Tracey Coleman

One in three women used the same word

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I read a statistic that made me sick. Eighty percent of women with fibromyalgia report difficulties with intimacy. Not twenty percent. Not half. Eighty. I did not believe it when I read it. I have been married fourteen years, and not one person in my life had ever told me this could be my body. But here is the truth. Your doctor adjusts your dosage and tells you to manage expectations. A therapist works on your marriage. Your friends tell you it happens to everyone after a certain age and change the subject. The problem sits in the space between them. And nobody is paid to look there. That is why most of us never hear this. That is why my mother never heard it either. My mother was one of the eighty percent. Fibromyalgia for nineteen years. Loved my father. Never once wanted him. She died at sixty two in a marriage where they had not touched in over a decade, and not one person, in her entire life, ever told her it was not her fault. I am forty. Two months ago I sat in a doctor's office and was told I was fine, that fibromyalgia affects everyone differently, and that I should consider adjusting my expectations. I said no. And what I found instead, at a kitchen table two hours from my house, took me from a woman who went stiff when her husband touched her shoulder at the sink, to a woman who reached for him first on an ordinary Tuesday for the first time in three years. But to understand why I ended up in a stranger's kitchen at forty, ashamed of the question I had driven there to ask, you have to know what I watched happen to my mother. And what I did not know was quietly happening to me too. My parents were married for twenty eight years. They never fought. I want you to understand that, because it is the whole point. There was no shouting in my house. No slammed doors. No affair. Nobody ever left. Where I come from, you do not walk away from a marriage. You stay. You carry it. You keep going. My father was a steady man. He is still a steady man. He drove her to every appointment for nineteen years. He rubbed her feet at the end of every shift even when she said she did not want to be touched. He never once raised his voice at her about it. And I watched her not want him for my entire childhood. I did not have the words for it then. Children do not. But I could feel it in the house the way you feel weather. By the time I was ten, they slept in the same bed and never touched. Not once. I never saw my father put a hand on my mother's back walking past her in the kitchen. Not once, in ten years. By the time I was fourteen, they were in separate rooms. The official reason was her pain at night. Nobody in that house believed it was only about the pain. By the time I was eighteen, my mother had a whole language for it. She would say "your father is a good man" the way other people say a verdict. She said it to me at my wedding. She said it to me the month she died. Your father is a good man. She never said she loved him. She did love him. She just could not say the other thing, so she said that instead, over and over, for twenty eight years. And here is what nobody tells you about a marriage like that. It does not end. Where I come from, it especially does not end. There is no rock bottom. There is no moment. Nobody has an affair, nobody packs a bag, nobody gets a lawyer. Two decent people simply become kind, careful strangers who share a house and a name and a church pew on Sunday. She died on a Saturday. I was holding her hand. At the funeral my father took my hand outside the church and said something I have not been able to put down since. "Twenty eight years. I loved her every single day of them." Then he looked at the ground. "I don't think she ever wanted me. And I never once asked her why." So, two months ago. I am forty. Married fourteen years. Two children, nine and six. A husband I love, who has never given me a single reason not to. We do not fight. We are kind to each other. From the outside there is nothing wrong with us, and I am extremely good at keeping it that way. Nobody at the school gate has the faintest idea. And I have not wanted him in three years. Where I come from, you do not say that out loud. You carry it. You keep moving. I have been a good wife about it. I want you to know I tried. We did the date nights. Every other Saturday for most of a year. They were lovely. His mother had the kids and we ate somewhere nice and talked about the children and came home and I went to bed first so I would be asleep before he came up. We did the weekend away. Just us, no kids, a nice hotel, the whole thing. I spent most of it trying to talk myself into the mood. Trying to talk yourself into wanting your own husband, in a hotel he paid for, while your hips ache and your skin burns from the sheets, is its own kind of answer. I said not tonight so many times it stopped being a decision and became a reflex. Something my mouth did before my brain arrived. And a few times I did not say it. I pushed through it so he would not feel rejected, and then I lay there in the dark afterwards feeling like a stranger in my own marriage, doing arithmetic on how long I had bought myself before I would have to do it again. I tried CBD. Three different