I Quit Sex for the Same Reason So Many Women Do. Then I Made the Most Thrilling Discovery.

When I got an unexpected job ghostwriting romance novels earlier this year, I thought I’d found an easy way to earn some money and get some fun stories to tell at dinner parties. I hadn’t read a lot of romances, but the opportunity to write all day was too good to pass up.

I quickly realized that I enjoyed the challenge of churning out thousands of words a day. But the deeper into my job I got, the more obvious it became that my day job was sharply out of step with my real life.

A year earlier, after not having a period for more than a year, my doctor confirmed that I had entered menopause. When I told my husband, we joked that finally, after a lifetime of chronic nerve and joint pain, plus a bilateral mastectomy to treat breast cancer, my body had done something right. Sure, I’d gone through menopause at 43, eight years earlier than the average woman, but I’d managed to do it without experiencing hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, or other side effects.

Except that it turned out, I hadn’t. Vaginal dryness—another common effect of menopause—had caused sex to be so painful that I had become scared of it. All of a sudden, I was spending my days writing books that included lots of sex, and my nights worrying that I’d never have pain-free sex again.

The sex scenes I wrote were explicit: dirty words, creative euphemisms for body parts, and uber-athletic tongues and fingers. As long as the action was between consenting adults, there was no limit for what the characters did and said. I could center chapters on fellatio in a car on the way to a weekend getaway, angry sex in an elevator, or a night of vanilla passion that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie.

Those scenes were easy to write because I’ve never been shy about sex. Perhaps that ease developed in elementary school, where I realized that the most interesting subjects were the ones that made adults squirm. Eliciting these reactions made me feel bold and mature, most memorably when my family was at a holiday party when I was 6 or 7. A group of friends and I were playing Scrabble and I spelled out the word sex. My friends giggled, my parents blushed, and the host scolded me for using that word—all responses that guaranteed that my interest in taboo subjects only grew.

It was no surprise that I read Flowers in the Attic and Wifey before I was a teenager, drawn in by the knowledge that adults thought these were books that kids shouldn’t read. In their overheated, melodramatic way, these books taught me how to craft a compelling storyline and create memorable characters—as well as how to write sex scenes. Thanks to them—and way too many issues of Cosmopolitan—I was well-versed in discussions about kink, orgasms, contraception, and a slew of other sex-related topics before I actually had sex.

When I finally did, I quickly learned what I liked and what I didn’t—and how to make that clear to my partner. When my now-husband and I began dating almost 20 years ago, it was a relief to find that we had similar likes and dislikes, as well as libidos. And though our relationship has weathered a lot in the subsequent two decades, our sex life was a constant source of pleasure.

But with menopause, I began to retreat from my husband, too worried about what my body couldn’t do to relax into physical affection. Even hugging and kissing felt fraught, weighed down by my insistent awareness of just how far I could go before the pain would take over. No matter how reassuring and comforting my husband was, I couldn’t stop feeling like this was one more way my body, already beaten up by cancer and chronic pain, was malfunctioning.

It didn’t help that the most effective method of treating vaginal dryness, hormone replacement therapy, was off limits to me because of my cancer diagnosis. My husband and I tried a variety of over-the-counter options, first with laughter and optimism but, as one after another failed to help, with dogged stubbornness. Eventually, we stopped trying altogether. It was just too frustrating to keep failing at something that for so long had been easy and joyful.

There were days when I hated writing sex scenes, because they reminded me of a part of my life that had vanished. I would find myself envying these fictional characters that were acting out encounters I could only write. Sometimes it felt like I was writing an elegy for my own sexual self—past, present, and future. I felt like a fraud, both when I was writing the scenes and at those dinner parties when friends told me how cool my job was. Who am I to write about this? I’d wonder. I can’t even have sex without wanting to cry.

I thought about quitting. But it was bad enough that cancer and pain had wrecked my body. Giving up this job because of my physical struggles felt like ceding my creativity to menopause, along with my sex life. So, in the face of a bleak present and uncertain future, I began to mine my past more frequently: the illicit thrill of being a teenager fooling around with her boyfriend in his basement. The first time I had really, really good sex. Waking up next to a new boyfriend for the first time, our clothes tangled together on the floor. Wrapping my legs around a man’s waist as he gripped my butt, our sweat mingling together. Making out so vigorously on top of a table that it broke. Hearing my name uttered in a low, urgent moan.

There was a certain power I would feel after these and so many other encounters: that I had the ability to make someone feel that good, and that someone could make me feel that good. There was power in knowing someone and in being known. I remembered how I used to walk with more confidence and ease back then, how comfortable and secure I felt in my body and sexuality.

The more I drew on these memories and sensations, the more connected I felt to my body—and my sexuality. There wasn’t one day, one chapter, or one scene that made me realize this connection; it was the accumulation of instances, sentence by sentence and book by book, that helped me see that even though my hormone levels had changed and I had grown older, I was still the same person as before menopause. I was that preteen gasping at Chris and Cathy Dollanganger’s relationship (albeit now with a much better understanding of consent) and reading about Sandy Pressman’s affair. I was the college student with her first love, the twentysomething enjoying casual relationships, the mother whose body was finally her own once more. And I realized that I could be that confident and powerful again.

I began to look forward to writing sex scenes instead of resenting them. They were a way to tap into the person that I used to be and a daily reminder of who I wanted to be again.

I’m still not back to that person. I can’t write my way out of the biological reality of diminished estrogen levels, and I have no idea which of the dizzying array of lubes out there will help—or if any of them will. The reality is that my husband and I could try them all, from anise-flavored to watermelon-scented, and still end up with a greatly reduced sex life.

But as writing romance novels reminded me, it’s possible to feel that same vitality and assertiveness again, even if it’s in a different form. My happily ever after might make for a depressing end to a contemporary romance, but it’s all mine.