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ATTITUDES AND EXPECTATIONS
'Sex? Never had it so good'
Your children may think it is more appropriate for you to
be buying slippers than black lace teddies and condoms, but
if you are involved in a mid-life relationship it is quite
likely that sex will be high on the agenda and with luck a
real pleasure. There may be huge pitfalls for older people
in new relationships, but when it comes to sex, many couples
report 'never having it so good'. Making love, not war, youth's
message in the early seventies, is still being lived by the
now middle-aged baby boomers in the early 2000s. After years
of unsatisfactory, sexually deprived marriages, denial of
true sexual orientation or lonely celibacy, recycled couples
often find a zest for sex and a richness of depth and satisfaction
unlike anything they experienced before. Some even speak of
the profound, spiritual dimensions that sex now has. Susan:
We swam naked together, made love on beaches, under
rocks and in hollows of the hills, as well as in more conventional
places. I found I was multi-orgasmic, something I had never
really known before. Sex was always unbelievably lovely,
just pure pleasure. And there was this profoundly spiritual,
almost transcendent quality too. Sometimes I seemed to totally
merge with Jem and the whole universe. For months we made
love every day, sometimes more often. My partner's son,
who is a young doctor, was keen on telling his father how
men's ability decreased with age. I thought, 'Little does
he know!'
For many of us, the instant sexual gratification of the 'hamburger
takeaway' style of youth is replaced by the gourmet meal approach
of the middle years. Even though we may have come from dead-end
relationships sex-wise, greater maturity and experience tell
us that an emphasis on performance can now give way to developing
attachment, interplay and intimacy. Mid-life men speak of
'caressing with their penises' and at last being able to slow
down their ejaculations so that pleasure is rich and prolonged.
'The young man is hopeless,' says Jim, 'because it's over
before it has started.' Murray acknowledges that love-making
'takes longer now and I enjoy it more than ever. We are more
inventive than when I was younger and there is a lot more
closeness.' For mid-life women, many feel that it is only
now that they have reached their real potential. Freed from
the responsibilities of young children, less concerned about
the anxieties of contraception, confident in what they offer,
more at ease with their bodies and their needs, it can be
a time, as one woman poetically says, like 'the rich end of
summer when everything that has gone before is gathered up
in a sort of harvest'.
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