brands over two years. I took turmeric capsules for six months. Ashwagandha gummies. A magnesium bottle from the health food store that I took every single night for two years. We even went to counselling. Four sessions. She was lovely. She recommended date nights. I did everything right. And I was still lying next to a man I loved, feeling absolutely nothing. Two months ago I finally went to my doctor. It took me three weeks to make the appointment because I could hear my own voice saying it out loud and it sounded ridiculous. I have fibromyalgia. My marriage is fine. My husband is good. What exactly was I going to complain about. Same man. Seven years. He looked at the chart. Not at me. He ran my bloods. He was perfectly nice about it. "Everything looks completely normal." Then he looked at me over the screen. "Fibromyalgia affects everyone differently. You are managing a lot. This is very common. Adjust your expectations." Adjust your expectations. And I heard my mother's voice in my head. Your father is a good man. Nineteen years of adjusting expectations. A woman who died having never once wanted the man who rubbed her feet every single night. "No," I said. He blinked at me. "That is what they told my mother. For nineteen years." He did not have an answer for that. He said I could come back if I wanted to discuss my pain management. I left that office feeling smaller than when I walked in. That night I could not sleep. Which was every night. At midnight I gave up. I got my phone, and I turned the screen brightness all the way down so the light would not wake him, and I lay there in the dark next to my husband and typed the question I had never said out loud to anyone. Fibromyalgia no desire for husband. That is the search. That is the one every one of us types eventually. Every page said the same thing. Communicate more. Schedule intimacy. Try different positions. Take a warm bath first. Warm baths. I had done all of it. So I kept going. Past the articles. Into the threads where women actually talk, at one in the morning, when nobody they know is reading. And there were thousands of us. Thousands. Women with fibro. Good marriages. Good husbands. All of us saying the same sentence in slightly different words, all of us apologising for taking up the space. And underneath one of them, a reply that stopped me. It was from a woman who said she had been a pain management nurse for thirty years, and that she had spent three decades watching women with fibromyalgia be told this was normal, and that she had something to say about it that no doctor was going to say to us. She left her name. She said if any of us wanted to talk, she was old and she was retired and she had time. She was two hours away. I looked at the clock. It was 2:07 in the morning. I drove out at six. Her name was Dawn. She was not a doctor. She was an integrative health practitioner who had spent thirty years working with women in chronic pain. She answered the door in a house robe and reading glasses and looked at my face for about two seconds before she said "you had better come in." Her kitchen smelled like coffee and something baking. She poured me a cup without asking me if I wanted one and pulled out a chair. "Right," she said. "Tell me." So I did. All of it. The three years. The date nights. The wine. The not tonight. Your father is a good man. My mother in a separate room for twelve years and my father outside a church saying he never once asked her why. I cried, in a stranger's kitchen, at eight thirty in the morning. Dawn let me finish. Then she put her cup down. "Nobody has ever looked at your body," she said. "Have they." I did not understand. "Everybody has looked at your pain. Your doctor looked at your bloods and looked away. Your counsellor looked at your husband. Your friends looked at your wine glass." She folded her hands on the table. "Not one of them has looked at what the pain has been doing to you underneath." "Here is the thing they never tell you," she said. "Desire is not a feeling you have about your husband. Desire is a signal your body sends." I said I did not know what that meant. "It means it is not free. It costs your body something to send it. And your body will only spend that if it believes you have enough to spare." She tapped the table once. "Now. Fibromyalgia for how long?" "Six years," I said. "Six years. Your nervous system has been running on high alert for six years. Pain signals firing all day, every day. Cortisol elevated every single night. And cortisol burns through one mineral faster than any other." She looked at me. "Magnesium." "Every night your body goes to war. And every night it pays for that war with magnesium. And after six years of that, you are empty." She leaned back. "A body that empty starts making decisions for you. It protects your heart. It protects your lungs. It protects your brain. It keeps you upright, and it keeps you going, and it will not stop to ask your permission." "And desire is the first thing it cuts." She looked at me straight on. "Because desire is the one thing on the list you can live without." I sat there. "And here is the part," she said, "that is going to make you angry." "No conversation on earth can put that signal back into a body that has run out." "Not a date night. Not a weekend away. Not