ForChics ad: Feel Wanted Again ❤️

My husband put his arm around me for a picture. I leaned into him before I could stop myself. He took his hand away as soon as our daughter lowered the phone. That night I asked her to delete the photo. That was in May. There's a different picture of us on the fridge now, and my husband is the one who put it there. My name's Laura. I'm 44, I've been married 18 years, and until a few months ago I could tell you the last time my husband had touched me without somebody asking him to. Our daughter Emma graduated high school this spring. After the ceremony we were outside by the gym, taking pictures in every possible combination while our son complained about being hungry. Emma took my phone and told us to stand together. Mark put his arm around my waist. And I leaned into him before I could stop myself. That's the part I remember. How quickly I did it. I had been standing there holding her flowers and worrying about whether we'd get out of the parking lot before the restaurant stopped serving lunch, and then his hand was there and I forgot about all of it. She took 3 pictures. He took his arm away when she handed the phone back. Then he asked our son where he'd parked, and we went to lunch. That night Emma sent the pictures to our family group chat. There was one of her with her brother, one with my mother, and then the one of me and Mark. We looked happy. I was leaning against his chest and he had his hand around my waist, and if you'd shown me that picture of another couple I would've thought, they still really like each other. I knew he'd taken his hand away as soon as she finished. I texted Emma separately and asked her to delete that one. She said, “Why? You look so pretty.” I told her I didn't like my arms. There was nothing wrong with my arms. Mark manages an auto repair shop. He works hard, remembers when my car needs an inspection, and drove 40 minutes back to our daughter's dorm on move-in day because she'd forgotten the pillow she'd slept with since she was little. That's the man I'm married to. If I called him right now and said I needed him, he'd come. But I couldn't remember the last time he'd come looking for me when I didn't need anything. We had our routine down. We could get dinner on the table, get both kids where they needed to be, and get through an entire evening without asking each other a question we didn't already know the answer to. He'd ask if I'd eaten. I'd ask how his day was. He'd say busy, and I'd say mine too, and we'd both mean it. Then we'd find something else to do. I work in a school office. I talk to people all day. Parents, teachers, kids who need to call home. By the time I get back, I'm happy to have a quiet house. For a long time I told myself that was all it was. We were tired. We didn't need to talk constantly to prove anything. And we didn't. But sometimes he'd walk past me in the hall, and I'd move out of his way, and afterwards I'd remember when he used to stop me there. We lived in a little rental when we first got married. You couldn't open the bathroom door all the way if somebody was standing at the linen closet. When I'd try to squeeze past him with a laundry basket, he'd put his hands on my hips and pull me closer. I'd tell him to move because I was busy. He'd say he was busy too. I used to complain that I couldn't get anything done. For about a year before that graduation, I would've given anything to have him interrupt me like that. I hadn't said it to him. I'd come close once. We were cleaning up after dinner and he asked why I was so quiet, and I said, “Do you ever miss how we used to be?” He looked worried immediately. He put down the plate he was holding and asked if I was unhappy. And I heard myself say no, because I didn't know how to answer that without making him think I regretted our life. I don't regret our life. I wanted this house. I wanted our kids. I wanted him. I still wanted him. So I said I just missed having more time together, and he agreed we should go out more, and that Saturday he made a dinner reservation. We had a nice time. He asked if I'd enjoyed myself twice on the way home. That was what made me stop trying to explain it. He was doing what I'd asked, and I was sitting there waiting to feel something I couldn't ask for properly. I wanted him to reach for me when I hadn't spent the week arranging it. By May, I'd stopped expecting that. Then he put his hand on my waist outside the gym and I found out how little it would've taken. I sat on the edge of our bed looking at that photo for a long time before I sent Emma the message. Mark was downstairs looking for the receipt for our son's new shoes. I could hear him opening drawers. I nearly called him upstairs. Instead I plugged in my phone and got ready for bed. About 2 weeks later, Beth came into the office to help me finish the end-of-year attendance reports. She's worked there longer