Welcome to the Waves, Slates Show about gender, feminism, and what it really means to be triggered.

I'm Shannon Paulis, a senior editor for Slate and editor of The Waves.

Today on the show, I'm talking to Virginia U-Banks.

She's an associate professor at political science at the university at Albany, SUNY, as well as a writer.

In this summer, she wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine that I cannot get out of my head.

It's called His PTSD and My Struggle to Live with It.

It's a deeply personal piece of writing that illustrates what it's like to care for someone who's recovering from trauma.

Trauma and PTSD are words that are thrown around a lot these days.

In this episode, Virginia will help us understand what they actually mean.

She's also going to get into why women often suffer from PTSD at a higher rate than men do,

and how she got her PTSD diagnosis by caring for her partner, Jason.

Before we get into the conversation, I just wanted to set up Virginia's relationship with Jason,

who's her partner of many, many years, by reading a paragraph to you from her essay.

Jason had been a friend for years.

I was newly single, playing the field.

Considering my options, I spied him in a crowded room and thought,

Jason Martin, that would be fun.

And I tipped my cowboy hat so covered both of our faces and kissed him.

Jason resisted my attempts to get him into bed.

His slowly unfolding moves, suggesting,

allowing for durability for depth.

I resisted his resistance, hurting him towards shallow intimacy as like a border collie.

...