The author and her husband before their wedding ceremony at the Los Angeles Central Library in 2009. Neither had had sex yet.

For most of my adult life, I ended my evenings curled up in pyjamas with my favourite men: Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, the Jo(h)ns (Oliver and Stewart) and Trevor Noah.

They were witty, indignant and knew just how to stroke my outrage while making me laugh. They gave my day closure – a safe feeling that someone principled was paying attention to what was going on in our country.

Meanwhile, my actual husband was usually just one room over, watching his own shows on his own device. Our decompression happened in parallel worlds after long days of work and high-stakes negotiations with our children over exactly how many more minutes of screen time they could have.

We then fell asleep in separate states of overstimulated exhaustion, each lit by the blue glow of our respective screens.

I was a news junkie. I read headlines while brushing my teeth. Listened to podcasts while driving our kids to piano lessons. Spent my time poring over The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and NPR instead of grading student projects or answering work emails. It wasn’t just procrastination; it was pleasure. Even when the content was bleak, the commentary was delicious – especially when coated in satire.

But then came January 2025 – the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and the fun was gone.

It turns out irony can’t save an autocratic stew of misinformation and hopelessness. Not even the best comics transform the dismantling of public health, the criminalisation of immigration or the erosion of democratic institutions into wholesome, witty punchlines anymore. It stopped being entertainment. It started feeling like trauma bonding. Or maybe just trauma.

That’s when I noticed something strange: I no longer wanted to watch the news at night. Or read it online. Or laugh at it. I didn’t want a clever monologue or a scathing segment. I just wanted to be still.

In that stillness, I started doing something I hadn’t done in a while: I climbed into bed. With my husband. Who, as it turns out, had been right there all along.

One night, as I lay there with my beach read, my nightgown rode up just enough to show a peek of my underwear. They were comfortable, full-coverage briefs – maybe dark grey? Think Target, not Victoria’s Secret.

“Are you trying to seduce me?” he asked.

I looked back and thought: That’s a brilliant idea. So I leaned in and straddled him. It was sex before we put in our mouth guards. We were fully awake.

Afterward, he kissed me and said, “You have a 100% track record in seducing me.”

I hadn’t really ever thought about it that way, but l wanted to see where this could go. Because the thing about lying next to someone you’ve been married to for over 16 years is that your bodies remember things your brains may have deprioritised. Like desire.

We’re in our 40s. We have two kids. Our bedtime routine used to involve cajoling those kids to stay in bed, then cursing in the dark........

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