, no gummies involved. Two weeks ago I watched him carry a sleeping kid up the stairs and thought something I’m not putting in print.
Would I order again? Already did, before we finished the first bag.
