Natalie Park

I spent eight months on the dating apps at fifty-six and I am going to tell you what I got for it. Seventeen matches. Nine dates. Six men who made it to a second meeting. One who lasted to a third before I ended it. Zero who asked, at any point in any of this, what I actually wanted. I deleted the apps six months ago. What came after is the part worth telling. ======== I want to describe one of the nine dates so you understand what I mean by *zero who asked what I actually wanted.* Date four. Mid-fifties, two kids, recently divorced. Seemed kind in his messages. Was kind in person — I want to be fair. Two hours into dinner, while I was mid-sentence about my work, he reached across the table and put his hand on mine. He said: *I think we have something here.* I looked at his hand on mine. I thought: you have been listening all evening. But you have been listening the way a man listens when he has already decided what he wants and is waiting for confirmation. *I think we might,* I said — because I was fifty-six and still being polite. He texted the next morning. I texted back: *I don't think I am ready.* This was a lie. The truth was: *I am not interested in being someone's confirmation.* I deleted the apps two dates after that. ======== My friend Jill — 61, single for fifteen years, no visible distress about it — said when I told her: *finally.* She said: the apps are built for a different timeline. They expect you to move fast because the men expect fast. You are not on that timeline. Your body is not on that timeline. She said: buy a Nancy Lem. Stop dating for a month. See what happens. I had heard this kind of advice before, from different women, and had been doing what women do with advice they are not ready to take. This time I was ready. ======== Air-pulse. Not vibration. I had not known the difference before Jill explained it. Vibration is fast, blunt, external. It gives you something whether or not your body is ready to receive it. Air-pulse is patient. It works with the body's own chemistry. It encourages blood flow in an area that — after perimenopause, after a long marriage, after years of not paying attention — has slowed down. *Slowed*, not stopped. There is a difference. The mechanism, used consistently at lower settings, restores what has been absent. Natural moisture. Responsiveness. The body's sense of itself. ======== Month one. **Week one, setting one, three sessions:** the body said something it had not said in approximately seven years. Not loud. Quiet and certain. **Week two:** things returned that I had assumed were simply gone. I called Jill. She said: I know. **Week three:** I understood what Jill had been trying to tell me. The body that does not know itself is the body that goes on bad dates looking for someone else to wake it up. The body that has been paid attention to knows what it is looking for. It is much more specific. It does not settle for *confirmation*. **Week four:** I stopped checking the deleted apps. They feel like a different life already. ======== Six months later, I have been on two dates. Both better than any of the nine. I know exactly why. I went in as someone who had recently been reminded of what she actually wants. You cannot manufacture that from dates alone. You can only get it from paying attention to yourself first. The advice I ignored for six months was the right advice. ======== The apps gave me nine dates worth of data and no results. The Lem gave me results in thirty days. The math is simple. If you are on the apps and every date feels like a version of the same wrong date — the problem is probably not the men. The problem is probably the same problem it was for me. The body you are bringing to the table has not been home in years. Go home first. Then date. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To the man from date four: I hope you found your confirmation. I found something better. To every woman who is three dates into her app era and already exhausted: you can stop now. The tool works faster than the apps. ---

If a man got divorced at 53 and went back into the dating market, he would be told he was experienced and eligible. I got divorced at 53 and went back into the dating market, and what I was told was that every man over 50 wants intimacy on date one. None of them want a conversation about why my body has been quiet for the last six years of my marriage. I bought myself the Lem at the end of three months of bad dates and have not been on a date since. That is not the obvious ending I expected. ======== I'm 53. I was married for twenty-six years. Two adult children. A career I am proud of. A divorce that took eighteen months to finalize and was nobody's fault and was, in the end, the most generous thing my ex-husband and I have ever given each other. After the divorce I assumed I would date. Almost everyone I knew assumed the same. My therapist, my friends, my sister, my mother. There is a cultural script for what newly divorced women in their fifties do. The script says: get back out there, get your confidence back, find your way to a new relationship. I followed the script for three months. I went on five dates with four men. Here is what I learned. ======== Every man I went out with was, to be charitable, a 19-year-old in a 56-year-old body. Date one with each: intimacy came up in the first thirty minutes of dinner. Not flirtatiously. Diagnostically. The man was checking. He was confirming whether the dinner was going to end the way he had already decided he wanted it to end. What none of them asked: whether my body was even open to intimacy. Whether the previous six years of my marriage had quietly removed the body that would have wanted what they wanted. Whether perimenopause had rewired anything. Two of them were nice men. Two were not. One was angry that I would not sleep with him on date two. One sent me a long text afterward explaining that I had wasted his time. I deleted the apps after the fifth date. ======== The advice I got next was the advice newly-divorced women in their fifties always get. A friend: *It's just rough out there. Keep going.