Intimacy at 60: it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it...
As we age, a fresh outlook on both physical desire and our emotional needs can take a relationship to a whole different level. By Linda Kelsey
On my 69th birthday last week, after an early morning canal-side walk and breakfast at a pavement café, we returned home, and my partner dyed my roots for me, as he has been doing once a month since the start of lockdown. Decked out in plastic pinny and rubber gloves, before applying the noxious chemicals, he kissed me gently on the top of my head where the grey had grown through. It was a gesture of both the utmost simplicity and the utmost intimacy. As well as being a surprisingly sensual moment. That was when I realised that I was having a lovely birthday.
The night before, I had politely turned down the offer of sex on the basis of rather troubling pain in my hip and my increasingly arthritic neck. I felt momentarily guilty before falling asleep with my reading glasses still on.
I’ve been thinking a lot about intimacy recently, and what it means to couples as they age, and I’m increasingly convinced it’s a conversation worth having openly as we attempt to negotiate the tricky business of our needs and desires in later life. We have to learn how to balance those needs and desires with physical and emotional changes.
Over the past few years there has been some recognition that sex – or the desire for it – doesn’t necessarily stop at 60, 70 or even 80. And a jolly good thing, too. The fact that older people are increasingly willing to talk about sex, and even admit to engaging in it, has led to a greater openness and understanding about sexual intimacy in later life that not only shatters taboos about ageing but enables oldies to frolic freely without wondering if they’re on the freakish spectrum.
This is partly the consequence of the Baby Boom generation currently hitting the third age. Believing they pretty much invented sex anyway, they continue to be unwilling to shut up about the things they’ve always been so out and proud about.
It’s also a result of increasing divorce amongst 50 and 60-somethings, large swathes of whom subsequently find new partners and discover their libido has merely been in hibernation, rather than lain down and died. As someone who experienced the latter, forming a new partnership in my mid-50s after a long marriage, I’ve been prone to shouting it from the rooftops myself.
But sex is a complex business, and one size most certainly does not fit all. Any new orthodoxy that suggests 60-somethings should all be swinging from the chandeliers would be as unhelpful and judgmental as saying the very idea of wrinkly sex is an embarrassment, and vaguely disgusting. A major study by Age UK found that more than 54 per cent of men and 31 per cent of women were still sexually active over the age of 70, with at least a third still having sex once or twice a month. But that means almost half of men and almost two thirds of women aged 70 plus were not sexually active. Those who were still “doing it” hit the headlines. Those who weren’t were left to deal with it as best they could.
If the end of sexual intimacy feels inevitable after decades of marriage, and isn’t problematic for either partner, then all well and good. But it’s rarely that simple.
What I realise, when I talk to my women friends about sex as we come closer to the milestone three score years and ten, or go beyond, is that there needs to be a much more nuanced recognition of intimacy in later life, one that acknowledges that, even as libido dwindles, the need for both physical and emotional intimacy remains a powerful one. As Peter Saddington, Relate counsellor and sex therapist, explains: “Our bodies do become less responsive as we age. Physical aches and health issues may make sex difficult or painful, but the basic human need for touch – and for communication – never goes away.”
“It’s all right for you,” one friend said to me. “You’ve only been with your bloke a dozen years. I’ve been married 40, and we are definitely not doing it any more. He wears a night mask for sleep apnoea, which is not a good look, and he’s had a heart attack.”
What saddens her is that, because intercourse is no longer on the menu, her husband doesn’t come near her at all. “I don’t want sex as such, and he certainly doesn’t seem to want it either, but a hug would be nice. A sensual massage would be bliss.”
According to Peter Saddington, for some men no longer being able to maintain or have an erection means they are no longer a man in their own eyes. This can lead to withdrawing from both physical and emotional connection.
And yet it doesn’t have to be that way. One girlfriend spoke movingly to me about how she and her husband have found a new path to intimacy after his treatment for prostate cancer made penetrative sex impossible.
“At the beginning,” she told me, “I tried to repress all sexual feeling so as not to make him feel bad. But we’ve always had good communication, and once he emphasised to me that he could still give me pleasure, and that giving me pleasure would make him feel good, too, regardless of his ability to respond in the traditional way, I realised we didn’t have to lock down that aspect of our lives.” If, at first, it all felt a bit selfish and non-reciprocal, she went on to explain, over time they discovered that intimacy had grown rather than diminished. They discovered that, out of the bedroom, too, they had become kinder and more loving towards one another.
Another woman friend, embarking on a new relationship in her late 60s, with a man already in his mid-70s, confessed: “If I am honest I think I am more interested in sensuality than sex these days.” After the menopause she had started to find intercourse really painful, and no amount of lubricants or localised oestrogen therapy did the trick. For her, the pleasure is in intimate touching, slow-dancing together in the kitchen, sending romantic texts, holding hands when they are out walking together. “Fortunately, he appears to have the same idea. When I met this lovely new man I was attracted to him for his humour, his intelligence, his love of theatre and books, not his hotness. I suppose it’s more the idea of a loving companion than a sexual partner that I want at this stage of my life.”
My own partner, who I believe will remain a touchy-feely sort of person until his dying day, argues that while a sex life in later life may turn out to be optional, intimacy for him will always be compulsory. He also has to remind me sometimes that he enjoys receiving a compliment as much as I do. That I should try to spend less time in the bathroom before coming to bed, unless I’m happy to find him already fast asleep.
In truth, he’s better at the intimacy game than I am. He never shies away from curling up on the sofa with me as we watch TV, or planting kisses as we chop unerotic onions side by side in the kitchen. And, perhaps most important of all, he insists we talk about our feelings, regardless of whether they are positive or negative, and really take the time to listen to one another.
I confess I sometimes find his attention to all things sensual (including candles every night at supper) irritating. But it also makes me feel that, despite being 69, with blobby arms and way too many wrinkles, I am still in a vital, loving and evolving relationship. It’s a much preferable feeling than the alternative.
‘Physical aches may make sex difficult but the basic need for touch never goes away’