Is no-strings sex OK when you’re 64?

DEAR BEL, I READ your advice recently to a man whose wife refuses to have sex.

My husband and I are friends with another married couple. The woman, who is my age — 64 — has told me and other friends that she hasn’t had sex with her husband for 23 years.

Her husband has a healthy libido. Yet she is not pleasant to him, never shows him any affection or emotion, and is always criticising him . . . and in public, too.

I felt sorry for this man and one day he confided in me. He didn’t know I already knew about his marriage, but told me he was desperate. Well, we ended up having sex — with no emotional strings. He loves his wife, but finds it unbearable having no attention or closeness.

You advised that other man to be careful and think things through — but that’s not the answer in our case. I also have a healthy libido, but my husband can no longer have sex due to health reasons.

If only what we are doing was OK — as it’s only filling a sexual closeness we don’t have at home.

Yes, we are playing with fire — and I do worry what would happen if we were caught. But I would really miss the sex if we stopped, which we have tried to do. I would appreciate your thoughts. AVRIL

THe contentious, fascinating journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) once told me one of the benefits of age was that he could admire a beautiful young woman ‘ without wishing to impose my aged frame upon her’. He’d been (shall we say) a wayward husband; in his later years he settled (as so many do) into the comfort of companionable marriage.

As someone once said, losing the sexual itch is like being released from a bothersome animal, tied to you for years, snapping at your heels.

After the letter you refer to was printed, I had an interesting response from T. He writes: ‘We have a perfect, married, loving life apart from that bugbear in the corner. My advice you love her: put up with it, I have a great life. I have thought about mistresses etc but done nothing.

‘Marriage is not just sex. Now I’m glad I put up with the situation. We still have a loving, happy relationship. At times it was hard and I did miss the physical side, but looking back and also seeing where we are now, it was all worth it.’

I suspect T’s response to this marital situation is common. Yours perhaps less

so, because although the desire is there, not acting on it can be as much a lack of opportunity as morality.

But you and your friend’s husband have found each other and are satisfying a mutual need, ‘with no emotional strings’ — except of course the threads of sexual desire now tying you together, which you’ve already tried and failed to break. You’ll probably say the wife is not a close friend. In that case, surely she was wrong to confide intimate details of her marriage to a mere acquaintance.

You’re highly critical of her, which makes a convenient justification for having sex with the husband who also confided in you, clearly picking up your interested vibes.

The complications of this deception must be quite tiring (lying takes much thought if you are not to be found out) and you are quite aware of the risks.

I’m not unsympathetic to the needs that still hold you both in thrall, but hate the thought of two innocent people being harmed.

So what is to be said? You are both consenting adults, your spouses did not consent to being deceived — but if this is what you want to do, be very careful.