Yes, you can have great sex after 60 — I should know
Relationship expert Tracey Cox, 63, who began her career in Sydney, explains what a lifetime of experience has taught her.
Tracey Cox is the grande dame of sex and relationship experts. She has been writing, researching and counselling on sex for 30 years. Her first book, Hot Sex: How to Do It, sold more than a million copies. Her latest (and 17th) was Great Sex Starts at 50: How to Age-Proof Your Libido. Now an elegant 63, she says the idea that sex in midlife and beyond isn’t as fulfilling as in one’s younger years is nonsense. “Sex is just as good, it’s just different,” she says.
Cox has been married to her second husband, Miles, for eight years. “I was engaged three times before my first marriage — I was terrible when I was young,” she says cheerfully, speaking from their London home. (She’s British but grew up in Australia, where she was assistant editor on Cosmopolitan, and still has a light accent.)
Cox’s first husband — a professional beach volleyball player turned finance executive — was, she says, lovely but “the first time round I hated marriage. My dad had an affair and I just didn’t like the institution.” She was with her first husband for seven years and married for two. When it ended, Cox says, “I had a long period of serial monogamy, just loving being single. I met Miles when I was 51.” They married mainly to please her mother, then 80, and Cox warned her fiance: “I didn’t like it last time.” Fortunately, she says now, “I love being married to him.”
As for her own sex life, has she encountered for herself many of the midlife challenges, from lower libido to physical changes, she discusses? “I really have,” she says. “Menopause was really hard for me. It has been a bit of a battle. Thank goodness I know what to do.”
Here she shares her strategies to keep sex great post 50, 60 and beyond.
Scheduled sex doesn’t have to be boring
“At the start of your relationship, your brain was flooded with all these sex and love hormones that made you go crazy for sex,” Cox says. “But when you’ve been together 15, 20 years, the spontaneous desire to have sex is not going to tap you on the shoulder.” Clinging to the myth that it’s got to be spontaneous is frankly silly and unrealistic — you won’t have sex, she says. “You have to create opportunities for sex, which means scheduling sex.”
Of course, if your attitude is, “We’ll have sex at 10pm on Tuesdays — that’s it,” it will be boring, Cox says. “But if you say, ‘Let’s take turns each week, coming up with just one thing that’s different’ — it might be a different room, music on or watching something first — little tiny things are very exciting to our brains,” Cox says. “That’s the difference between scheduled sex that’s boring and sex that you anticipate. And anticipation is just as good as spontaneity.”
Get out of the ‘cuddle zone’
The more you have (good) sex, the more you want it, Cox believes, and, she says, studies show that once a week is optimum for happiness and health. No time? “Stop going on social media, stop watching TV, stop doing the chores. You do have time for sex, it’s that other things take priority.” Get out of the “cuddle zone”, Cox advises, by getting out of the house together. To revive your sex life you have to feel excited by life.
Foreplay is key
The unrealistic portrayal of midlife married sex on TV as fast and furious enrages Cox because it makes people feel bad. “Even I look at my husband and think, ‘We don’t do it like that any more.’” But the truth is, “No one is champing at the bit for it after you’ve been together that long. The sex you have in midlife and older is different from the sex you have when you were young with hormones going wild and your bits in perfect condition.” Everyone takes longer to get aroused. Sex often becomes uncomfortable for women — Cox had a period of finding penetrative sex painful.
“You have to change things,” she says. “Miles and I have very much embraced the whole foreplay-based sex sessions.” Post-50, she adds, “It has to be more foreplay-focused, softer sex, less penetrative sex, more oral sex, more sex toys — more interesting sex for women, actually. People say, ‘Sex isn’t like what it used to be.’ No, it’s not. It’s better.”
Be careful about the language you use
Couples are surprisingly intolerant of the fact that all body parts age. In midlife and beyond, if there are physical issues affecting your sex life, it’s not a reflection on how much your partner fancies you, yet many take it personally and can be terribly unkind. Cox says: “I get really upset when women joke about penis size or impotence.” Be very careful with your language. Never call a man with erection issues “impotent”, she adds. It fuels anxiety and shame, and often perpetuates the problem.
When writing Great Sex Starts at 50, she asked men and women about age-related issues. “For women it was dry vaginas, loss of desire, menopause stuff. For men, their erections weren’t so hard, they were having trouble maintaining them.” Women, she says, were more stoic and practical: “‘Oh well, let’s get some lube.’ But with men, not getting an erection was the biggest psychological catastrophe.” In fact, if a midlife man suddenly doesn’t want sex, this is often why. “He has trouble getting an erection and he’s too embarrassed to tell you.” You can normalise any issues by mentioning yours (“it’s all part of ageing, I guess”), she suggests.