a better husband. You do not have a husband problem, and I think you have known that for three years." "The road to wanting him does not run through your marriage. It runs through your body. And nobody has ever gone and looked." I started to cry again. "That is why your bloods came back normal," she said. "There is no standard test for this. They measure serum magnesium. That is one percent of your total body magnesium. The other ninety nine percent is hiding in your muscles and your bones. You can be critically depleted and the blood work says normal." "You are not the broken thing." "You are a woman running on empty whose nervous system has been burning through the one mineral it needs most, every single night, for six years." Then she said the thing I drove home with. "And that is what happened to your mother. Not that she stopped loving your father. Her body stopped sending the signal, and for nineteen years, not one person looked." I told her about the magnesium I had been taking. Two years. Every night. She did not laugh. But she almost did. "Go to your car," she said. "Get the bottle." I had it in my bag. I handed it to her. She turned it around. Not the front. The back. "Read me what it says under supplement facts." Magnesium from magnesium glycinate AND magnesium oxide. She put the bottle on the table between us. "Oxide absorbs at four percent," she said. "You have been pouring water into a bucket with no bottom for two years and blaming yourself for being thirsty." I stared at the bottle. And I thought about Grandma. The big white bottle from the pharmacy. Magnesium oxide. I bought it for her every month for years. She took it with water every night in that recliner. It did nothing. She passed in 2019. Still in pain. Still in the recliner. I had been taking the same kind I bought her. The same kind my mother took. Three generations. Same bottle. Same nothing. I could not speak for a minute. "The form that actually reaches your nervous system is bisglycinate," Dawn said. "Ninety percent absorption. It crosses the blood brain barrier. It goes directly to where your pain gates are stuck open." She leaned forward. "Your nervous system has gates. Actual gates along the spinal cord. In fibromyalgia they lock open. Every signal floods through. That is why a hug hurts. That is why a bedsheet hurts. That is why your husband's hand on your shoulder sends your body into defense instead of desire." "Magnesium closes those gates. But only if it arrives. Oxide never arrives." She sat back. "You have not been failing at magnesium. Magnesium has been failing to reach you. For two years." "There is a difference between stimulating something and restoring it," she said. "The CBD, the turmeric, the ashwagandha. Those try to calm the surface. Nothing is wrong with the surface. The depletion is underneath. At the cellular level. In the places no blood test checks and no supplement on that shelf reaches." She wrote a name on the back of an envelope and slid it across the table. Celuvida. "400mg magnesium bisglycinate. Zero oxide. Two gummies before bed." She looked at me over her glasses. "Take it every single day. Give it ninety days. And stop checking yourself every single night to see if it has worked yet. That is what ruins it for most of you." I ordered it in her driveway before I drove home. Week one, nothing. I want to be honest with you about that, because I nearly stopped. I lay in bed on the seventh night doing the exact thing she told me not to do, auditing myself, and I felt precisely nothing, and I thought, well. There it is. Week two is when it started, and it was not what I expected at all. He came up behind me at the sink and put his hand on my shoulder, the way he has done ten thousand times, and I did not go stiff. That is it. That is the whole thing that happened. I did not flinch. I was not already doing the arithmetic on how to get out of whatever was coming. The no was not already sitting in my mouth before he had even said anything. I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and I cried, because I had completely forgotten that not flinching was even an option. I did not call that desire. I called it relief. Week three. I slept through the night. Not a full night. Five and a half hours. But I did not wake up at 3AM with my jaw clenched and my fists curled. I woke up and my hands were open. Week five. He said something across the kitchen, the way he has said things across that same kitchen for fourteen years, and I laughed, and the laugh went further down than my throat. It landed somewhere in my body. I noticed it land. I do not know how to explain to you how long it had been since anything landed. Week seven. I caught myself watching him. He was reading something on his phone at the table with his glasses pushed up on his head and I was just looking at him, and I had not looked at him, actually looked, in years. Week nine. This is the one. It was a Tuesday. Nothing happened on that Tuesday. The kids were in bed and the dishwasher was on and he was on the couch and I sat down next to him. And I reached for him first. Not because it had been a while. Not because I felt guilty. Not because it was on a calendar and not because I owed him. Because I wanted to. Three years. Three years, and it took me until week nine of