What every woman needs to know about men’s libido

Yes, they do think about it all the time... ...and the bad news, ladies: the urge doesn’t always fade with age

IT’S the subject of many (often blue) jokes and much bar-room bragging. But what’s the truth about the male libido, and does it really fade as the years go by? Here five male writers, aged from their 20s to their 60s, hilariously reveal their sexual triumphs and disasters — and just what sex has meant to them as they’ve got older...

sixties Cosmo Landesman, 61, has been married twice and is now single. He says:

I AM a 61- year old man — with the libido of a spotty, sweaty, sex- mad teenager. I am Adrian Mole on heat.

I’m not boasting. honest. I’m just surprised. This wasn’t meant to happen.

When I was a teenager I thought that by the time I turned 60 my sex life would be over.

Like all young people I assumed that no one over 60 had sex; they had memories of sex. Instead of wild, bedroom passion they had early nights of cocoa and cuddles.

When I was a few days away from turning 60 I remember thinking: goodbye sex, it was nice knowing you! I had reached that age when you look in the mirror and see a stranger’s face. And this stranger was some old bloke with grey hair, wobbly jowls and a jelly belly. Who would have sex with that?

And then for my 60th birthday a sexy blonde (45) took me to a hotel room at the top of The Shard in London and we made wonderful whoopee all afternoon.

I’ve been married twice and am now divorced. Since splitting with my longterm girlfriend, I’ve been single for two years. But I can honestly say that as a 60-year-old man I’m having more and better sex than when I was in my 20s.

Why? Partly luck (I’ve met a series of wonderful women!). And partly policy: I never pursue young women (anyone under 45). And besides, in my experience older women are better in bed; they have a natural beauty and unselfconscious sensuality. It’s not such a performance with them. And they can laugh at the mishaps of love-making.

Also, the older you get the more experienced you become. I’m more relaxed, more confident and more knowledgable about how to make a woman happy in the bedroom than ever. Sex is wasted on the young. Young men haven’t a clue about female anatomy.

I admit there are times when I wish my libido would shut up and leave me alone (someone once said that it’s liked being chained to a lunatic).

I’d like to concentrate on other things like my work. And, yes, I admit there are times when I think I’m too old for one-night stands and flings.

Even though I know the pleasures of being old, free and single, I admit I would rather be married and in a monogamous relationship.

Don’t get me wrong; sex without love can be great, but there’s nothing better than sex with love.

I hope I don’t sound like the oldest swinger in town — and I certainly don’t want to end up that way.

But society wants men and women in their 60s — and beyond — to be safe, sweet and sexless. Our children squirm at the thought that mum and dad. . .you know.

And young friends of mine feel slightly embarrassed when I talk about sex.

Well, I have some bad news for them: this is one sex-mad oldie who is going to keep having sex till he drops dead. At least I’ll go out with a smile on my face.

fifties Brian Viner, 53, has been married with children for 22 years. He says:

THE word libido, it occurs to me as I roll it around in my mouth, would be a perfect name for a car. Who wouldn’t want to take a sexy, silver, soft-top Ford Libido for a spin?

But the gloomy reality is that for me it would be more of a family saloon, its rightful place just under the speed limit in the middle lane of the motorway, with 53,000 miles on the clock and most of the excitement disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

As I edge towards my mid-50s, my libido, like my pulse, is still there, all right. I just don’t often feel it racing, let alone raging. That old theory (coined by women, I’m fairly sure) that all men think about sex, on average, roughly twice a minute, is emphatically not true of me. Twice a day, maybe.

As I get older I find myself appreciating physical beauty more, and craving sex much less. The comedian Billy Crystal, at 67, jokes that he still looks at 25-year-old women, only they’re out of focus, and by the time he gets his glasses on, they’ve gone.

I can sort of relate to that. This might make me sound like a sad middle-aged voyeur.

But increasingly I like looking at attractive people, of either gender and any age, in a way that I didn’t in my 20s, when I only had eyes for possible conquests, or my 30s, when my eyes were half-shut with that other kind of sleep deprivation, caused not by nights of passion but attending the needs of our second-born child, who didn’t sleep for more than a hour at a time for his first five years.

The children are pretty much grown up now, which in theory liberates me and my beloved wife of 22 years to engage in all the sex we missed back then, as long as the bedroom door is locked to prevent a hulking brute stomping in to ask where his football boots are. Why you would need them at quarter to 11 at night is one of the burning existential questions of my life.