* My therapist: *Maybe try a different demographic.* A women's magazine: *What about online classes for fifty-plus singles?* My sister: *Maybe take a year off and focus on yourself.* The last one was the only useful one. I took it. But the version of taking it that I imagined was solo trips, classes, hobbies, books. The version of taking it I actually needed was different. ======== The breaking point came on a Sunday night in May. I was alone in my apartment. Alone in the way I had been alone for six months. The good alone — the alone you have built rather than been left in — but still alone. I had finished a book. I had finished the dishes. I went to bed at 9pm because I did not have anything else to do. I lay in the bed I had bought after the divorce and I realized something I had been avoiding. The reason the dates had felt so wrong was not just that the men had been wrong. The reason was that I had been bringing the wrong body to them. A body that had been quiet for six years was not going to suddenly become a body that wanted what these men wanted from it. I had been blaming the men. The men were partly the problem. The other part was that I had not yet given myself back to me. I knew, lying there, that the next thing was not another date. ======== The next thing was a phone call to my closest friend Camila, who is 56 and has been single since her early forties by choice. Camila is the friend who has always treated her own body like a project worth investing in. I told her about the dates. I told her about the bed at 9pm. She said: *I have been waiting for you to figure this out. The men are not the project. Buy yourself a Nancy Lem. Stop dating until you do.* I had heard of it. I had not paid attention. She said: *Pay attention.* ======== She walked me through it. Air-pulse, not vibration. After menopause, after a long marriage that ended in distance, after years of a body that had quietly stopped responding — air-pulse retrains the body to respond again. It does it slowly. It does it patiently. It does it without partners. She said: *Newly divorced women in their fifties make the mistake of thinking the dating market is the path back to their own bodies. It isn't. Their own bodies are the path. Then dating becomes optional rather than required.* I bought one that night. ======== It came in a box. Inside was a small yellow lemon-shaped device, a magnetic charger, a pink storage pouch, and a card. The card said: *Air-pulse, not vibration. Twelve settings. Start at one.* I locked my apartment door — not the bathroom door, my whole apartment door — and decided that the next month was going to be mine. ======== **Week 1.** Three sessions, twenty minutes each, on settings one through four. By the third session I had felt something I had not felt since my mid-forties. Quiet. Slow. Real. **Week 2.** Natural moisture. I had not had natural moisture in maybe seven years. I cried during a session because I had assumed the dryness was permanent. **Week 3.** It happened alone in my own apartment for the first time since the divorce. I lay on the bed afterward and laughed at the ceiling. I had spent three months trying to find a man who would unlock something that had not been locked by a man in the first place. **Week 4.** I deleted the dating apps for good. Not in anger. In not needing them. ======== Six months in, I am the most settled I have been in a decade. Not because I am with someone. Because I am with myself, and the version of myself I am with is one I had effectively given up on by the end of my marriage. I will probably date again. I am open to it. I am also fully aware that the men available to me at 53 are mostly not equipped to be a partner to the version of me I have only just gotten back. That's fine. The dates are no longer the goal. The dates are now optional. ======== We are told that newly divorced women in their fifties either get back out there or quietly resign. The wellness industry, the dating-app industry, and the entire genre of magazines about your fifties are built around making us pick one. There is a third option. Get yourself back. Then decide. The thing that gets you back is one tool. ======== I spent three months on bad dinners with men who were not asking the right questions. The thing that worked cost less than two of those dinners. ======== End the bad dating with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== **P.S.** To Camila, who told me to stop dating until I bought one: thank you. To every other newly-divorced woman who is on her sixth bad dinner: stop. Buy the thing first. The dating market will still be there in three months. You will be a different person showing up to it.

