As an actor and reality TV star (lately of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Lisa Rinna has never been afraid to be herself. Now she’s using hat boldness and honesty to talk candidly about aging, health, sexuality, and how they intertwine in a revealing (literally!) new interview with Cosmopolitan.
Rinna owns her sexuality so confidently now that you might be surprised to hear it wasn’t always that way. “I grew up very repressed, like everybody did in the ’60s,” she said. “You’re just a good girl, and you don’t say how you feel; you just try to be quiet. You can see how well that went for me.” Rinna said she “rebelled” on her own, but it wasn’t until she started dating her husband of 31 years, Harry Hamlin, that she truly embraced her sexuality — while on vacation in Tahiti, as you do.
“We had this over-the-water bungalow and we were out taking photos and I was very self-conscious, if you can believe it,” Rinna recalled. “And he said, ‘Can’t you pose or something?’ I was just standing there with my arms down at my sides. I think that day just opened a door and from then on, I was like, ‘Yes, I can do something.'”
Even after she learned to love her sexuality, Rinna said, her sexual confidence ebbed and flowed throughout her life. Giving birth to her two daughters (Delilah, 25, and Amelia, 22) had a huge impact because of the effect on her mental health.
“I had postpartum depression and I completely lost my mojo,” Rinna explained. She dealt with it for the first 15 months of Delilah’s life before getting treatment, and then she “was ready for it when I had Amelia,” Rinna said. “I went on an antidepressant, which helped tremendously. Without that, I don’t know how long it would’ve taken. I’m very positive and a very happy person, and I felt completely hopeless. And that’s pretty scary when you’ve never had that happen in your life.”
Once Rinna recovered, she said, “it took a minute for me to figure out ‘what do I do?’ I think it’s hard after you have children to figure out how to get that sexuality back.”
The answer: a pole-dancing class, taught by a fellow actor, that Rinna had found out about through a newspaper article. “There was an article in the Los Angeles Times about Sheila Kelley doing a pole-dancing class,” Rinna explained. “[It] made me think, ‘Wow, that’s scary, and that would be really interesting to do, and maybe I should do it. I think I should do it.'”
In the small class — “there were maybe six of us” — taught in Kelley’s husband’s home office, Rinna rediscovered her sexual confidence. “[I]t felt safe,” Rinna remembered. “It changed my whole perception and fear about sexuality and expressing yourself. I did it for a good two years, and I don’t think I ever looked back.”
As she’s gotten older, the Days of Our Lives alum said her sexuality has continued to evolve. “Our hormones change and we change,” Rinna says simply. “When you’re ovulating, the universe says you need to make a baby and you’re sexual. So I think it’s really interesting when you go through menopause.”
Rinna uses hormone replacement treatment, and is a “big proponent of hormones,” she said. The actor was initially hesitant to take them, she says, because her mother’s breast cancer was believed to stem from “years and years and years” of HRT, but a visit to an Eastern-Western medicine doctor eight years ago changed her mind. “I was really suffering,” RInna recalled. “I couldn’t sleep, the hot flashes, everything, and I was anxious and angry and just a mess.” The doctor recommended a mix of plant-based, bioidentical hormones, saying they’d be “safe for me personally” and might help protect her from breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
“if I’m going to have a better life by taking them, I’m going to do it,” Rinna said. “They have been really helpful in my being able to stay feeling good about myself.”
Before you go, make sure to shop our favorite beauty products for people going through menopause:
