The Ultimate Guide to Sex after Fifty

I am a fifty-nine-year-old lesbian, not in a relationship. I desperately miss making love and experiencing the erotic warmth and excitement of a woman’s body making love to me. I am continuously amazed by my erotic feelings! Forty years ago, I figured I’d be long past this at my age!

If you’re in a loving relationship now, treasure each other. At our age, we know with every birthday how likely it is that one of us will be left alone. Of course that’s true at any age—no one has forever. Now, though, as we trudge back and forth from doctors’ offices with ailments we couldn’t even spell ten years ago, we can’t fool ourselves as easily.

Even if we’re healthy, we may come home one day and hear our partner say that he or she wants to leave. Hearing those words is a blow to the gut. It’s even worse when there are no words: a woman told me that her husband of thirty years didn’t come home from work one day. She never heard from him again—only from his lawyer.

When we lose a partner due to death or breakup and find ourselves solo, the world that we knew is gone. We may retreat from intimacy, feeling too vulnerable to handle it—or we may rush into it. Our response to loss will be highly individual—like everything else we do and feel.

One woman friend of mine told me that after her divorce, she “wanted to fuck everything in sight.” I think it’s a usual thing, to seek reassurance of one’s attractiveness and capacity to give and receive love. The first time I kissed a woman after the separation at age fifty, I started shaking all over, so fraught was the moment.

The divorce rate among adults ages fifty and older doubled between 1990 and 2010.⁹⁰ The end of a marriage or significant relationship can feel like a welcome, life-giving release or a death blow to the heart. Or both. You may feel decimated by a divorce or breakup, or finally free to be yourself. As for sex, that may be arduous, tear-filled, and reluctant. Or it may come quickly with a zest for new experiences and new partners.

I was married for almost forty years to a man who didn’t give a rip about what I felt—he had his orgasm and he was done. We’re now divorced and I’m seeing a man who gives me multiple orgasms every time and takes about one or one-and-a-half hours to get the job done. I am getting what I deserved all of those years that I was married, and enjoying it very much.

It’s tough to regain your confidence and feel sexy after a breakup when it wasn’t your choice. Being dumped leaves big bruises and a gaping hole in your world. But many say that after taking time to grieve the loss, they emerge with a new sense of self and sexiness, as if the sap is rising again and a new bud is ready to flower. The hunger for sex may come back stronger than it had been for years, especially if the relationship was stagnant.

First marriage: the most miserable five years of my existence. Second marriage: finally began to learn about good sex but she only felt amorous when we were drinking, and when I quit drinking, my sex life ended. Third marriage: an essentially sexless marriage and one more divorce. Then at fifty-five, I met a woman online. We developed a bad case of the hots for one another. When we finally got together, the sex was incredible beyond description. We married and, somehow, it’s lasted. I’m sixty-four, happily married, totally faithful, and the sex is better than ever.

According to a 2004 AARP study of 1,148 forty- to seventy-nine-year-olds who divorced in their forties, fifties, or sixties, many take a hiatus from sexuality after divorce:

After their divorce…[t]he majority (56 percent) report sexual touching or hugging in varying degrees of frequency (daily to once or twice a month), while 38 percent of the total claim not doing any of these at all. Many women, especially those who have not remarried (69 percent), do not touch or hug at all sexually. An even larger majority of women who have not remarried do not engage in sexual intercourse (77 percent saying not at all), in comparison with about half of men (49 percent) who have not remarried.⁹¹

Those statistics surprise me, because most of my readers tell me quite the opposite—they’re eager to experience sex again. They want to free themselves from the previous relationship, get their sexy selves revved up again, and create an intimate connection with a new person who is not their ex. Maybe the discrepancy is because the people who write to me are more likely to be sex-positive and sex-desirous?

At age fifty-nine, my husband of eighteen years dumped me. I emerged after a nine-month mourning period feeling horny as hell. I hadn’t had any sexual desire throughout our marriage because I had spent all my sexual energy avoiding sex with my husband. Except for a brief crush on our carpenter, which I wouldn’t have done anything about, I had never looked at a man sexually since my wild, single-girl days.

Now I was long past menopause and supposedly long past my sexual prime. My body didn’t know this, however. It started twitching every time an attractive man came into the room. All of a sudden I was evaluating every man I saw as a sexual partner. I was on fire all the time.

—Erica Manfred
in “The Wacky Iraqi, the Shaman Lover, and Me” in Ageless Erotica.

An astonishing number of women go directly from one relationship into another, even though they know that they should take a break between relationships, give themselves time to heal, and clear out some emotional baggage. In my clinical experience, 90 percent of the time, at least one person has already begun another emotional/sexual relationship before there is an actual physical separation from the first partner.