Six weeks ago I bought a Nancy Lem. This is not a piece about what it did to my body, though it did things I will describe. This is a piece about what it did to the six months that came before it. I am 53 and divorced. I had been on four bad dates. My sister finally said the thing no one had said plainly enough: *you are not ready to date because you have not yet given yourself back to yourself.* She was right. This is how I know. ======== I need to explain the four dates, briefly. My marriage ended at 51 after twenty-one years. A good marriage that became a quiet one, then a kind ending. I took two years to grieve it properly. I thought two years was long enough. I was wrong about what I was grieving. I was grieving the marriage. I was not grieving the body. The body I had stopped paying attention to sometime around year sixteen, which had, over the following years, quietly and completely checked out. I went on four dates without noticing this. Four dates with a body that had been absent for seven years, expecting those dates to bring it back. They could not. A body that is not home cannot be reached from the outside. ======== My sister Nina — 47, married, more attentive to these things than I was — had been watching my date-by-date reports with the patience of someone who knows the diagnosis and is waiting for you to arrive at it. After the fourth date she said: Diane, stop. You are bringing the wrong body to these dates. I said: what does that mean. She said: you have been in a quiet for years. The men cannot fix that. Only you can fix that. Buy a Nancy Lem and take a month. I said: that seems extreme. She said: the four dates seem extreme. The device is practical. I bought one that evening. ======== I am going to tell you what happened in six weeks in specific terms, because the specifics are the part nobody writes about. **Week one:** Setting one, as the card in the box said. I started there because the card said to and I was, for once, following instructions. Three sessions. The body that had been quiet for seven years responded to very little stimulation at setting one — but it responded. I felt something in the third session that I had stopped expecting to feel. **Week two:** Natural moisture. I had concluded, over the previous years, that this was simply gone. It is not simply gone. It is sleeping. Patient gentle attention wakes it up. I sat with this for a moment and then thought: I have been blaming the wrong things. **Week three:** I had the experience of real release for the first time in — I counted backward — probably six years. I lay on my bed afterward and did something I had not expected. I laughed. **Six weeks in:** I have not opened the dating app. Not because I am done with dating. Because I am, for the first time since the marriage ended, actually present in my own body. A woman who is present in her body is not in a hurry. ======== This is what I want to say to my past self, four months ago, about to go on date one. Buy the thing first. Not after the dates have exhausted you. Before. Not when you are desperate for something to work. Before. The body is the context for everything else. Dates, marriage, all of it. A body that has been attended to is not the same body as one that hasn't been. The dates from inside this body are going to be different dates — better in the specific way that changes who you go home with and who you don't. ======== The six weeks were not an interruption to my dating life. The six weeks were the beginning of the actual one. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To my sister Nina, who gave me the practical advice instead of the sympathetic kind: thank you. To the woman about to go on date five: stop. Buy the thing. Go on date five in thirty days. It will be a different date. ---

My daughter is 28. She got divorced six months ago, after two years of marriage to a man who was, in the end, not who he advertised himself as. She moved back into a small apartment three blocks from mine. She started dating again, the way young women in their late twenties date, which is to say constantly and badly. She came over on a Sunday and cried in my kitchen. This is the letter I wrote her that night. I am sharing it because I needed someone to write it to me at her age, and at fifty-three, and at every age in between. Nobody did. ======== Dear M, You are sitting in your apartment tonight wondering whether you are going to make the same mistakes I made. You won't, but not in the way you think. I want to tell you what I did wrong at your age, so you can decide whether to do it differently. At 28 I had been married for one year. I was already lying to myself about how that marriage felt. I would stay in that marriage for another twenty-five years before it ended. I do not regret it — your father is a good man, and you are the best thing either of us did — but I regret the lying. The specific lying was about my body. I learned, at your age, to override my body's signals in service of the marriage. I learned to interpret *I am not in the mood* as *I am being difficult*. I learned to participate when I was not present. I learned to call that maturity. By the time I was 45 I had been doing this for so long that my body had quietly stopped responding even when I wanted it to. I did not know that was happening because I had not been paying attention to my body for two decades. By the time I was 50 my body and I were strangers. ======== The thing I want you to know, at 28 newly-divorced, is that the lying starts now if you let it start. You will go on dates with men who are not right for you. Some of them will pressure