The other, more fundamental obstruction to a rampant sex life is that my wife is menopausal now and would much rather get her thrills from a good novel. We have a healthily interactive relationship in bed; it consists of her reading out the best bits of her book to me.

And yet I find that, at 53, my libido and I are in a perfectly good place. I have sex about five times more often than I need my hair cut, which seems like a satisfactory ratio for a bloke of my age. When there’s no hair left to cut, I’m sure I’ll be past bothering.

forties Nick Curtis, 49, has been married for 20 years and doesn’t have children. He says:

Ah, LIBIDO, from the Latin for desire, or lust. Plenty of that still sloshing around the old loins, thank you very much. I may not think about sex every seven seconds but I do think about it a lot. But then, I work from home, so I have privacy, an active imagination and, sometimes, time on my hands.

It was different when I last worked in an office, surrounded mostly by smart, attractive young women. Then I was hyper-aware of appearing like a dirty old man, and would slam the lid on any hint of flirtation or salaciousness as if battening down a cellar door on zombies. Was it OK to notice a new dress? To tell someone half my age she looked nice? Minefield!

For context, I should say that I also think about death a lot. A friend told me this would happen in my 40s, and I laughed at him. Then I woke up the day after my 40th birthday and — waaah! — there was the grim reaper standing at my bedside.

So any idle daydream about Angelina Jolie (respectably close to my age, note), or any faint stirrings caused by the glimpse of a well-turned ankle on the street or a hollowed clavicle on the train, is immediately countered and cancelled by intimations of my own mortality. I am three decades past my sexual peak and future prospects are tilting downward, not upward, if you catch my drift.

I like to think I’ve evolved an aesthetic appreciation of sexual attractiveness, and sometimes have to stop myself running up to comely strangers and imploring them to enjoy their bodies while they are slim and supple.

I spent most of my late teens and 20s in long relationships, and in between invented romantically tortured excuses not to have sex with girls: one likened me to the chaste heroine of an 18th-century novel.

Fortunately, at 29 I met an extremely beautiful, clever, kind woman and we got married.

Our relationship was — how to put this? — very passionate at first. Since we don’t have kids I’m sure some friends, looking enviously from their Lego-strewn lives, assume it still is.

And it’s true, for the first ten years we led a life of exotic city breaks, giddily romantic nights out and lascivious, champagne-fuelled weekends in bed.

But now, 20 years on, although our affection continues to deepen, we’ve been through medical problems big and small (an operation on my hands meant I couldn’t prop myself up in bed, know what I mean?), career ups and downs and the pressing matter of ailing parents.

I am free of many concerns that afflict my fortysomething peers: school fees and student loans, the commensurate mountain of debt, the fear that after all that cash the kids will turn out to be dole scroungers.

But, equally, I am self-employed in an area where wages are depressed and youth is valued more than experience, I’m increasingly lost in the new digital landscape, and I’ve been forced to resort to an otherwise all-female Pilates class to slow the steady collapse of my body into sludge. Such concerns curb the libido somewhat. Meanwhile, my wife works long, tiring hours.

Sex isn’t an effort, as such, but we have to make an effort, to try to fit it in (nudge, nudge) between important things like cooking, Twitter and the new series of Fargo.

Sex is still important, but I realised a while ago we are close to the punchline of an old joke: we’ve gone from ‘triweekly’ to ‘try, weekly’ and are fighting a rearguard against ‘try, weakly’.

The necessary bits of the flesh are willing, but the spirit sometimes has to be cajoled. And we are not getting younger. There’s another joke we are fond of, which is funny because it’s true.

Wife: ‘Do you want to dash upstairs and make love to me?’

husband: ‘I don’t think I can manage both.’

thirties Andy Jones, 31, lives with his partner and doesn’t have children. He says:

I DOn’T miss my libido of old. My 20s were an embarrassing chaos: sending that message to the girl who isn’t your girlfriend; hovering around the office kitchen hoping to bump into the hot new girl at work; the tragi-comedy of the walk of shame when she ignores your flirtations.