It’s tempting to dull the pain by rushing into a new relationship that assures us that we’re desirable and worthy of love (or at least lust) and gives us that adrenalin rush that we crave. But how do you know who you are—independent of half the couple you used to be—if you don’t take time to be alone? Give yourself the gift of self-knowledge and independence, without jumping right into being half of a couple again. Experience being whole on your own first.

I’ve had several significant loves in my life, and I’ve grown and learned life lessons from each of them. But I honestly would not be the person I am today without a lot of time alone, unpartnered, to contemplate what is important to me, what I have to give in the world as well as to a lover, and what I need to change in myself to be the person I want to be. I honestly feel that I would not have been ready for Robert, the most important and loving relationship of my life, if I hadn’t had many relationships that ended, and time alone to learn from them.

Although the love of your life may be just a minute away from the end of your last relationship, more often I see people rush into the next relationship and repeat exactly the same problems that destroyed the relationship they just left!

I had relationships with several women in the years leading up to my marriage. After my divorce at fifty-one, I became serially infatuated with each of them, all over again. The trail of past relationships eventually led me back to examine some themes in my own erotic and romantic history. I realized that throughout my adult life I had been attracted to women who were emotionally or otherwise unavailable to me. Not for nothing had my married sex life been pallid and infrequent. Whether I am capable of greater love and erotic fulfillment than I was previously, I have yet to find out. I do feel a greater sense of freedom and openness to possibility than ever before, as well as a much stronger, clearer sense of what I want and what is right for me.

On August 2, 2013, the fifth anniversary of Robert’s death, The Huffington Post published an intimate memoir essay that I wrote, titled “Sharing Body Heat.” I described crawling into bed with Robert after he died to hold him and say goodbye. Sharing this openly and widely to HP’s enormous readership was a risky thing to do, because Huffington Post readers often delight in posting crass comments. Still, I risked it because I wanted to reach people who were grieving or had grieved, and had their own memories to share.

And share they did: 500 comments (almost all of them warm and positive), thousands of new visitors to my website and blog, about a hundred personal emails. Grief feels like such a private experience, yet once we share it, we realize how much we have in common.

Publishing this piece was also a way for me to take a huge step toward moving on myself. I had stayed sexually active with my delightful and ever-growing assortment of sex toys and my weekly date with myself—hurray for the pleasures of solo sex! I confess that the few attempts at partner sex during those five years had left me physically satisfied but emotionally sad, reinforcing for me that Robert was indeed gone and would never make love to me again.

I tell you all this because I want to share how confusing it can be to try to emerge from grief and become intimate with a new partner. Some of my readers report that having sex is the easy part—emotional intimacy is more difficult.

Going public with “Sharing Body Heat” had a powerful effect on my own grief process. It was an intense experience to read the comments and the emails, and realize how deeply I had touched people. Those connections made me feel truly ready to move forward—finally.

At exactly the same time, in the way the universe works sometimes, a lover from my past surfaced again and became a “friend with benefits”—and I was able to open to him without sadness, without the interference of memories.

If you’re wondering what’s normal: The word normal has little meaning in the grief journey—it’s all normal. We all grieve differently, and we all have our own time tables for being ready for sex again. Some get sexual right away, others wait months or years, some never want a partner again.

My love for my husband was so great that I am having a very difficult time considering another man. My head knows moving on is best, but my heart puts up a very good fight. I do believe that at seventy-four, finding someone with whom I am compatible from a distance would be best. His and her homes with visitation rights, perks, and genuinely being there for one another sounds like a plan to me! Easy to say and difficult to find!

I fell in love my first year of dating with a widow, who still had her last husband’s ashes in the closet five years out. Her friends pushed her to date. Neither of us was ready. Yet those three delightful months—full of poetry and tears—were very healing and dear and soul profiting for both of us. Especially the sex. One cannot underestimate the mystery of healing, honest, soul-deep sex.

When I started dating after losing Robert, I thought that I could only date a widower, because only someone who has gone through this awful journey could understand. I later expanded my options, but I still have a special place in my heart for widowers. Here’s why:

• When they talk with animation and suddenly sink into silence and sadness, I understand.

• When they bring up anecdotes about their spouse, I get it.

• When they slip into present tense talking about their spouse, then correct themselves, I remember how often I’ve done that.

• When they talk vulnerably about their grief, I know I can do that, too.

• When they laugh and talk about their future changes they want to make in their lives, I know what it took to get to that point.

This is one of the things that I like about the widower I’m dating. We can talk about our spouses, acknowledge how lucky we were in having them, sometimes be sad about their loss—and still enjoy our time with each other.