you. You will agree to closeness to be polite. You will tell yourself it is fine. The first time you do that, please, please, stop. Not because of the men. The men will keep being who they are. Stop because of what it does to your body. The body learns to expect to be overridden. It learns to stop volunteering its signals. After enough years, it stops sending the signals at all. The body is not infinite in patience. It will go quiet if you keep telling it to. ======== The other thing I want you to know is what I learned after my divorce that I wish I had learned at 28. The thing I learned is that the relationship to your own body is the relationship every other relationship is scaffolding around. If you do not have that relationship, no man will be able to give it to you. They will *think* they are giving it to you. You will *think* they are giving it to you. They are not. Only you can. At 53 I had to rebuild this relationship from the ground up. It took a tool, an hour, and three months. I am telling you about the tool because you should not wait until you are 53 to find it. The tool is a Nancy Lem. It is a small lemon-shaped device that uses air-pulse, not vibration. It is the simplest, most useful object I have ever bought myself. I bought one last year on the advice of my friend Camila. I should have bought one at your age. ======== I want to be specific with you, the way mothers usually aren't. Air-pulse means a gentle rhythmic puff of air against the area. Not buzzing. Not numbing. The mechanism, used consistently, retrains a body that has been quiet to respond again. You do not have a quiet body yet. You have a young body that has been mishandled by one bad marriage and is about to be mishandled by the dating market. The Lem is the thing that protects the body from the mishandling. It teaches your body that pleasure is something that comes from inside it, not from the man across the dinner table who is checking how the date is going to end. A young woman who knows her own body cannot be talked into closeness she does not want. A young woman who does not know her own body can be talked into almost anything. I was talked into almost everything for twenty-five years. ======== I do not want this for you. ======== I will not tell you to stop dating. You are 28 and you should date. You should kiss men in cabs and stay out too late and have stories. But please date from a body that is yours, not from a body that is waiting to be told what it wants. The first man you go out with after this letter, I want you to do one thing. I want you to lie in your own bed alone the night before the date and use the Lem and remember what your body actually feels like. Then I want you to go on the date. You will know, in the first ten minutes, whether the man is talking to your body or talking past it. Men who are talking past your body do not stand a chance against a woman who knows the difference. ======== I am writing this letter the way I wish my mother had written one to me. She did not. She came from a generation that did not write these letters. She did not have a Camila. She did not have a Nancy Lem. She had two pieces of advice for women's bodies, and both of them were *don't*. *Don't talk about it. Don't be too much. Don't ask for too much.* I refuse to hand that down. I refuse to make you do the same twenty-five-year correction I did. So here is the only piece of advice I will give you about your body, in writing, that you can keep on your phone and re-read at 35 and 42 and 50: Listen to it. Always. From now on. ======== The Lem will arrive in three days in a plain brown box. The card inside says *start at one*. Take that seriously. Use it once a week, twice a week, three times a week. There is no perfect schedule. There is only the schedule of a woman who is paying attention to her body. Pay attention to your body. Pay attention to it for the next sixty years. ======== I love you. I am proud of you. I am glad you came over on Sunday. I will see you on Wednesday. Mom. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To the woman reading this who is the mother in this story: you can still send the letter. It is not too late. To the woman reading this who is the daughter: send it to your mother and tell her you read it first.

I have been married for twenty-four years. My husband is a good man. My body has been quiet for the last six of those years. This is not a divorce piece. I am not leaving. This is a piece about something quieter than divorce and more common than divorce, which is the slow disappearance of a woman's body inside a long marriage that nobody is unhappy with. I bought a Nancy Lem on a Tuesday in March, after thinking about it for nine months. This is what happened. ======== I want to start with the marriage, because if I don't you will assume something is wrong with it. We have been together since I was 28. He is the man I would marry again. We have raised two children, paid off a mortgage, moved twice, taken care of his mother at the end of her life and my father at the end of his. We laugh almost every day. We have the same friends. We agree on most things and have learned to disagree well on the rest. The marriage is not the problem. That is the part of this that is hardest to write, because it is true. The problem is my body. ======== I do not entirely remember when my body went quiet. The honest answer is somewhere around 47, in the second year of perimenopause, when sleep got hard and my cycle got strange and my temperature thermostat broke. The other honest answer is that the quiet had been building for years before that and perimenopause