Welcome to Ask A MWLTF (Yes, that’s Mother Who Likes to F*ck.), a monthly anonymous advice column from Scary Mommy. Here we’ll dissect all your burning questions about motherhood, sex, romance, intimacy, and friendship with the help of our columnist, Penelope, a writer and mental health practitioner in training. She’ll dish out her most sound advice for parents on the delicate dance of raising kids without sacrificing other important relationships. Email her at askpenelope@scarymommy.com.
My 6-year-old was digging through my husband’s suitcase after he got home from a work trip, looking for souvenirs, and he pulled out a bottle of pills I didn’t recognize. Later, after Googling them, I realized they were “sexy time” pills. Now I can’t stop spiraling.
My husband and I haven’t had much of a sex life lately, and he definitely wasn’t using them with me before he left. Part of me thinks I’m being paranoid, but another part of me feels like people don’t pack erectile dysfunction medication for innocent reasons. Do I confront him? Wait and see? Am I naïve?
There’s something especially brutal about discovering a possible threat to your marriage in the middle of ordinary family life. Not through some glamorous affair reveal, but while your 6-year-old is happily tossing dirty laundry onto the bedroom floor looking for a keychain from the airport gift shop.
That’s the part that really lands for me here. The collision of domestic innocence and adult secrecy. One minute you’re unpacking snacks and chargers and tiny hotel shampoos, and the next your entire marriage feels briefly rearranged around a bottle of pills.
And yes, let’s be honest, most people would spiral. The internet loves to pretend there are only two possible responses to moments like this — either “trust your gut!” or “you’re crazy and insecure!” — but the reality is that long-term relationships are built inside ambiguity. A strange discovery like this drops directly into whatever vulnerabilities already exist between you. And you’ve already named one: The two of you haven’t had much of a sex life lately.
That matters. Because when sex has gone quiet in a marriage, anything connected to desire starts carrying extra emotional voltage. The pills don’t just raise questions about fidelity. They raise questions about longing, rejection, aging, secrecy, and the terrifying possibility that your partner might still have an erotic self — you’re just no longer included in it.
Of course your mind went where it did.
But I’d caution you against turning this into an investigation before it becomes a conversation. One of the most corrosive things that can happen in long relationships is that anxiety quietly transforms us from partners into detectives. You find one thing, and suddenly your nervous system starts building an emotional crime scene around it. You start looking backward, reinterpreting old moments, noticing gaps, collecting evidence. The marriage itself becomes secondary to the search for certainty.
And certainty is seductive because it promises relief. If you can just figure out what the pills mean, then maybe you can stop feeling crazy. But relationships are rarely that clean. The pills may mean exactly what you fear. People absolutely cheat on work trips. But they may also mean something less dramatic and more private — anxiety about aging, performance, masculinity, or sexuality that your husband hasn’t known how to talk about openly.
That doesn’t make the secrecy insignificant. It just means secrecy and betrayal are not always identical things.
I also think there’s something poignant here about the timing of the discovery happening through your child. Parenthood has a way of flattening adult erotic life into the background. Kids become the center of the household, the organizing principle around which everything else revolves. Then suddenly, through this almost absurd domestic moment, you’re reminded that your husband exists separately from fatherhood. As a sexual person. A private person. And whether or not he’s done anything wrong, that realization can feel strangely destabilizing.
So no, I wouldn’t wait to see whether the pills “get used.” I wouldn’t monitor him or search for more evidence or enlist your 6-year-old in an accidental espionage operation. Once a relationship slips fully into surveillance mode, something intimate starts to erode, regardless of what’s ultimately true.
I would talk to him. Calmly if possible, imperfectly if necessary. Not as a prosecutor presenting evidence, but as someone saying: “Finding these brought up a lot for me, especially because we haven’t felt very connected lately. I need to understand what’s going on.”
The hardest part of long relationships is that the people we love remain partially unknowable to us. Sometimes that mystery feels erotic. Sometimes it feels terrifying.
Usually it feels like both.
