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“She’s got to be ninety-five and a half years old,” Ben said. “We were friends while she was living independent, like me, but one day she fell and wound up upstairs in the assisted living department of my condominium.”

“Ahh. I knew there was another reason you were going up there besides playing music,” I said, gently poking him in the ribs.

“You bet. I’ve known this lady for, I guess, over three years. As soon as I saw her, I thought, I know my beautiful (late) wife will forgive me, but I got to have a little friendship and she looks like she might supply it. I got her phone number up there and called her. I asked, ‘Do you mind if I come by again and share some animal crackers with milk and have a wild time?’ She was a little hesitant, but she said, ‘Okay, you can come on up.’ First time we met, I was a totally perfect gentleman. I cut a banana, two-thirds for me, one-third for her, and we just talked about our background, our life. Her background was Columbia, Alabama. My background was the ghetto of Manhattan. It is like a million miles apart. But it shows you if folks care about each other’s company, it don’t matter where you come from.”

Ben and I had been talking about sex, so I asked him if they had a physical relationship.

“After I had seen her a few times up there, I say, ‘You know, Jocelyn, I wonder if we could get a little more intimate.’ Was that the right thing to say, Jane?”

“Sure.”

“Instead of undressing her like a madman?”

“I’m real proud of you, Ben. That was the right move.”

“You know what she says? ‘I think it is a little too late.’ So I say, ‘Well, let’s give it a shot.’ Now, this is the God’s honest truth. The next time I came by to visit her, she was in her pajamas. I said, ‘Ask no more.’ We got kind of friendly. I says, ‘So you’re wearing your pajamas?’ She was kind of shy. I just started to undress her inch by inch. The first thing is we wound up in the bedroom. We got into bed as is. Like you mentioned before, you can have a great time without penetration. It was like cementing us together as good friends.”

“That is so beautiful, Ben.” I’d been talking with him about what a shame that all the emphasis is on penetration when there are so many other ways to give and receive pleasure later in life.

“Yeah. She liked it, just the whole experience.”

“Skin on skin,” I added.

“Yeah.”

Ben’s not alone in experiencing late-life sensuality. Evelyn Freeman was a licensed therapist, artist, and jewelry maker when, in 1980, she started the Peer Counselor Program at the Senior Health and Peer Counseling Center for Healthy Aging. In 2007, the center merged with WISE Services to become WISE & Healthy Aging, an agency that provides a variety of support services for people fifty-five years and older.

Retired at eighty-nine, Evelyn was a remarkably beautiful ninety-one when I interviewed her.

“I never expected to be ninety-one,” she told me. “So many things I didn’t expect. I never expected to be turned on at this age. My husband walks in now, from the pool, nude, and I get sexually turned on. That’s such a bonus.”

“And can he respond?” I ask.

“Well, not in the way we responded fifty years ago, but he responds with feelings and we touch a lot. But we’re not able to be as fully sexual as we were.”

I loved hearing these stories from Ben and Evelyn. They fill me with the hope that with any luck, a modicum of health, and a willingness to remain open to its potential, the deliciousness of sensual intimacy can continue right to the end.

Interviewing Evelyn Freeman at the WISE & Healthy Aging center.
MARLENA ROSS, WISE & HEALTHY AGING

Collecting Dividends

Dr. Johnnetta Cole, president emerita of Spelman College and Bennett College for Women, the two historical black colleges for women, was seventy-one when I interviewed her in her Atlanta home, and she vibrated with joy and energy. She married her third husband, James David Staton, Jr., at seventy; he is seventeen years younger than she. “In the Third Act sex can be very special,” she told me. “While it will probably not be as energetic, as experimental, or as frequent as in the Second Act, it has the possibility of being an important and satisfying part of life now.”

Dr. Johnnetta Cole.

“Why?” I asked.

“You can collect dividends from what you’ve learned in the First and Second Acts to use in the Third. A woman may well know her body better, and she may be at greater peace with her body. In fact, in the Third Act, a woman may become more assertive about sex because she knows what she needs, she knows what she wants, and she is not shy about asking for it. And if a woman in Act III is fortunate enough to have a partner who is also at ease with his or her body, then intimacy, if not sex, can be very special. In my case, how fortunate I am to have a husband who has a deep, nurturing way about him. The way he is no doubt comes from years of being a caretaker for his younger siblings and from being a single parent. I was listening to an NPR story the other day,” Johnnetta continued, “and it was talking about aging and sex and how difficult it is for children to imagine their parents in a sexual act. The older the parents are, the more trouble children have with this. The person doing this particular story talked about a woman who was in her late eighties, not in good health, and when asked who should be contacted in a circumstance where somebody needed to be there and be there quickly, she lied. What she really wanted to say was the name of her lover. But she was afraid that her children would find this disgusting, immoral, or bizarre. I think it’s really unfortunate that we have so distorted the aging process that we insist on separating growing old from sex … something wonderful that many folks in the Third Act can and do enjoy.”

