September 1, 2008
When I was interviewing older adult (fifty years plus) couples for my book September Songs, I never asked them about their sexual lives directly. The question I asked was "What do you think are the major sexual issues that emerge at this time of life?" The partners' responses were always specific to themselves and never came in the form of generalities. The mates simply launched into an open discussion of their own sexual relationships and the ways in which their sex lives had improved, stayed the same, diminished or ended completely. We talked about very personal matters, such as managing menopausal changes in the female partner and erectile and orgasmic changes in the male.
As these interviews progressed, I was gathering valuable information about sex in the older adult years. For example, couples like the Donaldsons and the Winstons whose sexual activities had slowed down, might have been concerned about this slowdown but were nevertheless basking in contented, close, deeply satisfying relationships. On the other hand the completely asexual Hamiltons, who were clearly devoted to one-another, taught me that a lack of genital sexual relationships in the marriages of people in their later years is not necessarily a tragic outcome. Actually, as reported recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results of a large scale study indicated that over one quarter of couples in their age-group (the early sixties) have not had intercourse within the previous year. Still, there were many other couples who reported that their sex life was the same, or in some cases, even better.(See the article cited above). I was deeply moved by the Sternbergs' description of the intimate sexual relationship that these mates continued to enjoy in the wake of Nancy's traumatic breast cancer operation.
All in all, though sex is a perennially interesting topic, I found myself unable to make a defining statement about sexuality in older adulthood - aside from the observation that it didn't appear to be as crucial as was real affection between the members of the pair.