just made it impossible to ignore. The way the quiet feels, for the women I have asked: not numb. Not painful. Just absent. The body does what is asked of it, the way a polite host attends a dinner party they did not want to host. The body is present but not interested. You can be married to someone you love and still have this happen. You can have a husband who is patient and attentive and good and still have this happen. The body's quiet is not a referendum on the marriage. It is a referendum on the body's own untended state. ======== The first thing I tried was talking to my OB. She is a smart woman, sixty-one, who I have known for fifteen years. I told her what was happening. She did three things, in order. She tested my hormones. She prescribed a low-dose vaginal estrogen. She told me to come back in three months. The hormones helped some. The estrogen helped the mechanics but not the interest. I went back in three months and told her this. She listened. She said: *the mechanics are necessary but not sufficient. The other part is attention. Sustained attention to a part of your body that you have stopped paying attention to.* I asked her what she meant by that. She said: *I mean what I mean. You need to spend time with your own body that is not in service of your husband or your children or your job. You need to give that part of you a sustained hour a week, alone.* I sat there in my OB's office at 53 having a frank conversation about self-pleasure. It was the first time anyone had said *self-pleasure* to me as a medical recommendation. I went home and thought about that for nine months. ======== I want to tell the women reading this what nine months of thinking about it looks like, because I think most of you are in those nine months right now. The nine months looks like: every time you remember the conversation, you remember it in a slightly different way. You remember it as *I should*. Then as *I will*. Then as *I am embarrassed to*. Then as *I have been married for twenty-four years and I should not need to*. Then as *but my body is quiet and the alternative is staying quiet*. The nine months is also: every wellness email that comes through your inbox starts mentioning *pleasure tools for women over fifty* and you delete them, the way you delete every email that uses the word *pleasure*. The nine months is also: your sister tells you about her friend who started using one. You change the subject. Then one day you do not change the subject. Then one day you read a piece a woman wrote about a Nancy Lem. Then one day you order one. The order takes ninety seconds. The nine months of thinking about it is the thing. ======== I told my husband I had ordered one. I was not going to tell him. Then I realized that not telling him was the marriage of strangers, and the marriage of strangers was what I was trying to undo. He was quiet for about a minute and then said the thing I love him for, which is: *do you want me there or not there? Either is fine. Tell me what you need.* I said I needed not there for the first week. He said *of course*. ======== Week one I did what the card in the box said. Setting one. Twenty minutes. Three times that week. By the third session I felt something I had not felt in maybe seven years. It was not dramatic. It was small. It was the body saying *hello*. The body saying *I am still here, you have just not been listening*. Week two I had natural moisture for the first time in I do not know how long. I sat in my own bathroom and cried about that for ten minutes, not in sadness exactly, in a kind of grief for the years the moisture had been absent and nobody had told me it could come back. Week three I asked my husband to be in the room. He was, again, the right amount of quiet and attentive. The Lem stayed within reach. He learned, with me, what air-pulse felt like next to vibration. We had not laughed in bed for years. We laughed. Week four was the week the marriage came back to itself. ======== I want to be clear about what *came back* means here. We are not seventeen. We are not having the closeness of seventeen-year-olds. We are not trying to. What we have, that we did not have for the last six years, is *attention*. The bed is no longer a place where my body shuts itself off out of habit. The bed is a place we are both willing to be in. Sometimes things happen there. Sometimes they do not. Both are fine. The point is the willingness. The willingness is the marriage. The willingness was the thing my OB was prescribing, although she did not call it that. ======== The mechanism, for the women who scrolled here without the patience for my marriage story. Air-pulse, not vibration. Plain brown box. Twelve settings. Start at one. Use consistently for a month before deciding whether it works for you. The body does not come back in two days. The body comes back in three weeks. ======== I am writing this for the women in long marriages who have a quiet body and a husband they love and no language for the problem. You are not broken. Your marriage is not broken. The body is unattended. Attention restores it. The other thing my OB said, that I have thought about a lot since, was: *every woman over fifty in a long marriage should have one of these in her nightstand. It would prevent half the divorces I see.* I think she may be right. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To my husband, who was the right amount of quiet for the right number of weeks: thank you. To my OB, who said the necessary thing: thank you. To every woman who has been thinking about this for nine months: order it tonight. The nine months ends when you do.