Don’t judge us if we think we’re ready to date, then realize we’re not. We don’t grieve for a time, and then suddenly we’re done. It’s a spiral: we cycle in and out of grief. We can feel that we’re ready to move forward, and then we’re struck down by missing our beloved.

If you date a widow or widower, please don’t worry that you’re in competition with his or her perfect spouse. Don’t expect us to take down all the photographs or hide the urn. (Though once you get to bedroom status, I think you’re within your rights to ask that the wedding photo be turned away from the bed or in another room.)

Understand that there will always be that layer of memories and love, and accept that part of us. You’re not in competition with our memories. They show that we know how to love.

We were both widowed when we met—he for seven years, I for five. Many things have conspired to make us feel fulfilled and bonded, one being the way we can speak freely, and with warmth, about our spouses. We view them not as impediments, but rather as inspiration. The happy marriages we experienced have helped us find joy in each other without having to compromise our private memories.

Self-aware widows and widowers understand that dating new people is part of the attempt to create what they call in grief parlance the new normal. So yes, part of us cries out to the deceased partner, “Just don’t be dead anymore!” as I’ve found myself doing. But the other part knows that it’s healthy and necessary to meet new people on their own terms, with a fresh and welcoming attitude, and not compare them with memories.

I’m a social worker in hospice care. Many of my coworkers are uncomfortable at best—and shocked at worst—when the surviving partner of someone in their seventies and eighties brings up the issue of missing sex with the deceased partner, or about sexual concerns with a new partner. I lead a caregiver support group, and I make it a point to bring up sexual issues related to grief and loss. I can see the look of relief in the eyes of the group when someone is finally willing to acknowledge this!

I spent a year in deep grief, not knowing how I was ever going to be able to love again. I surprised myself by falling in love with someone new a year later. He had plenty of space in him to absorb my grief attacks. Like the time he arrived on my porch to go to an art museum by bus just as I melted down about all the times my husband and I took the bus for fun day trips. My new love listened to my story, held me, and normalized the whole experience. He said I clearly had space for him in my heart, so he didn’t mind and even welcomed hearing about the life I had with my husband. It was incredibly healing to be witnessed and loved through the last of my grief process.

How can you tell when it’s time to put away the chocolate, air out the blanket you’ve been huddling under, and get back out into a social scene that could lead to a new relationship? If you’re like me, you’ll try to emerge and run back into hiding a few times—until finally it works, and you feel like you’ve stepped into the sunshine after a long time in the darkness.

In Getting Naked Again: Dating, Romance, Sex, and Love When You’ve Been Divorced, Widowed, Dumped, or Distracted, psychologist Judith Sills, PhD, offers these tips for knowing when you’re ready to date again:

• You are functioning again, no longer curled in bed weeping, sleepless, or stuporous.

• The physical symptoms of loss have subsided (heart pain, headaches, whatever your body did in response to your loss).

• You have moved past the despairing feeling of being utterly lost and without a future.

• You are past the guilt and self-blaming, and past blaming him or her.

• You have taken active steps to sweeten and improve your life.

• You got rid of something filled with memories that you had been hanging on to.

• If you were dumped, you are beyond the need to hear every obsessive detail about your ex and his or her new partner. You’ve lost interest in analyzing your ex’s personality.

• You are able to look in the mirror, look through your closet, look around at your social world, and smile at some of what you see.

A hint to widows: If you’re dating again and invite a man to your home, please rearrange things so that your home is not a shrine to your late husband. That really takes the steam out of the new guy.

Although it’s certainly possible to fall in love right away after loss of a spouse or long-term lover, that’s usually the rebound effect and not likely to last. The first lover after a loss is usually transitional—a way to get your sea legs, to see yourself as a desirable lover, to shake off the low self-esteem that often follows a breakup, and to practice being in a relationship in a new way. “Sexual mentors, palate cleansers, and other transitional relationships” Judith Sills calls them in Getting Naked Again. Gail Sheehy calls them “Pilot Light Lovers.” in Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life.

Transitional lovers can be really good for you. They can reignite your sexual fire and teach you a lot about yourself and your capacity for rising from the embers. Just be careful not to let the glow of a new relationship and the zest of new sex blind you to good sense. Enjoy the rush, but don’t confuse good orgasms with falling in love. Don’t share finances, move in, or get married quickly.

Imagine my surprise post-divorce when I realized I was feeling the need for a lover. It took me about a year to feel like I was myself, but once I cleared the mental cobwebs and found my Happy, I started seriously checking out all sorts of men with speculative thoughts running through my head. I felt sexy. I attracted men because they recognized my sexiness. I purchased my own condoms.

Many of us are independent, with full lives, but partnered sex is lacking. We’re not always fortunate enough to be in a love-filled, committed relationship. Does that mean we should not have sex until that happens again (if it does)? That’s the choice of some of us, but not all of us.