Not all couples want more sex
Of course sexless relationships can still be satisfying, Cox says, “and there are a lot of sexless relationships”. She adds: “A sexless relationship is a bad thing if one person wants lots of sex and the other isn’t interested at all. It won’t last.” But plenty of people, especially if they got together young, get to 50, have a few issues and decide they’ve had enough sex, she says. “And they’re more than happy. So long as lots of touching and affection and love is there, and it’s talked about, sexless relationships can function perfectly well. It’s not like a flatmate. Sex isn’t the only way to show love and intimacy.”
What if you do both want sex but months have passed? Cox’s advice is simply to talk. “The longer you go without, the less likely it is you’ll resume sex — unless you have a conversation,” she says. You can say, “Do you know what, darling, we haven’t had sex in so long. I miss our sex. I miss being close to you. Do you miss it? Shall we talk about how to bring that back into our relationship again?” Add, “Maybe think about it and we can talk later.” They might get defensive, so she advises you to be gentle. However, if it’s been more than a year, and certainly if it’s been more than three, Cox says it’s hard to get back to it. Eventually “there’s ‘the sibling effect’, where you stop thinking of them as a sexual person,” she says, “and the thought of sex with them feels a bit icky.”
Have ‘holiday sex’ all year round
“Sex is awkward in a long-term relationship,” Cox says, “because you’re saying, ‘Can you do the dishes?’ Can you pick up Jonny?’ And then all of a sudden, ‘Can you throw me on the bed?’ It’s hard to switch.” She adds: “This is why scheduled sex is good. It’s Tuesday, you look at each other a bit differently.” How to alter the mood? “I might say to my husband, ‘If you want sex, you’ve got to run me a bath and make sure it looks pretty!’” People can cringe at the idea of role play, she says. “But one reason role play or having fantasies or talking dirty works is because it takes you out of that everyday zone. It’s why you have better sex on holiday, because you’re different people.”
Not in the mood? Give it five minutes
Most men have “spontaneous” desire, Cox says, where “you just feel like having sex out of the blue”. But two thirds of women have “responsive” desire, where “you don’t feel like sex at all but, once you’re touched in a way that suits you, suddenly you become aroused.” It’s why some women mistakenly think they have a low sex drive.
Also, Cox says, it requires good technique. “You have to tell him what works for you and he has to do what works for you. I was one of the spontaneous sex people — I wanted sex all the time.” Now she’s older, “It’s, ‘Oh, create desire!’
“If your partner is good at stimulating you, you can go from zero to fifty to a hundred.” And if you don’t think you’re in the mood, Cox suggests that sometimes you should give it five minutes, noting that “desire is not the only motivation for sex”, others being to please your partner, though never in a coercive way, and to feel close. “To be sexually generous is important,” she says.
Don’t feel guilty about your fantasies
Romantic sex can be a bit boring 20 years in, Cox says. “Women don’t want the same old sex over and over.” But often they don’t ask for what they want, so they’re bored stupid, she says. “If you give women interesting, erotic, naughty, hot, dark sex, women are up for it.” Cox and her husband were on holiday when Fifty Shades of Grey came out and met a woman who told them that, having read it after a six-year dry patch, she woke her husband up at 3am for sex. “It made them do new, naughty, edgy things, things you’re almost embarrassed to admit to liking — that’s the key to keeping long-term sex going, you’ve got to go to that darker side, to get away from the ‘can you take out the milk bottles?’ side.”
So stop feeling guilty about your fantasies, she says — “fantasies are not wishes” and your partner benefits from them. “If you fancy the guy at the garden centre, channel it into sex with your partner. It’s how people make monogamy less monotonous.” Listening to audio porn, privately or together, is especially great for women’s libido, Cox says. “Men tend to be visual, women are much more in their heads and audio porn feeds your imagination.” She advises investing in some sex toys. “I recently asked three friends how long it took them to orgasm with a vibrator — two minute,” Cox says. To optimise your sex life, she adds, “you should be having it with yourself too”.
Make a commitment to look your best
“We have this feeling that our partner should love us no matter what,” Cox says. “But if you let yourself go — men or women — and slob around, your partner’s going to lose attraction to you. When you make a commitment to be monogamous, I think you make a commitment to look your best.” That’s one thing. Another issue, she says, is that some people, mostly women, are so critical of how they look that it ruins sex. “How can you let someone look at your body, touch it, kiss it, if you don’t like your body?” Find a way to make peace with it, Cox says: “You have to want to feel sexy.” And hone your technique. She says that research shows, “If you’re sexually confident, and your partner compliments you on your skills, women suffer less with body image.” Cox advises those who are self-conscious during sex to focus on sensation and their partner, and to be active, not passive.
Don’t focus on orgasms (yours or your partner’s)
“Stop orgasm-chasing,” Cox says. “If orgasm’s your focus, it detracts from everything.” Because there’s a drop in sex hormones as women age (and men too) “you become less sensitive, you need firmer stimulation, for longer”. View this as the opportunity to get more pleasure, she says. “Some men feel if the woman hasn’t had an orgasm, it’s an indictment of his virility.” If you take the focus away from orgasm, she adds, it will happen naturally, more likely than not.
The Times
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