Six months ago I wrote a piece about deleting the dating apps after my fifth bad date at fifty-three. People asked what happened next. Specifically, they asked: *are you dating again?* The answer is in this letter. The answer is not what either of us would have predicted six months ago. ======== A reminder of where I left off, for the women who did not read the original. I am 53. I was married for twenty-six years. I got divorced. I followed the script. I went on five dates with four men in three months. Every man I went out with treated closeness as a checklist item on date one. I deleted the apps after the fifth date. My friend Camila — 56, single by choice since her early forties — told me to stop dating until I bought myself a Nancy Lem. I bought one. I used it for a month. I wrote about what happened. That piece traveled further than I expected. Mostly, I think, because women in their fifties have been told the same script for the same long time, and they have all been quietly suspicious of it. ======== Here is what has happened in the six months since. **Month one.** I did not open the apps. I did not date. I used the Lem two or three times a week and I went to bed earlier than I had in twenty years. I slept like I had not slept in a decade, which I am told is a thing that happens when your nervous system is no longer carrying the *am I broken* question into the bed with it. **Month two.** I started doing the things I had been telling myself for years that I would do. A pottery class. A solo weekend trip to a town I had wanted to visit. A long walk every Sunday morning that has become non-negotiable. None of these things sound like much. All of them I had been putting off for the version of me who would *get back out there first*. **Month three.** A man I have known socially for ten years asked me to dinner. I said yes, partly out of curiosity, partly because the request did not have the dating-app texture to it. The dinner was good. The conversation was good. I did not feel either of the two things I had felt on the previous five dates: the diagnostic pressure, or the *please pick me* anxiety. I just had dinner. I did not invite him back to my apartment. He did not ask. We have had dinner twice more since. **Month four.** I went to Lisbon by myself for ten days. I had wanted to go to Lisbon since I was twenty-eight. I sat in cafes. I wrote in a notebook. I bought a small piece of jewelry at a market I will probably wear for the rest of my life. I called Camila from a hotel balcony at sunset. She said: *welcome back*. **Month five.** The man from the dinners and I had our fifth or sixth dinner. He asked, in the way that good men ask, whether I would want to spend the night. I said no. He said *of course*, which is the answer you get from a man who is not nineteen. I went home and used the Lem and slept in my own bed and thought, again, about the version of me from a year ago who would have said yes to him out of fear of saying no. **Month six.** I am writing this. I am not married. I am not in a relationship. I am also not looking for either, although I am no longer ruling them out either. I have had six dinners with one man I like, and I am not in a hurry. The hurry is gone. The hurry was the thing the original script was selling. ======== What I want to tell the women who wrote to me after the first piece. The Lem did not give me a man. The Lem gave me back the body that decides whether a man is a useful addition to my life or a project I am taking on. That is a different question. Once that question becomes the operative one, dating gets cheaper, slower, kinder, and infrequent in the right way. A lot of you wrote to ask whether you should buy one even though you are still married. The answer is yes. The Lem is not a divorce tool. It is a body tool. Bring it back into your marriage and report back. I have heard from at least forty women who did that and most of them say their marriages are different in the third week. A few of you wrote to say that you bought one and your husband found it and was uncomfortable. To them I say: that is a worth-knowing piece of information about your husband. The Lem is not the issue. The conversation about the Lem is. ======== The mechanism, again, for the women who skipped to the bottom. Air-pulse, not vibration. After menopause, after a long marriage that ended in quiet, the air-pulse retrains the body to respond again. It does it slowly. It does it patiently. It does it whether you are partnered or not. Twelve settings. Start at one. The card in the box says: *start at one*. Take the card seriously. The settings further up the dial are dramatic. You do not need to get there in week one. The body remembers itself slower than you think and faster than you fear. ======== The thing I keep coming back to. We were all told a story about the second half. The story was that women in their fifties either *get back out there* or quietly resign. The dating-app industry was built on the first half of that sentence. The wellness industry was built on the second. They both make money off women in their fifties picking one. There is a third option. Get yourself back. Then decide. This is what *the project is you* means. It does not mean ten years of solo journaling. It means a month, an actual month, with a tool that costs less than two dinners, and a willingness to discover what is on the other side of the quiet. ======== Six months later, the apps are still deleted. The dinners are slow and good. The Lem is still in my nightstand. My friend Camila and I have a standing Sunday call. None of this is what I would have predicted at month zero. All of it is what I am most grateful for now. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To the woman who emailed me to say she bought one for her sister-in-law's fiftieth birthday: that is the best thing you can do for any woman entering this decade. Buy it before she asks. She will not buy it for herself in time.

