Claire Berrnette

If a doctor has ever told you that low desire in your fifties is a normal part of aging, or that hormone therapy is too dangerous to consider, I’d like a word. Both are out of date. The distance between what the research actually says and what women get told in a ten-minute appointment is the reason this site exists.

I’m Claire Berrnette. I write for ClaimNight about women’s sexual health, midlife, and relationships — mostly the parts everyone finds too awkward, too “hormonal,” or too settled to look at closely. They are none of those things.

I don’t lead with the letters after my name, and I’m not going to. My background is in psychology and human development, but that isn’t why you should trust a word I write. Trust the citations. Every claim I make comes with the study or the guideline behind it, and if I can’t produce the receipt, I don’t make the claim. There are things I’m fairly sure are true that still aren’t on this site, because I hadn’t pinned the source yet. That’s the deal.

The thing that actually shaped how I write wasn’t a classroom. It was my own first marriage ending in 2018. It taught me that “this is hard” and “this is over” are two different sentences, and that most people can’t tell which one they’re living in. These days I’m in Lincoln Square with my husband Marcos and a beagle named Fig, who is convinced he’s the one paying the mortgage.