Harry Miller

I ordered these as a joke. My wife is the one who told me to stop being cheap and order them properly.

This is going to be the least professional thing you read today. I don't know how to write. I run a small landscaping business in Cape Coral, Florida. I have never written a review of anything longer than "good tacos" on Yelp. But my wife has now told me three times to write this down, and when your wife tells you three times to do something you do it. I am 41. I know that is younger than most guys reading this. Bear with me. I have been with my wife for eleven years. We have two kids, seven and four. I love her more than anything. And for about the last three years — call it since our second was born and I hit 38 — the sex has been, to be honest, dying. Nothing dramatic. No fight. No cheating. Nothing wrong on paper. She still wants me, or I think she does, and I still want her, or I think I do. But the mornings that used to just happen weren't happening. The reliability wasn't there. And the couple of times I tried to power through when I wasn't fully feeling it, it went badly enough that we both kind of stopped bringing it up. We were down to maybe twice a month. Which for two people who used to be a lot more than that is a thing you notice without wanting to talk about. I did not want to see a doctor. I am 41, in decent shape, six-foot-one, still play basketball on Sundays. I did not want to walk into a doctor's office and say the words. I did not want a pill in a drawer that my kids might find. I did not want it to be a thing. So I did the internet thing. And the internet thing, if you are 41 with a young family and time to lose, is basically watching about a hundred different supplements advertise the same thing in slightly different colored bottles for six months. I tried three of them. All of them were nothing. One of them made me feel weird for like two days and I threw the rest in the trash. I ordered Aurivita because a guy on my crew, Marco, mentioned it. Marco is 47 and Marco is a huge personality and Marco brings it up unprompted at least once a week, which — knowing Marco — I always assumed was Marco being Marco. He kept saying "the cayenne pill, bro, the cayenne pill." I laughed at him for about four months. I ordered it as a joke. That's the honest truth. I put it in the cart at 11 p.m. one night to shut Marco up, expecting to be able to tell him next week that it was garbage like the other three and we could stop talking about it. I did not tell my wife. I did not even really think about it. I got the pouch in the mail, put it in the medicine cabinet behind the Advil, and started taking three softgels every morning with my coffee. Week one, nothing. Which, again, was what I expected. I told Marco on Thursday. He said "give it a month, bro." Week two, I noticed my hands were warm at 6 a.m. This sounds like nothing. But I get up early — 5:30 — and I sit outside on the porch for twenty minutes with my coffee before the kids are up, and in the ten years I've been doing that I have always had cold hands until about my second cup. And I noticed that Tuesday of the second week that my hands were warm the whole time, and I sat there thinking about it, and I couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Also — and this is where it starts getting less appropriate to talk about — I woke up on Wednesday of that second week in the state guys my age used to wake up in and had kind of accepted we didn't wake up in anymore. Not a big deal. Not lasting through my shower. But present. I noticed it and I thought, huh, that hasn't been a regular thing. Week three is where my wife noticed something. She did not say anything then. She told me later that she noticed I had started making eye contact with her again, which apparently I had stopped doing. She said I looked at her while she was making the kids' lunches on a Saturday and she caught it and thought "that's the look he used to have." She said nothing to me. She waited. Week four was the night that changed my mind about the whole thing. I don't want to describe it in detail because my wife would kill me and also because I don't need to. What I will say is that whatever had been off for three years was not off that night. It was like — and this is going to sound stupid — it was like the whole thing worked the way it used to work. Like the mechanism was back. Like I did not have to think about it or manage it or negotiate with my own body. I was 30 again for one night. Afterward my wife looked at me in the dark and asked me what I had been doing differently. I told her. I told her about Marco, and the joke, and the cayenne pill in the medicine cabinet. She sat up and she looked at the pouch. She looked at the ingredients. She said "this is capsaicin, from cayenne, right?" She googled it on her phone in bed for like twenty minutes. She googled the researcher's name — David Julius — and the Nobel Prize and the TRPV1 thing. She googled the specific product. She looked at the third-party lab certificates on their website. Then she rolled over, poked me in the chest, and said: "Stop being cheap about this. Order the big pouch. And write this down for other guys." That is why I am writing this. Because my wife made me. Look — I am not going to pretend I understand the science. My wife understood it in twenty minutes on her phone better than I have understood it in six months of taking the thing. What I know is what I observed in my own body. In four weeks. From a supplement I bought as a joke. Weeks five, six, and seven have all been like week four. Not every single day is a party — my wife and I have two kids and full-time jobs and it's not like we're teenagers. But the mechanism, whatever the mechanism is, is back. When we want to, we can. And when we can, it works the way it used to. That is the whole difference. It stopped being a thing we had to think about. I asked my wife what to tell you if you're reading this. She said tell them three things. One. Cut open a softgel before you swallow the first one and rub a little of the oil on your tongue. If it burns like real cayenne, you got the real thing. If it tastes like flour, you got scammed by someone else selling you ground pepper. Her sister ordered a knockoff off Amazon and it was flour. Aurivita is not flour. The oil in the softgel is dark orange-red. When I did the tongue test in front of her the first time, I made a face, and she laughed. Two. Give it three weeks minimum. She said if I had quit after week one when I felt nothing I would have missed the whole thing. It takes time. It's not a pill you pop before dinner. It's a supplement that builds up. Three. If your wife is like my wife and would rather you did this quietly than made a huge public production of it — order the discreet packaging option on their site. It ships in a plain box. My wife did not want the neighbors seeing an Aurivita pouch on the porch and she is right about that as she is about most things. Aurivita has a 120-day money-back guarantee, which is the only reason I finally ordered it — because Marco told me the guarantee thing and I figured if it was bunk I'd just send it back. I did not send it back. If you're 40, 45, 50, whatever, and things have been slowly dying between you and the person you love and you have been telling yourself it's just how it is now — it isn't just how it is. That's the whole thing. It isn't just how it is. The pouch is in my medicine cabinet. It stays there. I take three every morning with my coffee. My wife takes one too now. She says her energy is better. I don't ask questions. aurivita.co/products/cayenne-pepper-softgels — Marco's friend from Cape Coral. Ryan is my name, in case that matters to anyone. My wife's name is Sam. She is the actual reason this got written. Marco, I owe you a beer. Individual results vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.