My Zonked Out Wife
I don't know who she is. I am pretty sure she doesn’t either.
By Barry Weiss · July 2, 2026 · 4 min read
I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. Something that if my wife ever reads would end in a conversation I do not want to have. But she won’t, because she'll be in a gentle Lexapro sleep by 8:45pm.
My wife has been on one drug or another since before her first kiss. And there are ten million guys in this country lying in bed next to the same woman.
The Pill
In high school, her mother was a whore. There's no gentle way to say it. Her daughter would obviously follow the same path, so she dragged a fourteen-year-old to the gynecologist and got her on birth control. "For her periods." Yep. Her mother's promiscuity became her daughter's prescription, and that prescription ran for fifteen years starting in eighth grade.
Birth control alters mate preference. Women on the pill lose ovulation-driven attraction to masculine men and instead select softer, safer types. Studies confirm that partners of women on the pill during mate selection had measurably less masculine features.
So she chose me. Without it, would she have chosen me? I don't know. She doesn't either.
Here's the part that makes me sick: she came off the pill briefly two years post-college, “side effects.” In the two months off the hormones she slept with six guys. She'd had three partners total before that, and suddenly her body count tripled. It turns out the pill had been suppressing her actual sex drive, her actual impulses, her actual self... something that all detonated the moment the chemistry changed. Six dudes in two months.
Back on the pill, she also got an Adderall prescription for studying, Xanax for a breakup, and Ambien twice a week to help her sleep. The full sorority pharmacy.
The Fertility Horror Show
We got married and she stopped the pill to get pregnant. But her body, whose natural development had been suppressed before it finished developing, couldn't do it.
So we enter the hormone gauntlet: Clomid, Letrozole, Gonadotropins. Drugs designed to jump-start ovaries that had been in pharmaceutical hibernation for fifteen years. These drugs made her, there's no clinical way to say this, an absolute dragon bitch: Sobbing, screaming, bloated, in agony, and looking at me like I'd personally ruined her life.
That didn't work. IVF: more hormones, higher doses, more needles, more mood swings. It worked. She got pregnant. Then the baby came and with it postpartum depression, and with the depression came Zoloft because of course it did. Birth control caused the fertility problem, fertility drugs caused the hormonal chaos, pregnancy caused the crash, and the crash required an SSRI.
We did it all again for kid number two. Another IVF cycle, another hormonal demolition derby, more Zoloft.
The Flatline
Two kids and a job she insists on working despite making a quarter of what I do. She doesn't need the money — she needs a break from the children. Fine, just say that. But the evenings are hers, and bedtime is a war she fights with the help of THC gummies. Dinner, gummy, bath, story, bed.
Someone told her the nightly edibles weren't healthy. She mentioned it to her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist didn't ask why she needed to be sedated to parent her own children. Instead the psychiatrist prescribed Lexapro.
And it works. God, does it work! She is calm. She is even. She is asleep by 8:45 with the emotional range of drywall. The woman I married is gone. In her place is a pleasant, functional, medicated mannequin who wouldn't notice if I moved into a hotel.
Twenty-six years of drugs: Birth control, Adderall, Xanax, Ambien, Clomid, Letrozole, injectable hormones, IVF drugs, pregnancy hormones, Zoloft, THC, Lexapro. She has never existed in her own unmedicated neurochemistry for more than two months, and during those two months she was a train wreck.
These 10 million women have 1.8 kids each, who they put on Vyvanse, Adderall, and Methylphenidate as soon as they’re old enough to talk. The husbands go the opposite direction, taking exogenous T and ashwagandha so while their wives are passed out they can beat off in the guest room. A zonked-out nation, just below replacement level, walks zombie-like towards gradual extinction. Maybe this is bliss.
My wife sleeps. I lie next to her at 9 PM, scrolling through my phone. She drools out the side of our mouth onto a $200 pillow. I don't know who she is. I am pretty sure she doesn’t either.