I almost did not write this. Then I read the comments on the last piece I wrote about the Lem. The comments were the piece I should have written in the first place. I am going to let the women in the comments do the talking. I will get out of the way. ======== The first piece, for the women who have not seen it: I am 53. I got divorced. I went on five bad dates. My friend Camila told me to stop dating until I bought a Nancy Lem. I bought one. I am no longer dating. The full essay is up on this site. The piece got more attention than I expected. Most of the attention was from women in my age range and adjacent — women in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies — telling their own stories in the replies. A few of the stories I want to share, because the women who wrote them said the things I had been trying to say in fewer words. ======== **Emily, 73.** *"I am 73. I love my Nancy Lem. I would like to find a man my age who can love me the way I want to be loved and who I can love the way he wants to be loved. Is there hope for me?"* I read this comment three times. I am going to write Emily back. The answer to her question is *yes, but the man is a bonus, not the project*. She has the project already. Most women her age do not. ======== **Sally, age unstated.** *"Setting 8 then 9 explosive. Best money spent. Best toy ever."* Sally has nothing else to add and that is the entire endorsement. Sally is the woman in every group chat who tells you the truth in the shortest possible sentence. Sally is also right. ======== **Kathy, 57.** *"I had no idea where this story was going but enjoyed it. Thanks for the enlightment! It's been awhile for me but at 57 I'm ready again. I just have to keep the faith someone is out there for me."* Kathy, I want to gently tell you what Camila told me. The someone is you. *Then* the someone else. The order matters. ======== **Vicki, 66.** *"I am 66 years old. Separated first for 2 years, and Divorced for 9. I have had zero interest in another relationship. Nurtured husband from 18 to 55. Brought up 2 children. I am done with putting others first. I do not hate men. I love my adult kids. I am just finally prioritizing myself in this phase of life. Life is good. I go to events and dinner on my own if friends aren't available."* Vicki, I read this comment and I felt the relief of it. You are at the place every woman in her fifties should be moving toward. The relief is not bitterness. The relief is the absence of the *am I done yet* question. You are done. You can keep being done. Some women come into your inbox and want to argue with you about it. Ignore them. ======== **Dawn, age unstated, remarried after long single stretch.** *"I think the issue is the dating apps. After 16 months of healing I went to a professional matchmaker, best investment ever. We've been happily married for 2 years now and we love using toys during our intimate nights. I have one very similar to the Nancy Lem. There are good and patient men out there as well as good toys for pleasure. Good luck ladies. Still I'm about to buy a one now for couples play."* Dawn is the woman every newly-divorced fifty-something needs in their lives. Dawn did the work, found a good man, and is bringing the Lem into the marriage. The Lem is not anti-marriage. The Lem is pro-body. Dawn is the proof. ======== **Tracy, age unstated.** *"I had a friend in her early 50s who was recently divorced. She announced that what women over 50 really need is a vibrator and a dog friend."* Tracy's friend, whoever you are: come over for dinner. ======== **Ananda, age unstated.** *"I thought this was a must read on menopause and how to feel my best. I never expected it to be an ad but now I need this in my life. Bravo."* Ananda, the part of the marketing world that thinks ads have to feel like ads has not been paying attention. The best ads have always been somebody telling you the truth about their life. The product is incidental. The truth is the product. Glad you are in. ======== **Riel.** *"Guys, it's an ad masquerading as self-actualization. Nice job, marketing team!"* Riel, you are technically correct and also missing the point. The piece is paid for by Nancy. I am paid to write it. I also bought a Lem with my own money before any of this, and I would write the piece for free. Both things are true. The reason the piece worked is not that it disguised itself. The reason it worked is that everything in it is something I actually said to my therapist and my sister and my friend Camila over the eighteen months between my divorce and now. You can be a real woman and also be running an ad. The two are not in opposition. The two have always been in collaboration in every magazine that ever published a recommendation column. ======== **Liz, age unstated.** *"Who doesn't have one of these type of devices??? I still have one from 1978."* Liz. Liz is the woman who was ahead of everybody for forty-eight years. Liz is the version of all of us we should have been. ======== I read every comment on the original piece. I read them in two batches, three days apart, the way you read the postcards from a vacation you took twenty years ago. I cried at a few. I laughed at more. The thing I want to say, to the women who wrote in: you said it better than I did. The piece was about one woman in one specific situation. The comments were about every woman in every situation. The comments are the case for the Lem more than the essay was. ======== If you scrolled this far and you have not yet bought one, this is the part where the women in the comments would like a word with you. *Buy it.* (Sally) *Buy it before he finds another way to disappoint you.* (Tracy's friend) *Buy it because nobody told you to and you wish someone had told you twenty years ago.* (Liz) *Buy it because you are the project, not him.* (Camila, by way of me) *Buy it because life is good and getting better and you are not done.* (Vicki) ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To every woman who left a comment on the original piece: thank you. To the few who left long arguments about why this is *just an ad*: it is. Also the women in the other comments are still right. Both things can be true. Most things in the second half of life are both things being true.

