Donald Trump Reignited My Sex Life

However, my husband and I didn’t just stumble into this midlife renaissance. Our story is a long — and in many ways — quiet one.

We waited until marriage to have sex. This was mostly for religious reasons (we’re politically liberal evangelical Christians — we exist!), and because we both believed sex was special — so special it should be done and developed with a special person.

At the beginning, it was thrilling — less because we were good at it (we definitely weren’t) and more because we were having sex at all. Then, gradually, we got better. We got to know each other’s bodies the way you learn to drive around your town: a few awkward turns at first, then smooth and intuitive ones.

Then we had kids, which, as many people know, is the great erotic buzzkill of adulthood. Still, we kept going. Not constantly. Not creatively. But consistently enough to know we still wanted each other. 

Over the last decade, something else shifted. My husband stopped watching porn. It was a personal choice, rooted in his desire to honor God by honoring our marriage. I didn’t ask him to, but I noticed when he did, and it changed the texture of our intimacy. He saw me differently. I was the only source of any of that energy. He really looked when I changed clothes and forced himself to peel open his eyes when I got up early, just to say, “I wanted to catch my favorite show.” He was giving all his attention to me.

I didn’t fully realize how much I’d been giving mine to the news.

It’s funny how easy it is to split a life into separate screens. Kids on iPads. Parents on laptops. Couples drifting apart, not through malice or neglect, but through thousands of tiny, unintentional choices to disengage from the room they’re in.

As a cognitive scientist, I think a lot about joint attention: the ability to share focus on something with someone else.

Consider the moon landing. People all over the world (including my mother, as a child in South Korea) gathered around the one television set in the neighborhood to watch a single, shared moment unfold in breathless anticipation.

Now, our attention is rarely attuned to the same thing in the same way. It’s fractured. Even though it sometimes feels like we’re all having the same experience (almost everyone has a cousin who posts weird conspiracy theories on Facebook), our attention is profoundly splintered. Each of us is served a uniquely personalized stream of content. No two “For You” pages are exactly the same. We’re never concentrating on the same thing at the same time.

Case in point: The looming end of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. The official CBS line is that it’s a financial decision. Some think it’s kiss-the-ring appeasement to Trump’s FCC. Others say he just wasn’t funny anymore (hold my earrings, I’ll go after those bastards for you, Stephen!). I believe it’s something else: a casualty of the fragmentation of attention.

Late night hosts distill the chaos of the day into cathartic jokes couched in a single, shared narrative. But that only works when we have the same basic facts — if we’re living in the same version of reality. When that disappears, the jokes stop landing. The shared relief vanishes. The power is gone.

For us, the fractured feeds, personalized timelines and misaligned realities weren’t just happening out there. The call was coming from inside our house. We’d become two people living parallel lives, each tuned to our own algorithm on our own devices. Until suddenly, we weren’t.

Trump, in all his chaos, broke my nightly news habit. I could not bear to see or hear him before going to sleep at night. And by doing that, he broke something else open: the part of me that had been longing — not for information, but for joint attention. The rare, beautiful state of truly focusing on something together. Being in sync. Connection.

And there, on the other side of all the noise, was my husband.