Love knows no age. via dark_ghetto28 @ flickr
What qualifies as passionate sexual activity? This isn’t a trick question. I’m not getting into a Bill Clinton-esque game of semantics. My inquiry is driven primarily by the most recent installment of the weekly column in The New York Times entitled “Modern Love”. It’s also spurred by a series of articles on RH Reality Check, “How Are Your Orgasms, Mom?” Living in such a youth-obsessed culture means that hearing about anyone over the age of, say, fifty (and I’m being generous here) having sex is enough to make a lot of people in their twenties and thirties clap their hands over their ears and go “la-la-la-la-la! I can’t hear you!”
The “Modern Love” column this week was written by Nancy Price Freedman, a 70-year-old woman who investigates whether long-term sexual passion is quantifiable and if it even matters. Upon hearing that an acquaintance ended a relationship because she doubted its potential for long-term “passion,” Freedman writes that
It seemed like such a waste of a promising relationship, and such a high bar to have to maintain — to remain physically passionate for years and years. Though afterward we laughed about the passion part, with barely concealed envy.
“Oy, who has the energy?” my friend said with a laugh.
“Who has the flexible joints?” I added.
“Does anyone actually remember sex?” a postmenopausal colleague chimed in. Shrieks of laughter.
Freedman adds, “Sex at our age is something we’re evidently more comfortable joking about than talking about honestly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, despite our declining energy, joints and memory.” And that’s the point that is almost never accepted or acknowledged. She encapsulates the whole issue with this: “Yet the whole issue of sex among older people distracts us from a deeper truth that simple, tender intimacy is very important as we age, the sort of thing our highly sexualized, Viagra-pushing culture tends to minimize or ignore.” The thought of “tender intimacy” over grand sexual passion is seen by our culture as being so boring, so wussy, so girly. Old men popping Viagra in commercials? Standard issue. Old people cuddling in embraces and exchanging slow kisses? Well, it’s assumed that nobody wants to see that.
Underlying this is the fear of aging (younger is always better!) and the issue of seeing intimacy among older people as somehow representing the sex lives of your own parents/grandparents. As someone who definitely knows her parents still have sex (thanks, dad and stepmom, for having sex in our shared hotel room after you mistakenly thought I was asleep), I find myself thoroughly non-squicked by the prospect of senior citizens gettin’ it on.
There is also the assumption that a passionate sex life is necessary to be happy in a relationship. I don’t believe that to be true. And it also is inherently tricky to define what makes a sex life or a relationship “passionate”. Is it defined by frequency? By amount of foreplay? By position used during intercourse? By wearing skimpy lingerie? People’s sex lives are not mapped out like cinematic sex scenes, nor do people stop having sex upon reaching a given age.
RH Reality Check’s Ann Whidden has an excellent feature on the consequences that ensue when we simply write off the possibility of seniors having sex.
“From birth to death, we are all sexual beings. We have a hard enough time acknowledging this when it comes to children, but when it comes to aging adults, the silence is deafening. And deadly: 60 percent of unmarried women ages fifty-eight to ninety-three report that they didn’t use a condom the last time they had sex, and the CDC reports that 15 percent of new HIV cases are among people over fifty.”
Simply put, “Stigma and shame from family, caregivers and doctors, who get “grossed out” by the idea of older adults having sex, leave the concerns of aging adults invisible and untended.” Nobody wants to have “the talk” with card-carrying AARP members about things like condoms and the necessity of STD testing. Whidden closes with a terrific quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “On his ninety-fifth birthday, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes saw an attractive woman and mused, ‘Oh, to be seventy again.’” Sexual intimacy at seventy? Perfectly cool. Sexual intimacy at ninety-five? Also fine. Thinking that your sex life stops once the hair turns gray and the bones turn arthritic? Wholly inaccurate. And that “tender intimacy” Freedman spoke of? Yeah, it’s a good idea for the twenty-something set, too. Passion knows no age.
This Modern Love really confused me. It seemed like she was saying, “Sex isn’t hugely important once you’re older…but, I am still sexually active, and you shouldn’t assume that I’m not!” So, okay, I won’t assume it, but I think there are people for whom sex is incredibly important for their entire lives. It seems reductive to say that non-sexual intimacy becomes more important for everyone.
I actually think that elderly sexuality would be liberating in a way because by the time you’re a senior citizen, no one looks like a model anyway, so there’s got to be less pressure to maintain a perfect body. Plus, no possibility of children. The joint pain would be an issue, but the sex would be worth it, I’m sure.
My dear husband was a passionate sexuagenarian when he died.
