Things I Tried Before $2.30 Fixed It: $19 Gas Station Pills. $42 Amazon Herbs. $79 Pump. Hims And BlueChew At $10 A Dose. And More. Total: $700+ For Nothing.

I'm 54. My wife of 26 years and I hadn't had sex in eight months. Not because she stopped wanting to. Because I couldn't.

Last month I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out every single thing I'd bought in the previous 18 months trying to fix it. Gas station pills. Amazon herbs. A pump. Hims. BlueChew. A doctor's visit I paid cash for. The list ran four pages.

I want to walk you through that list. Because if you're reading this, I have a feeling you're going to find yourself somewhere in it.

I've got at least four friends in the exact same boat. Every one of them has tried roughly the same six or seven things, in roughly the same order. And every one of them has a wife who is roughly the same number of weeks from running out of patience.

Here's What Didn't Work. In Order. With Prices.

• $19. A Rhino off the rack at a gas station off I-71 at 11 at night. Bought it next to the energy drinks like a coward. My heart pounded for two hours. Nothing else happened. I threw the wrapper away in the parking lot so I wouldn't have to carry it into my own house.
• $42. A "horny goat weed blend for men over 50" off Amazon. 4.6 stars, 8,000 reviews. I took it religiously for two weeks. Felt nothing. That bottle is still in my medicine cabinet.
• $34. A magnesium and zinc stack a buddy swore by. A full month of it. I slept a little better. Nothing else changed.
• $79. A vacuum pump. I used it twice. It sat in a drawer for a year. I'm not going to describe this part of the list in any more detail than that.
• $28. A "honey shot" I saw on Instagram. It arrived in a little gold foil packet that looked exactly like a ketchup pack from a diner. Money gone.
• $110. A Ro trial. It worked. But then I did the math. Eight to twelve dollars a dose. At a couple of times a week, that's eighty to a hundred dollars a month, every month, for the rest of my life. And it renews on its own whether I use it or not.
• $95. A Hims trial. Same pricing model. Same monthly charge. Same subscription I had to remember to cancel.
• $89. A BlueChew trial. Same again. Chewable this time. Same charge hitting my card on the same day every month.
• $150. Cash for a doctor's appointment. Eight minutes in the room. He asked me four questions, typed for a while, and told me to come back in six months.

And one folder on her laptop I didn't find out about until much later. It was labeled "house."

The Night It All Came To A Head

The list above isn't the part that scared me. The part that scared me was our anniversary.

We'd planned a quiet night in. Just the two of us. Candles. A bottle of wine she'd been saving. Everything she used to love. Everything I used to be able to deliver.

And I couldn't.

She tried. God knows she tried. And when it was clear it wasn't going to happen, she put her hand on my shoulder, said "it's okay," and went to bed.

If you have ever heard your wife say "it's okay" in that particular voice, you already know what it means. It does not mean okay. It means she's done trying. She's already gone. She's just still in the room.

That was the night I stopped buying random pills off a rack and started actually looking for something that made sense.

What I Was Actually Looking For

Here's where I landed after that night. I made a list of what I needed, and I was strict about it.

• No subscription. I was done with a charge hitting my card every month for the rest of my life. I wanted to buy a thing, own the thing, and be finished.
• No appointment. I'd already paid $150 to sit in a paper gown for eight minutes. I wasn't doing that again.
• No conversation about it. Not with a doctor, not with a pharmacist, not with the 24-year-old at the counter. This is the part nobody says out loud: for a lot of us, the humiliation is the actual barrier, not the money.
• Under three dollars a day. I'd done the Hims math. Ten dollars a dose was never going to work for a guy with two kids in college.

That list ruled out almost everything on the market. Which is how I ended up on GForce 5.

What Finally Worked: $2.30 A Day

A bottle is $69. That works out to about $2.30 a day.

Not $10 a dose. Not $80 to $100 a month, forever, on a card you have to remember to cancel. Sixty-nine dollars, once, and it's yours.

Here's exactly what was on the table, and I want to be precise because I checked all of it before I spent a cent:

Why I Almost Didn't Order It

I'll be honest with you: the price is the reason I nearly closed the tab.

I'd been trained by 18 months of failure to believe that anything under a hundred dollars a month was garbage. The gas station pill was $19 and it was garbage. The Amazon herbs were $42 and they were garbage. So my brain went straight to: sixty-nine dollars, therefore garbage.

What changed my mind was doing the arithmetic in the other direction.

Hims and Ro and BlueChew aren't expensive because of what's in the box. They're expensive because of the Super Bowl ads, the celebrity endorsements, and the fact that a subscription customer is worth ten times what a one-time customer is worth. You are not paying for the product. You are paying for the marketing budget and the recurring billing model, on every single dose, forever.

Take those two things out and the number gets a lot smaller. That's the whole story. There's no trick to it.

What Actually Happened

It showed up in three days in a plain box. My wife carried it in from the porch and didn't ask what it was, because there was nothing on it to ask about.

I'm not going to give you a fairy tale about night one. What I'll tell you is what I noticed, in the order I noticed it.

The first thing that came back wasn't physical. It was that I stopped dreading bedtime. That sounds small. It is not small. Eight months of walking into your own bedroom at 9 PM with your stomach in a knot does something to you that I don't have the words for.

Then the rest followed. And then one Sunday morning in the second week my wife reached over, and I didn't have to invent a reason to get up.

We've been fine since. That's the whole ending. It's not dramatic. It's just fine, which after eight months is the best word in the English language.

Who This Is Actually For

I'm not going to pretend this is for everyone, so let me be straight about who I think it's for.

It's for the guy who has already been through most of my list. Who has a drawer with a pump in it. Who has cancelled at least one subscription. Who has decided that the conversation with the doctor is worse than the problem itself.

If that's you, the part that matters is that there's nothing to arrange. No appointment to book. No form to fill out about your medical history. No one to explain yourself to. You order it the same way you'd order anything else, and it comes to your door in a box that doesn't say a word about you.

That was the part I needed. It might be the part you need too.