The carousel of dating leads you into depressing little drills. When kicking off your clothes in the dark of a stranger’s room you learn to leave your keys,

wallet, phone and socks inside your shoes. You never leave anywhere without your shoes, so therefore you don’t leave anything behind. The last thing you want to do is have to ring up a week later to beg for your watch back. Our libidos chase the excitement — sadly, you have to sort the mess out afterwards.

Thankfully, by your 30s, you’ve got your priorities straight if not your trousers. You still wake up full of morning glory, but now it’s a nuisance not an invitation.

‘Andy, why are you still in bed?’ my partner might shout. ‘The boiler man is here in six minutes.’

You’re then left shuffling crab-like across the landing to hide your own accidental disgrace.

Women in their 30s, despite having seen this on a reasonably regular basis, still look confused at your time-keeping. ‘Why is it doing that? What does it want?’ as you wake up in bed with a start in the middle of Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch.

Thankfully, Tim Lovejoy has the perfect face to kill unwanted trouser-stirring.

Overly sexy music videos become repellent as do the saucy wardrobe choices of reality TV stars. You stop chewing over every sex detail with your friends. I used to feel jealous if my friends got lucky — now I envy their pay rises or Bang and Olufsen speakers.

In your 30s, fun stuff happens indoors. It takes falling into brambles and ruining good pairs of shoes to realise love-making is a bad idea outside. Warm beds, showers within reach — no security guard shining a light in your direction. The chance to cuddle and lie together lovingly afterwards, not crawl around in the long grass to look for a lost earring.

Other things take higher precedence. Watching box sets, gardening, staring at work emails on your phone while sitting alongside each other at 11pm. There are bumps in the road, but that completion of being with your perfect fit is thrilling in its own way — even if that masquerades itself in long periods of comfortable silence.

You realise, after years of dating, total acceptance comes with not having to speak the whole time, not chatting someone into bed. You like cuddling, being the other part in someone else’s jigsaw.

I like going to see my friends who have children more than those who don’t. Confronting those nowhere men who are stuck in aspic like me is fun at first, but uncomfortable if you suddenly find yourself in a nightclub.

In my 20s, I was in a hurry to sleep around, now I’m on a march to settle down. I tell myself my body clock has slower hands than that of a woman’s, but I still dread being bald, corduroyed and waiting for the kids at nursery while other fit younger dads compare gym routines. I’ll need my libido to start a family, let’s hope it can do me one last favour.

twenties Sam Parker, 28, is single. He says:

MANY films have poked fun at the libido of the twentysomething male in recent years, and while I never quite found myself inappropriately engaged with a pie (American or otherwise) it has certainly been responsible for some of the more amusing — OK: mortifying — episodes of my life.

From ‘edgy’ new haircuts to hours spent in awful nightclubs to the time, at a girl’s halls of residence, I tried to impress her by lighting a match off my teeth like John Bender in The Breakfast Club and burned my lip so badly I had to go home and kiss a bag of frozen peas instead, my libido has been the driving force behind most of the stupidest mistakes I have made over the past decade.

That said, I do think the movies — and quite possibly men themselves — tend to exaggerate. There’s a commonly held myth that we think about sex every three minutes, when for me at least it is probably more like every 30 (OK, make that 20 in the summer months).

After all, these are the years when you first step out into the world to try to find a job and a home to call your own: next to that, sex is not such a big deal.

Men in their late 20s are generally working all hours to try to start a career and, as a result, are probably left less in the mood for sex at the end of the average day than they’d care to admit. Being ‘sex-crazed’ is more of a joke we like to play up to in the pub than an actual affliction.

I don’t remember all of the sex I had at university, arriving as it invariably did after a few too many pints of snakebite and two-for-one vodkas.

But I do remember the peculiar rituals of the before and after: the thrill of chatting someone up well enough to get invited back to their place, then the strange charade of the morning after, mumbling goodbyes before tripping over the leg of my jeans and stepping out into cold, unknown streets, feeling both elated and a vague, nagging sense of ‘is this really it?’

Then, if you’re lucky enough, you fall in love somewhere in your 20s and sex suddenly becomes a shared adventure. You get to be young and smug and in bed with someone for days and nights on end, quietly convinced you are — if not inventing sex, exactly — then certainly discovering it for all of mankind. It’s a revelation, and a relief.

now I am almost 30, chasing sex is becoming more tiresome than fun, and increasingly I feel like I just want to settle down with one person. After all, I’ve heard that’s what happens when you get married, right?