But if you’re a heterosexual woman wanting to have sex with a partner, the odds get slimmer and slimmer as you get older. Your husband dies, you spend your years mourning, you come back to life and begin to look for a new man. After a few years, you realize the new man isn’t in your circle of friends… or in your neighborhood… or in your city… or on the planet. The new man is dead, or deadbeat, or dating a woman twenty years younger.
So you start cultivating elderly serenity, wise tranquillity, laughter and the love of friends, satisfaction in sensuous scents, textures, flavors, music.
And when your physician asks if you’re sexually active, you smile, twinkle your eyes in that cute postmenopausal zesty way, and say “only solo.” It probably grosses her out, but why should you care?
Kate Christensen’s book ‘The Great Man’ is really good on this, focusing on the wife, long-time mistress, and sister of a recently-dead painter–all 70ish, iirc, all with messily full lives, including sex. Very recommended.
I’m midway through Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook” right now, and loving it–I know she wrote a more recent book about an older (65?) protagonist’s unexpectedly falling in lust, and I’m eager to read that one next…
@baraqiel: “So, okay, I won’t assume it, but I think there are people for whom sex is incredibly important for their entire lives.” Sorry, this reminds me of a joke:
Two elderly men are sitting on a park bench. One asks the other, “So Fred, how’s your sex life?” Fred says, “Well, it’s a lot like Social Security: I get it once a month…but it’s not enough to live on!”
@Rachel: Thank you for sharing about your husband, and adding a bit that proves that “passionate” and “senior citizen” are not mutually exclusive traits. And I laughed out loud at your “only solo” line!
@BearDown: Okay, that is very funny.
For 2.5 years I have been writing the blog
Sexagenarian and the City, at
http://sexagenarian07.wordpress.com
It’s about my dating life with with sexagenarian (and a few septuagenarian) men.
It puts a whole new twist on the subject under discussion here…I dated 57 men, and the stories are all in the blog.
Hi, all. Lucid commentary, and insightful comments by various readers. I am a faithful reader of the Times’ Modern Love column. Had read and duly noted (with sighs) that piece last June on sexagenarian sex. Only just now came across THIS responsive piece.
I’ve got to emphatically endorse the viewpoint of BearDownCBears, and I certainly esteem his witty joke which captures the point, that some of us (usually, though not always, men) cannot get enough sex. It is simply a core, biological imperative, which will not be denied.
Divorce papers have just been filed for my beloved wife and me. She is almost 69; I am almost 52. I love her passionately – she is amazingly zesty and beautiful. She loved and perhaps loves me still, in like fashion.
She was a couple years past 60 when we met, and a hottie. I called her my Sexy Sexa, with incredulous glee at my undeserved fortune in finding her. Our year-long courtship was an erotic feast… her clothing would magically fall off whenever we were alone together, and her body was my playground.
But shortly after we married that went away. Simply dissipated. She remained sexual, but although she claimed to still relish it, the act between us became perfunctory and rare… Once a week was a stretch for her.
I was reduced to starving, and like a starving man, food was all I could think of, night and day… allow my metaphor. Awakening each dawn to leave her sleeping form for solitary masturbation quickly became… old. But that release was all that kept me sane. No hyperbole is uttered here, for I was constantly in a state of unsatisfied lust, like a jungle beast in musth.
Finally, I began to consider some kind of open marriage, a prospect she refused to countenance. But she had no answer for our libidinal inequity. Those legs of hers would part in moist welcome of me scarcely oftener than the moon would shine full, and I came to live like a scraggly wolf, gaunt of ribs, mouth forever agape in a rictus of silent baying for this tardy, heedless moon.
More metaphor of a purple hue. So sue me.
And here now we find ourselves, she and I [after counsellors clerical and lay, after domestic frustrations taken out on guiltless glassware, after sad partings and hopeful reconcilitions - and sweet makeup sex! I would breakup every day if assured of this! - vain hope]… Alas, we have parted this last time, for good. Loving each other with the love common to mushy chick-flicks and the dramas of old bards, but just – tragically – unable to sync our disjoint hormonal urges.
Sex is for some a dessert, tasty and optional. But for others it is the staple of a pulsing life. These camps are mutually exclusive, and it well may be that age eventually forces us all to pull up our stakes in the latter and pitch our tent in the former. It may be, and I may yet come to learn this first-hand.
But if this be some inevitable truth, it remains foreign to me… and my ignorance has ruined a marriage for the ages.
beautiful writing …as ever the poet! and as for the poetry of sexuality and eros and aging…I am early 50′s female and blessedly sexual..very! with 2 lovers (alas – guiltily as fraught with old fashioned values).
Wryly tho I yearn for mushy love ..of the commitment kind which none of my lovers one oler one younger are eager to offer…yes the sex is great and I hope it willlast foever..but o how I long for some mushy!