What It’s Like When Your Wife Goes on Testosterone

Magazine|What It’s Like When Your Wife Goes on Testosterone

After years of a marriage that had little sex in it, Greg Carter had largely accepted that his wife no longer had any interest. The last thing he expected was that right around the time that they both were nearing 50, his wife would have a complete change of heart. “She was pouncing on me,” he said.

His wife had recently started taking testosterone to manage her menopausal symptoms — at a dose so high that it brought her testosterone levels higher than is typical even for women in their 20s. The difference in her desire was almost immediate. “I had the experience of feeling like a teenage boy,” she told me. The shift vastly improved Greg’s own happiness, so much so that he sometimes felt pangs of regret about the years they spent together without a sex life. “I realized, later in life, all that we had missed out on,” he says.

Earlier this year, I published an article on how women are increasingly — with widely varying results — seeking out testosterone to help them with energy or their sex lives. Some women who take testosterone at relatively low doses approved by major medical societies feel little change in their bodies, while others see an increase in their desire. Women who take high doses — doses that exceed levels approved by major medical societies — often report sharp upticks in their interest in sex.

Franny’s doctor prescribed her testosterone (along with estrogen and progesterone) in what’s known as a pellet, a small medical product the size of a grain of rice that is inserted beneath the skin. Often those pellets, which release hormones over the course of several months, provide doses of testosterone that bring their levels much higher than those that women would have naturally — which was true in Franny’s case.

“I feel like I want it sometimes more than my husband,” Franny told me when I was reporting my original article. There was a hint of nervousness in her tone of voice — that dynamic was a shift from their norm and one that made me realize it wasn’t just Franny’s life that had changed, but also Greg’s. And that made me wonder what it would be like to be the partner of someone who was undergoing such a radical shift.

Greg, now 54, told me that their marriage was always, overall, a happy one. They supported each other over the years as Franny wrote poetry and taught writing while Greg built a career in fund-raising. He had headed into marriage assuming that sex would always be part of their lives together; instead, by the time they were in their 40s, their sex life had almost collapsed altogether. “It was emotionally frustrating,” he says. “At some point, you just come to accept it.”