I know, of course, that many Third Acters have chosen to pack it in sexually a while ago—for some women, maybe after menopause. For women with low libidos, sex was never an important part of their lives. Chances are, that won’t change in this last act. In fact, some women are undoubtedly relieved when, either because of widowhood or a lessening of their own or their partners’ sexual drive, they can close the book on that chapter of their lives. In such cases, the man’s decision to use sex-enhancing drugs just when his partner thought she’d seen the last of that demanding protuberance can cause anger and resentment. The painful ending of a love affair can also make us want to close up shop. Many widows who had loving, satisfying marriages feel no need or desire to crank it all up again with someone new. There’s the story of the elderly couple who had begun dating, really enjoyed each other, and decided it was time to move in together. They discussed finances, their adult children, their living arrangements, and finally the man asked, “How do you feel about sex?” She responded, “Well, I’d have to say I like it infrequently.” He paused and then, ever hopeful, said, “Was that one word or two?”

Clearly, a life of stimulating friends, interesting travel, work (paid or volunteer), grandchildren, and hobbies can be wonder-ful—with or without sex; and none of us should feel we’re copping out if this is our choice. This chapter, however, is mainly for those who are still sexually active or would like to be. If you’ve loved before, you can love again, and the same is true for sex. If there was a time in your life when you enjoyed sex, you can recover that pleasure—if you want to—because Cupid’s bow is undeterred by age. In fact, it may fly truer and land deeper. How many times in the last decade have I said that I was through with lovers, wasn’t even thinking about relationships anymore? “That part’s over for me,” I would announce. My women friends would invariably smile and say, “Yeah, okay, Jane, but ‘never’ is a big word.” I was so certain—and then along would come love, and let me tell you (though you can probably imagine), love and good sex are the best rejuvenators, better than any face-lift. And don’t think for a minute that older folks aren’t getting it on. According to the most comprehensive national survey ever done of sexual behavior among older adults, a lot of us are still doing it. As reported in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in 2007, 84 percent of men from ages fifty-seven to sixty-four reported having had some sexual contact with another person in the last year, compared with 62 percent of women in the same age group. The numbers dropped to 38 percent and 17 percent, respectively, in people seventy-five years and older. But among those seniors who were sexually active, about two-thirds had sex at least twice a month into their seventies, and more than half continued at that pace into their eighties.

There are, however, definite age-related changes. Nearly half of those in the study who were sexually active reported at least one sexual problem, with 43 percent of women reporting diminished desire and 39 percent vaginal dryness; 37 percent of men reported erectile difficulties.

In this chapter I hope to address these changes and perhaps help you manage them. Knowing what to expect of your own body and what to expect of your partner’s can make all the difference. Some of the changes are positive, and almost all can be dealt with by giving yourself more time to have sex. Other things that can help include patience, communication between partners, appropriate use of sexuality-enhancing drugs, and some basic knowledge.

Men and Health

There is nothing about aging in and of itself that gets in the way of our having sex. Health problems and medications are the key impediments—more so in men than in women. Only 10 percent of women report that their cessation of sex was due to their own illness or lack of interest. Mainly it is due to scarcity of appropriate partners (for every fifty-one men aged seventy-five and older, there are one hundred women!), illness of the spouse, or inability of the spouse to have intercourse. Dr. Michael Perelman, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry, reproductive medicine, and urology at Weill Cornell Medical College and codirector of the Human Sexuality Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital, told me that the health of the male partner is probably the strongest determinant in whether or not a couple continues to have sex. His failure to perform as he has in the past can become so bothersome to him emotionally that he will develop a pattern of avoidance that is as damaging as the lack of erectile function itself. Avoidance can become a habit and cause the man to pull back from giving or receiving
any
form of affection, for fear that he will be expected to follow up by performing sexually.

In
New Passages,
Gail Sheehy cites the Massachusetts Male Aging Study: “51% of normal, healthy males aged 40 to 70 experience some degree of impotence,” caused by medications, heart problems, diabetes, or anything that impedes blood flow to the penis. The effects of these health issues on sexual performance vary greatly from man to man, but generally they result in:

• Taking longer to get erections and requiring more direct manual stimulation.
  
• Erections are less firm and harder to maintain because of changes in blood flow.
  
• The penis starts to get smaller with age.
  
• Taking longer to reach orgasm (just what women have always wished for!).
  
• If there is orgasm, the force of ejaculation is reduced.
  
• There are fewer contractions.
  
• More time is needed between erections.
  
• Peyronie’s disease is a condition that affects approximately 10 percent of older men, causing their penis to shorten and curve during erection.
  

Diabetes is the most common cause of male impotence, yet, interestingly, 80 percent of diabetic women do not lose their sexual desire or ability to orgasm. In
The Fountain of Age,
Betty Friedan conjectures that the explanation for this disparity might “simply be that male sexuality is equated with ‘erectile capacity,’ and not with total sexual responsiveness, which remains unimpaired in female diabetics.” Friedan wonders, as do I, whether, if we moved the focus of male sexuality from a preoccupation with the erection to a more all-over sexuality, diabetic men wouldn’t remain sexual the way their female counterparts do.
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