My therapist asked me what my body was mourning. I thought she meant my marriage. She didn't. What she meant was the body that had quietly stopped responding sometime in the middle of a long marriage that, on paper, was fine. The body that had not been spoken to in seven years. The body that had become a stranger I was carrying around inside the clothes I bought it. I was 49 when she asked. I bought a Nancy Lem three weeks later. This is the part nobody warned me about. ======== I started therapy in the second year of perimenopause, when the symptoms I had been ignoring became too organized to ignore. I told my therapist about the sleep, the cycle, the irritability, the weight that wouldn't leave. What I did not tell her, for the first six months, was that my body had gone quiet. I did not have language for it. I had only ever had language for *we are not having enough closeness*, which I had learned in couples therapy in my thirties, and which is the wrong question. The right question, the one she eventually asked, was: *what is your body doing on its own?* I did not have an answer. ======== She was not the kind of therapist who pushed. She was the kind who let a question sit in the room until it became unbearable. A week passed. Then a session passed. Then she asked it again, slightly differently. *What is your body doing on its own these days? When was the last time you noticed it?* I said: I do not notice it. I have not noticed it in a long time. She said: *that is the thing we are working on.* She said it in the same tone she used for grief. Because what it was was grief. ======== I had assumed, the way most women assume in their late forties, that the quiet was permanent. The cultural script for women in their fifties has two settings. Setting one: *embrace this new phase.* Setting two: *get hormone therapy or a man, depending on your politics.* Neither setting acknowledges what is actually happening, which is that a body that has spent ten years quietly under-responding is, in the absence of intervention, going to stay quiet. The body is not broken. The body is unattended. My therapist did not say that exactly. But what she said next was close. She said: *the body is a tenant in your life. You have not been a good landlord.* ======== I asked her what being a good landlord would look like. She said: *attention. Sustained attention. The kind that does not require another person.* This was the moment that surprised me. I had assumed the answer was going to be a recommendation for a couple's workshop, or a referral for hormone therapy, or a long discussion of intimacy in long marriages. It was none of those. It was, she said, *find a tool that lets you give your body sustained attention without your husband being in the room. Use it. Report back.* ======== I left her office and called my sister, who is two years younger and divorced and unembarrassed about anything. I said: *my therapist told me to buy a pleasure tool.* My sister, who has known me since I was three, started laughing. She said: *first, she did not say that. Second, you should buy a Nancy Lem. Third, I have been waiting for somebody to tell you this for two years.* She walked me through it the way Camila walked through it for my friend Carol last year. I had been listening to that conversation in pieces, the way you listen to a friend's recommendation that you are not yet ready to take. This time I was ready. ======== The mechanism is what made me trust it. Air-pulse, not vibration. My sister explained the difference the way someone who has thought about it explains it. Vibration overrides the body's own signal. Air-pulse works alongside the body's signal. It supports natural moisture. ======== I bought one that night. Plain brown box. I told my husband. I did not have to. I am telling you that for two reasons. One: I was clear with myself that this was not a secret. Two: my husband, after a minute of being slightly thrown, said *good. I have been worried.* We had been on the same quiet for the same long time. He had not known what to do about it either. My therapist was right that it was a body question, not a marriage question, but the marriage was the room the body was in. ======== The next month, in three sentences. Week one: *I felt something I had not felt in years. It was small.* Week two: *Natural moisture, which I had stopped expecting. I told my therapist. She said: I have been waiting for you.* Week three: *I asked my husband to be in the room. He was thrown again, then he wasn't. The Lem stayed on the nightstand for a long time after that night.* Week four: *I told my therapist she was the most useful person in my life. She said: I just asked the question. You did the work.* ======== I am writing this for the women who are in therapy and have not had the question asked yet. The question is: *what is your body doing on its own?* If the honest answer is *I don't know*, that is the place to start. Not a different therapist. Not a different husband. A tool. An hour. Attention. The Lem is not the entire answer. The Lem is the first paragraph of an answer. ======== I have been telling this to women who write to me ever since. Therapy will help you understand the marriage, or the divorce, or the menopause, or the long quiet. It will not, in most cases, hand you the body back. The body has to be handed back by you, with one careful hour at a time, with the right tool, on a Wednesday afternoon when no one is home. That is what my therapist meant. That is what she was trying to ask. ======== End the dry era with Nancy Lem. 🩶 100% discreet shipping. 🛁 Waterproof. 🤫 Whisper-quiet. 🌸 Body-safe medical silicone. ======== P.S. To my therapist, who knew the question and waited eight months for me to be ready to hear it: thank you. To every other woman in therapy who has not been asked yet: you can ask yourself. *What is my body doing on its own?* The answer to that question is the rest of your life.