two berry gummies a day, out of a bag, to want my own husband. He did not say anything about it. He is a kind man. But I felt him go completely still for a second, like something in the house had shifted and he did not want to be the one to point at it. I called my dad that night, after. I did not tell him the whole thing. I told him some of it. That I had been struggling, that I had found something, that it was helping. There was a long silence on the phone. My father is not a talker. "Your mother would be glad," he said eventually. "Nobody ever gave her that." And then, quieter. "I'm glad somebody asked you why, baby." I called Keisha the next morning. My daughter. She is a nurse. She had been telling me for months to check the back of my bottle. I had not listened. "Mama," she said. "I have been watching women like you and Grandma my whole career. Women who hurt. Women who keep going. Women whose chart gets read while they do not." She was quiet for a second. "Grandma took the same kind for years. Nobody told her either." If you have read this far, you already know why. You have fibromyalgia. And you love him. That has never once been in question. You do not fight. From the outside there is nothing wrong with you and you are very, very good at keeping it that way. You say not tonight so often it stopped being a decision. You sit next to him on the couch every single evening and you feel miles away. He made a comment once. Not cruel. It stung, and it stayed. You have been too strong to say out loud that you miss being touched. You have already quietly decided this is just what fibromyalgia takes from you. After the sleep. After the energy. After the life you used to have. And at some point around midnight, with the screen turned down so it does not wake him, you have typed the question into your phone. You have done the date nights. The weekend away. The honest conversation. The warm bath. The CBD. The turmeric. And none of it touched it. But now you know why. You were treating the marriage. Or treating the pain. Neither one was the problem. Nobody has ever looked at your body. Not at the pain. Underneath it. At the thing the pain has been quietly draining from you every single night. And your body has been running on empty this entire time, deciding, every single day, that desire is the thing it can most afford to lose. Exactly like my mother's did. For nineteen years. Exactly like Grandma's did before her. Celuvida is what Dawn wrote on the back of that envelope. 400mg magnesium bisglycinate. Zero oxide. Ninety percent absorption. Two gummies before bed. Not a pill. Not a patch. Not a hormone. Not a stimulant. Restoration. Not stimulation. Take it for ninety days. Take it every single day, and stop auditing yourself every night to see if it has worked yet. Ninety day money back guarantee. If nothing has come back, if the flinch is still there, ask for your money back. That is not a technicality. That is the entire point. You are standing in front of two versions of the next twenty years. One path. You close this. And nothing bad happens, because nothing bad ever happens, and that is the entire trap. Next year looks like this year. You say not tonight. He asks a little less. Then he stops asking. And you notice that he has stopped asking, and you say nothing about it, because where I come from, you carry it. The bed goes quiet and stays quiet. Separate rooms, eventually, and there will be an official reason, and nobody in the house will believe the official reason. And in twenty years you are my mother. Married. Loved. Fine. And a good man stands outside a church and tells your daughter he never once asked you why. Another path. You stop treating the marriage and you start treating the body. You give it ninety days. And you find out whether the woman who used to reach for him first is actually gone, or whether she was only ever running on empty. I took the second path. I am not going to tell you it fixed my whole life. It gave me back one Tuesday. And then it gave me back another one. My mother never had this. Nobody ever looked at her, not once, in nineteen years, and she died being told to adjust her expectations, and my father is still standing outside that church in his own head asking a question he never asked her. Grandma never had it either. Same bottle. Same recliner. Same nothing, for years. They did not have this information. You do. 👉 Start the 90 Day Protocol. ✅ 400mg Pure Bisglycinate. Zero Oxide. ✅ Third Party Tested. GMP Certified. ✅ Two Gummies Before Bed. ✅ 90 Day Money Back Guarantee. P.S. Week one, I felt nothing, and I nearly stopped. Week two, he touched my shoulder at the sink and I did not flinch, and I cried into the washing up. Week nine, on an ordinary Tuesday with the dishwasher running, I reached for him first for the first time in three years. Your timeline will be your own. But you will not know until you try, and my mother never did. And her mother never did either. P.P.S. My sister Tamara started taking it six weeks after I did. She is thirty seven. Two kids. Good husband. Same silence in the house that we both grew up in and both swore we would never repeat. She called me last Sunday and could not get the words out for a while. Then she said, "I am not going to be her, sis." Neither am I. Neither should you.