than I have, and we've known each other for years. She leaned over my desk to point something out, and I asked what perfume she was wearing. It was one of those scents you notice because somebody's close to you. I kept catching it while she was talking. She said it was ForChics. I'd never heard of it. She pulled it up on her phone and showed me. Then she told me it was a pheromone perfume, and I looked at her. “That was my reaction too,” she said. Beth's been married 23 years. She's not somebody who tells you every detail of her marriage at work. But she said her husband had started taking his time saying goodbye in the mornings. Then she went back to explaining the attendance report. I let her finish. Before she left, I asked her to send me the link. I didn't tell her about the picture. I hadn't told anybody about that, and I wasn't going to start in an office where somebody could walk in at any minute. I looked it up that evening. There were 8,036 reviews and a 60-day money-back guarantee. I read through the scent descriptions, went back to the one Beth wore, and put my phone down. Then I picked it up again. I ordered Seduction, the one Beth wore. The description said it smelled like your own skin, only better. I'd liked that I noticed it while she was sitting next to me. I could imagine wearing that at home. It arrived the following week. I put on 2 sprays after my shower, before Mark got home, and went downstairs to sort through the school papers our son had emptied onto the dining table. He came in carrying the mail. Normally he'd leave it beside me and go upstairs to change. That evening he put it down, leaned over to see what I was reading, and said, “You smell nice.” I said I'd bought a new perfume. He bent down and kissed me just below my ear. Then he went upstairs. I sat there holding a permission slip for a trip that had already happened. I didn't text Beth. I didn't decide everything was different. But when he came back down, I looked up. I hadn't realized how often I'd stopped doing that. Over the next few days, there were other things. He came and stood beside me while I was making coffee on Saturday. His hand was on my back while he told me about somebody at work, and he left it there after he'd finished talking. On Sunday he needed to get something from the hardware store and asked if I wanted to come. I asked what he needed me to look at. He said nothing. He just thought I might want to ride with him. We were gone almost an hour. He bought a part for the downstairs toilet and we got coffee on the way home, and I talked about something that had happened at work without stopping halfway through because I thought I was boring him. He was listening. The following Thursday I was trying to put on a necklace before we went to our son's school concert. Mark came into the bedroom and asked if I needed help. I turned around and lifted my hair. He fastened it, but I didn't feel him move away. Then he kissed the back of my neck. We were late getting out of the house. That's as much of that evening as I'm going to tell you. What changed over those weeks wasn't just what he did. I stopped expecting him to pull away. If he came and sat beside me, I let my leg rest against his. If he put his arm around me, I stayed there. I didn't immediately find something I needed to get up and do. I hadn't known I was doing that either. In July we went to my sister's for a cookout. I was sitting beside Mark on the back steps while we waited for the food. He was telling me something, and I had my hand on his knee. Emma took a picture. I didn't know she'd taken it until she sent it to me the next morning. My hair was half out of its clip. I had a paper plate balanced on my lap. Mark was looking at me while he talked, with his arm resting behind me. I remembered sitting there. We'd stayed on those steps until my sister called us over to eat. I sent the picture to Mark. He asked Emma to print it. She has one of those little photo printers in her room, and a few days later it was on the fridge under a magnet from a vacation we took when the kids were small. He put it there while I was at work. I never told him why I wanted the graduation picture deleted. I hadn't wanted to get rid of a nice picture of us. I wanted to be able to look at one without remembering how quickly the moment had ended. The perfume I bought was ForChics Seduction. I still wear it, including on evenings when we're having leftovers and neither of us is leaving the house. I like how I smell in it. I like getting close enough for him to notice. And I like that getting close feels ordinary again. If you've been reading this and thinking about a moment of your own, the link is below. You get a full 60 days with it, and they're doing buy 1 get 1 free at 67% off. I sent Emma a message last week asking whether she'd actually deleted that first picture. She hadn't. I asked her to send it back.