I love men and the warmth of feeling close to them but I’ve not met ANY I’d risk my happiness on again
doesn’t text or call you the next day you don’t feel very good at all. You feel used, as I often have. So sex comes with very big highs and very big lows and you have got to be able to navigate them.’
Shirley, from Leicester, married her first husband aged 16 believing she had found the perfect escape from an unhappy home-life, alone with her father following her parents’ divorce. But that marriage, to a man who was ten years her senior, lasted just 18 months. Aged 32, Shirley married her second husband, who owned an engineering company, at a big church wedding in Knightsbridge, followed by a month-long honeymoon in Africa.
Although they were very happy and had ‘ a great sex life’ in the beginning, the stress of trying for a baby, discovering that Shirley was infertile and then two rounds of IVF put enormous strain on the marriage, which ended after three years. Ever hopeful of finding lasting love, she married her third husband within days of meeting him at a wedding in Los Angeles.
Shirley decided to move out to the States to live with him and again says their intimate life was fulfilling.
She had previously made a lot of money through a head- hunting business she set up in the City of London then sold, but a few months after her marriage, she lost the lot in a stockmarket crash. Shirley felt emotionally unsupported and, realising that she barely knew her husband, divorced him within a year of their wedding.
Soon afterwards, Shirley collapsed on a street in LA and, after being rushed to hospital, discovered she needed emergency surgery to remove a fibroid.
She returned to Britain for the operation where, with three broken marriages behind her, she decided to direct her energy towards creating a more fulfilling existence for herself.
‘Rejecting advances is not something that, at my age, I have to contend with very often but part of my work is teaching young girls that sex should be a reward for men who put them on a pedestal and treat them well,’ says Shirley.
‘We’ve come a long way since the days when a woman’s only place was in the home, but we have to accept our biology dictates that when we sleep with a man we want him to commit and nurture us.
‘Given my age and based on past experiences, it’s doubtful I’ll meet someone like that now.
‘So as I value myself far too much to make do with casual sex, I have to accept I may never be intimate with a man again.’
Therapist Val Sampson says women like Shirley, who associate sex with a trauma, can become so wary of getting hurt that they miss out on opportunities for relationships, even with men who are also looking for love and commitment.
And once we stop having sex, our desire can quickly wane.
‘Men respond to visual cues but the most important erotic organ in a woman’s body is her brain,’ says Val. ‘Once we switch that off, for whatever reason, there’s definitely a use it or lose it aspect to sexual desire.’
Suzie Webster, 61 — who was married for eight years until 1990 — has been celibate since breaking up with her partner of five years in 2004, aged 50.
The relationship was an ‘unhappy’ one, but Suzie never imagined it might be her last. Yet she has subsequently failed to meet anyone to share her life with.
‘I loved sex,’ says Suzie. ‘I’d be very happy to have a physical relationship now, but only when I really know a man. I’m not interested in casual sex, which so many men seem to want.’ ShE adds: ‘ My passions are still going strong, so I do look at men and think “Cor!” but I’ve not met the right one to settle down with.’ Instead, Suzie, from Cambridge, has a happily platonic relationship with a younger man. She says she gets to experience the joy of having comforting man-hugs and even walking handin-hand with him on the many holidays they have had in places such as Crete, Italy and France.
They share rooms but, after a chaste kiss, say goodnight and climb into separate twin beds.
Nine years ago Suzie set up a website, Platonic Partners, where similar- minded people can connect, which now has 9,000 members, 90 per cent of them within the UK.
She wanted to create a place where people could meet others for whom sex was not an essential ingredient in a relationship.
Meanwhile, Suzie fills her evenings with art classes, dance classes and socialising with friends.
‘We live in a very competitive society where if you’re not having multiple orgasms and don’t look like Barbie and Ken you feel you’re doing something wrong,’ she says.
‘I try to ignore these pressures and instead take myself to places through physical exercise, where the afterglow is comparable with the afterglow from sex.’
Susan and Shirley, like millions of other middle-aged celibate women in Britain, will no doubt be delighted to learn that Suzie has discovered an alternative to the love of a good man.