There’s a story women are told about midlife, and it goes something like this: your desire fades, your body betrays you, and you quietly become invisible—no longer desiring, no longer desired.
It’s a script so pervasive that most of us absorb it before we ever get there. The dominant cultural narrative treats midlife as a problem to be solved: manage the symptoms, age gracefully, accept the dimming.
I’m here to tell you that narrative is not just incomplete. It’s wrong.
Because the women I know who are most attuned to their sensuality—the ones radiating that magnetic, self-possessed energy—are often the ones who came into it later. Not despite midlife, but because of it. Because they finally had the courage (and frankly, the fed-up-ness) to stop performing and start feeling.
No one embodies this more than this week’s guest, Juliette LaMontagne.
Juliette LaMontagne is the writer and creator of Touch Me There—Reclaiming Desire, Power & Purpose in Midlife, a serial memoir about her midlife erotic awakening that is now being adapted for television. I came across her work exactly a year ago, on a flight to Napa of all places (she’s based in Sonoma County—kismet), and I was so moved that I interviewed her for this newsletter last year. This week, I finally got to sit down with her for the podcast.
On paper, Juliette had done everything “right.” Raised Catholic, she followed all the rules: marriage, kids, a successful career in New York City.
But behind the scenes, her marriage was unraveling under the weight of her husband’s addiction relapses—until a night in the E.R. became her breaking point. They separated for nine months, on opposite coasts. She was certain it was over.
Then the pandemic brought them back under one roof, and what happened next is one of the most extraordinary stories of erotic rebuilding I’ve ever heard: 12-step recovery, psychedelic-assisted therapy, sexological bodywork, the Wheel of Consent—and ultimately, the best sex of her life, decades into her marriage.
This conversation is for anyone who has ever wondered if it’s too late. It isn’t.
Besides Substack, you can tune in on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple.
Below are 5 key insights from our episode.
1. There’s a difference between remission and recovery—and it applies to marriages, too.
Juliette’s husband had been sober for most of their marriage, but he’d never done the deeper work of recovery. He was white-knuckling it—channeling that addictive intensity into adrenaline, work, and blame.
Meanwhile, Juliette was living in a state of constant vigilance, never knowing when the next relapse would come. Her nervous system was locked in fight or flight for years.
Through Al-Anon, she learned what she calls radical accountability: the practice of saying this didn’t happen to me—this is an opportunity for me to learn, and I have to take responsibility for my part. It wasn’t until both of them took that accountability—him in recovery, her in Al-Anon—that anything could actually change between them.
If your relationship feels stuck, this is the question worth sitting with: are you in remission, or are you in recovery?
2. Desire can’t come back online until your nervous system calms down.
This is a key part of Juliette’s story. Her eros didn’t return because of a new technique or a lingerie purchase. It returned when her body finally felt safe.
For Juliette, psychedelic-assisted therapy (alongside hormone replacement therapy) is what allowed her nervous system to finally rev down. And when it did, everything came back online—not just erotically, but sensually. Colors brighter. Sensation amplified. Alive.
She’s careful to say psychedelics aren’t the only path. But the principle is universal: you cannot access desire from survival mode. Whatever helps your body exhale—that’s where the work begins.
3. Your body keeps the score, and a skilled practitioner can help you release it.
When Juliette’s sensuality started stirring again, she sought out a sexological bodyworker—a practitioner who uses one-way touch to help clients cultivate their erotic well-being.
She describes a practice called vulva mapping: slow, intentional, exploratory touch (not aimed at arousal) that locates the places where the body holds tension, history, and—for many women—trauma. Spots that were once almost unbearably sensitive would release under patient, breathing presence, and suddenly fill with sensation and pleasure.
Her practitioner put it beautifully: going into the vulva is like opening a box of old photographs.
We also talk about orgasmic meditation—a partnered, time-bound practice that uses gentle clitoral stroking as a form of mindfulness, cultivating present-moment awareness, embodied pleasure, and emotional connection rather than chasing orgasm.
Juliette describes learning to breathe the building sensation outward through the whole body, until she was tingling to her fingertips—a completely different relationship to climaxing than the peak-and-done model we tend to experience.
And as Juliette points out, having a partner do this for you is its own practice: you’re not driving the car. For those of us socialized to monitor everyone else’s experience, learning to let go and simply receive—with no responsibility for the other person—is where the real work (and the real medicine) lives.
4. The Wheel of Consent will make you see your partner—and yourself—anew.
This is where Juliette and her husband rebuilt their erotic connection, and it started smaller than you can imagine: his hands resting on her feet, over her socks, for three minutes.
The Wheel of Consent, developed by Dr. Betty Martin, breaks touch into four quadrants—serve, accept, take, allow—and asks you to get crystal clear about who the touch is for and which direction the energy is moving.
It sounds contrived. It is anything but. Through this slow, negotiated practice, Juliette watched her husband ask for what he wanted from strength and integrity rather than neediness—and she found herself, for the first time in years, able to receive.
And then there was the moment he told her “wait.” One word. So hot. Because there is nothing sexier than presence—and for women who are used to driving every part of their lives (raising my hand here), surrendering control to a partner who can hold it is its own profound eroticism.
You don’t need whips, chains, or a play party to rebuild your sex life. You need exploration through touch, negotiation, and consent.
5. Surrender is the whole game.
The thread running through Juliette’s entire journey—the psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, the bodywork, the sex retreat—is surrender. The turning over of control to something, or someone, you trust.
I got emotional in this part of the conversation, because surrender is exactly what I’ve been struggling to access in my own life. I work with sex, I preach this daily, and yet building this business has kept me gripping the wheel so tightly that letting go—truly letting go—has felt almost impossible.
My own recent shibari experience cracked something open in me, and Juliette’s story reminded me why this work matters: it’s one thing to tell your mind to let go. It’s another to let your whole body be held.
Sometimes the bedroom alone can’t give us that container. And it’s brave to seek out the practices and practitioners that can.
If Juliette’s story resonates, do yourself a favor and read Touch Me There—Reclaiming Desire, Power & Purpose in Midlife . It is phenomenal—intimate, literary, and wildly hopeful.
In this episode, Juliette mentions a previous episode with AURORE erotica. Tune in below:
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