What is ‘sexual wisdom’ – and how it improves intimacy over the years

Society loves to address the sex and love lives of Generation Z and millennials – respectively those born after the 2000s and the previous generation, born in the 1980s and 1990s.

How are they dating, what sexual orientations are they identifying with, and what are their relationships like?

But as exciting as young love can be, dating and sex don’t start and end in youth.

In fact, both activities can improve significantly with age.

Several studies show that people who live the longest may be having the best sex.

For example, a 2016 study of more than 6,000 adults in the United States showed that “age had a positive relationship with quality of sex life.”

Its researchers found that older respondents developed what they called “sexual wisdom”—which refers not just to sexual dexterity, but also to respondents’ ability to be caring and generous partners.

“With life experience, people may be learning more about their own sexual preferences and the likes and dislikes of their partners,” says Miriam Forbes, a senior researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who worked on the study.

Similarly, research on the sex lives of adults in their 60s and 80s, conducted by Peggy Kleinplatz, director of the ideal sexual experiences research team at the University of Ottawa in Canada, showed that people’s intimate lives improved with the years.

And a 2018 study conducted in Israel showed that adults aged 60 to 91 shifted their focus “from lust to love” and from “taking to giving” in their sexual relationships over time.

Research suggests that skill, experience, and better communication of sexual and romantic desires come with experience.

Thus, younger people can learn a lot about relationships with older people.

Their experience can even reshape the narrative of our sexual journeys, deconstructing traditional notions of who is having the best sex and when.

The intimacy of the elderly

The growing public interest in the dating and sexuality of the elderly is a new phenomenon.

When Stacy Lindau began her journey as a medical student in the mid-1990s in Rhode Island, United States, she was taught to ask her older patients about their sexual history, but she realized that her teachers didn’t do that.

However, she did, and questions about her patients’ past experiences caused “a twinkle in her eye,” she says.

“They came alive and had a lot of stories to tell.”

If simply asking older patients about their intimate lives had this positive effect, perhaps it was an area worth studying to find out how to approach their overall well-being, the researcher thought.

Lack of interest

But Lindau noticed that while there were studies that focused on the sexual behaviors of younger people, none focused on adults aged 60 and over.

Studies on young people received funding because the group was the most affected by HIV/AIDS, says Lindau, a popular and crucial research topic at the time.

However, as effective treatments for HIV/AIDS have extended the lives of people living with the virus, research on the topic has shifted to include older people.

Meanwhile, the successful commercialization of erectile dysfunction drugs turned out to be another step that “really opened the door” to the study of sexuality among older adults, Lindau says.

This helped the researcher obtain funding for the study she and her colleagues conducted, published in 2008.

less likely to speak

Including more than 3,000 American adults ages 57 to 85, the Lindau study found that more than half of those ages 65 to 74 had sex at least once in the previous year.

But it also found that older adults were not particularly likely to discuss their sex lives with doctors.

The research also served as a model that paved the way for similar studies of intimacy among older people in the UK and Ireland.

Meanwhile, in her clinical work, Lindau continued to talk about the sex and love lives of people in their 60s and 70s.

‘Great lovers are made with time’

In addition to learning about her older patients’ continued interest in being sexually active, she also found that dating apps have become more common among seniors, allowing them to expose themselves in a way that was not possible in the past.

“Another theme I hear is the gift of growing old,” says Lindau.

His patients, many of whom had survived cancer or other illnesses, were learning to accept the aging process in part by adapting their sex and love lives to their current realities, essentially turning age-related obstacles into creative learning experiences.

This attitude is reflected in the aforementioned studies of intimacy among people aged 60 and over and in the Kleinplatz survey of people in this age group from around the world.

“We learned that ‘great lovers’ are made with time, they are not born ready”, says Kleinplatz.

“Typically, the best sexual experiences begin in middle age or later.”

In other words, according to the researchers, the path to sexual satisfaction almost necessarily takes time.

This “sexual wisdom” that Forbes spoke of in his research not only makes intimacy possible at older ages, it often enhances it.

Reorient the sexual trajectory

In fact, the baby boomers – those born in the period after the Second World War, between 1946 and 1964 –, the generation of sexual liberation, are still having sex, and perhaps better sex than other generations.

While many people may still feel uncomfortable talking about seniors’ love lives, this group continues to gain more voice and is normalizing the discussion of their sexual experiences.

On television, series that address the lives of older adults navigating romance and sexuality, such as Grace and Frankie and The Kominsky Methodare increasingly popular.

Many seniors have also been talking about the joys and challenges of old age sex (and even how to live a better sex life in your 70s).

This narrative shift can help put younger people’s sex lives in perspective.

a holistic journey

Instead of listening to the usual (and not very scientific) statistics about men reaching their sexual peak at 18 and women at 35, these closer looks at the intimate lives of older people challenge the conventional idea that a sex and love life must come. at their peak in their 20s or 30s, or else they missed their chance.

On the contrary, sex life can be thought of as a holistic journey that improves with time and experience.

“When you’re older, you’ll have learned to deal with more things,” says Dossie Easton, 78, author of The Ethical Slut (The Ethical Bitch, in free translation).

“Experience gives us a wider repertoire and more ways to match anyone.”

The data seem to agree: good sex is far from limited to young people; it’s part of a future for which younger sexually active people are working.

*Read the original version of this report (in English) at Lovelife session from the BBC Worklife website.