Friends with benefits means a friendship that involves sex—it doesn’t mean a hook-up devoid of emotion (not that there’s anything wrong with that if it’s what you want). We can feel close to someone, even intimate, in a FWB arrangement, without wishing that the relationship could be exclusive, primary, full-time, or live-in.

I’m not interested in an exclusive long-term relationship—I have been independent too long to want to compromise on things. But I wish I had a man in my closet whom I could take out when I needed an escort or was horny. I would definitely accept a “friend with benefits.”

I have had friends with benefits a few times over my many decades of single adult life. We were real friends—we cared about each other, confided in each other, enjoyed learning about each other, and delighted in conversation in and out of bed. We enjoyed activities that weren’t sexual as well as those that were. We just weren’t in love and we were not expecting commitment or exclusivity.

When it was time for the sexual part of the relationship to end—usually because one of us fell in love with someone else and was ready for a committed relationship with that person—we ended it cleanly and honestly, and stayed platonic friends after that. We remain friends to this day. We slide in and out of each other’s lives with ease, secure in the lasting friendship, with fond memories from our past.

I’m over fifty, longtime divorced, and a friend with benefits is really the only type of relationship that appeals to me. I have no wish to marry again, or move in with someone. I don’t want to do a man’s housecleaning or cooking or deal with budgets or family drama. A friend with benefits sounds great to me.

I get occasional emails from women asking whether a FWB or sex buddy relationship is possible at our age. The women who write me usually worry that they’ll become too emotionally involved. I say that if you’re worried about this, heed that fear, because it’s likely a warning sign that you will respond this way.

FWB isn’t right for all of us. I’m not pushing you to try it—rather, to know yourself, your emotional needs and habits, and determine for yourself whether it would work for you.

It’s nice to have orgasms with another person. I’ve just found that intimacy with a “sex buddy” is somewhat lacking. It’s kind of like “Diet Sex.”

Sex without commitment can work if we believe in it ethically and personally, and we’re clear with ourselves and our partners about the boundaries. Are we friends first, lovers second? Are we playing at romance, or refusing to let the relationship become romantic? Are the reasons that we want to be friends with benefits but not actual “in-love” lovers clear and valid to both of us? Honesty is required in this kind of relationship.

I believe strongly that if there’s a third person involved—you or your friend or lover has a primary partner—it needs to be okay with that partner, too. Don’t sneak or lie—if it can’t happen honestly, it shouldn’t happen. I don’t moralize much because I believe that anything two consenting adults do is no one’s business but theirs. But if another partner is involved, that partner has to give consent, too—either to the specific sexual friendship or to the idea in general, if the partner doesn’t want to know the details.

Of course older people can have friends with benefits, though I don’t think the label is particularly helpful. Relationships span a spectrum, and can be constantly changing. My philosophy is that if you feel like having sex with someone, why not? We’re certainly aware of the precautions you need to take to be safe. The only reason not to is if you are in, and value, a sexually exclusive relationship with someone else.

If you don’t have a partner, keep having regular sex with yourself. Do this whether or not you feel like it. I’m serious. We do harm to our health—physical, sexual, and emotional—if we forego sexual stimulation and orgasm. At our age, putting sex aside (yes, masturbation counts as sex) promotes vaginal atrophy and dryness in female bodies, and makes it much more difficult to reach orgasm and/or accept penetration if you want to in the future. For male bodies, lack of arousal and orgasm decreases erectile ability and is bad for the prostate. When preventive treatment feels so good, why not do it?

If you’re not in the mood—and if you’re grieving, you may not be—put self-pleasuring on your to-do list, and just do it. Along with all the other benefits, you’ll sleep better and your mood will lift. Trust me on this.

If you skipped chapter 4, Sex with Yourself and Toys, I hope you’ll return to it now. You’ll learn some surprising benefits of solo sex. And you’ll want to know why a sex toy may become your new best friend!

Solo sex keeps everything in working order—brain, body, blood flow, ability to orgasm. And then if life surprises you and sends you a new love, you’ll be ready and able to enjoy each other fully. You never know what—or who—is around the corner!

Seven years after my beloved husband of thirty-seven years died, my daughter nudged me to look for someone to go with to dinner, museums, and concerts. I was eighty. I joined a dating service online and met a gentleman who was eighty-five. The most shocking thing to me was how my body responded to being near this senior citizen. I had been forced to turn off those desires many years before when my husband was ill. I was embarrassed at how my body was responding to him at my age. We married a year later. Here we are, six years later, still active. I feel blessed that I found another love in my final years to make sweet love to me and make me feel pretty. My passion was never higher than with this gentle little man.