Reflections on Identity

Midlife Sex Is the Best Sex

Overcoming shame and guilt to embrace sexuality in midlife

One of the biggest surprises to me in the annals of “I didn’t see that coming” is how fiercely I own and celebrate my sexuality in midlife.

I am not alone. According to HealthDay News, women in midlife feel more confident and empowered when it comes to sex and thus report higher levels of satisfaction. Gynecologist Susan Hardwick-Smith writes in her book Sexually Woke that up to one in five women in midlife report feeling fulfilled sexually, a number that may seem discouraging but that she says negates the common trope about how our changing hormones and bodies make sexual satisfaction impossible after we hit a certain age.

My sex life at fifty-one is the best it’s ever been, mostly because I have been able to discard the negative emotions I associated with sex from the very first time I became sexually active.

My best friend and I were hellbent on losing our virginity the summer before we started our senior year of high school. We can’t be virgins anymore, it’s embarrassing, we said as we watched other girls parade around with a swagger that made us feel we would forever be confined to pastel childhood bedrooms with Raggedy Ann dolls.

My friend did the deed first. She was suddenly light years ahead of me, holding the secret to adulthood that remained elusive to me. She was my closest friend; we spent most of our waking hours together, but now there was a chasm between us that I could see in the surety of her steps. Would I ever have that commanding knowledge, the key to becoming a full-fledged woman?

A few weeks later, I found myself naked on the nubby fabric of the brown plaid sofa in the basement of my house, my parents asleep two flights above me, with a boy two years my senior. I was fairly desperate for him to take the burden of virginity from me. I recall pressure and pain, as well as fear that my parents would open the door at the top of the stairs to find us mid-act, this boy stealing my most precious commodity.

Losing virginity. The phrase implies a misplaced item that I might spend the rest of my life vainly attempting to find. Where did my virginity go? Had I dropped it, given it away, had it seized? Was it mine to hand out if I could get in trouble for it? I wanted it gone and I didn’t so much give it to the first willing taker as much as shed myself of it, like dropping a bag of unwanted clothes at the thrift shop. I wanted virginity out of my body, this demarcation between being a girl and being a woman.

Now I was one of them, bruised, wearied and worldly, worrying about pregnancy and infections. The act itself had been transactional, bringing more pain than joy. I was relieved not to have bled on the couch and then worried I hadn’t fully gone all the way if there wasn’t blood to show for it. My friend had done it in her parents’ bed while they were away and had bled copiously. Unable to get the bloodstain off their sheets, she lied when they returned and told them I had slept over and had my period.

There was immediate shame and secrecy. We knew that it was important we not simply give this valuable item away, we were supposed to protect it from invasion. There was never a suggestion by the people in charge of our development, at home or school, that we might want to have sex, that we might be curious, physically and intellectually. We were taught that boys — unable to control their genitals because they weren’t protected fortresses like our own genitals — would try to enter us at any cost. This was the way of boys: they would lie, cajole, beg, borrow and steal to gain access to this forbidden zone, and it was our job, our duty — no, our mandate — to keep our legs shut.

It is thus no surprise that after the hurried act, I felt both pride and shame. I had acted rebelliously and now I would suffer the consequences. What, really, was the difference between me and Eve as she was unceremoniously ousted from the Garden of Eden? I had capitulated and it could only be because of some weakness I had not previously known. At seventeen, I was a woman, well aware of my vulnerability because I had freely given to a man what I was supposed to conserve.

Looking back at the conversation around sex and teenage girls in the 1980s, when I became sexually active, it seems like a fait accompli that my feelings would be weighed down with negative emotions. An article from the Los Angeles Times in 1987 warns of a “disturbing trend toward having sex at earlier ages” and notes that although the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s reached women of all ages, “the consequences were most severe for teen-agers.” A study of teen magazines in the 1980s-1990s by Reanimating Data asserts that many teenaged girls used magazines as their primary means of sexual education, since parents and schools provided inadequate information. These magazines, for the first time, started a conversation about the possibility of women experiencing pleasure from sex, but unfortunately the emphasis was still on reminding girls they had the right to say no with the implication that saying yes would be highly problematic.

A few months after my deflowering, I spent a night with the same young man, who had since become my boyfriend. His family had a hunting cabin in the woods; we hiked through snowy paths, stopping to make snow angels and point to deer traipsing nearby. Back at the cabin, we ate fruit and sandwiches and attempted to make a fire. We were freezing, so we zipped ourselves into a sleeping bag, piling musty wool blankets on top. We had sex, then we slept. It was peaceful and I was in love.

When I arrived home, my mother was cold and angry, couldn’t look at me. She had bumped into my best friend’s mother at the store and learned that my friend was not at the cabin with us as I had promised she would be. I had lied to my mother and gone with my boyfriend alone. Why would you lie to me?

If I told you it was just us, you wouldn’t have let me go.

Right, because it wasn’t safe. He could have raped you!

I stared at my mother, incredulous. Did she really not see the woman I had become, or was she deluding herself because the reality was too painful to witness? Was I such a slut that the truth was too horrifying for her to digest?

Why would he rape me if I’m already freely having sex with him?

I don’t remember now if I said those words or just thought them. The conversation was over, but the feeling of degradation remained.

That boyfriend and I broke up when I went away to college the following year and then I had a new boyfriend and then I met the man I would marry. At the age of twenty, I was having sex with my last new lover, expecting that we would stay together the rest of our lives. I entered my adult years with not only limited sexual experience, but also a set of contradictory feelings about sex in general and, more specifically, about my own sexuality.

On the one hand, I enjoyed having sex and was comfortable in my body. My future husband and I had sex so often that we broke the wooden frame of his roommate’s futon bed and held that fact like a prize when his roommate returned from his semester in London to discover the cracked wooden slats. I had orgasms that were quick and fleeting, sometimes stopping right at the cusp, but for the most part he and I were both satisfied. I ambled around naked and thought I looked pretty good — my stomach was not as taut as I would have liked and my breasts were fuller than I wanted them to be, but I had an ease that enabled our sex life to be competent if not passionate as the years went on.

On the other hand, I never shook the feelings of guilt and shame that accompanied my first sexual experiences. An article about shame in Scientific American suggests that teens are most prone to feeling shame because their identities are not yet fully formed, whereas by middle age our identities are more firmly established. The way these feelings manifest in our bodies as we become women can have long-lasting effects, making us feel inhibited and closed off in our most intimate relationships, according to a sex advice column in Well and Good.

In my marriage, I was loathe to try new things or present myself to my husband sexually in any way that was different from how I had always been. It felt embarrassing and unseemly; thus it was understandable that sex became a tool of procreation — not a form of intimacy and mutual pleasure — as we had our three children. It went from being enthusiastic to practical and then inconvenient and flat-out exhausting.

With children in the house, sex became forbidden and secretive again. It had to be quick and quiet. As had been the case decades earlier when I had allowed my innocence to lapse, I had the feeling that I was doing something indecent. Now, it was rarely done for my own enjoyment but as an occupational necessity. A wife must have sex with her husband to keep him happy. My own happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction? Those came on the nights I didn’t have sex but could fall into bed, feel the cool sheets beneath my body without the guilt that I had to perform for my husband.

Thirty years after I had sex for the first time, I had sex for the first time again, post-marriage. I was just as anxious to lose my post-marriage virginity at the age of 47 as I had been as a curious teenager. It wasn’t that I was libidinous so much as that I needed to wrap my head around what sex as a newly single woman in midlife would look like. I found my chance in a one-night stand.

There was no pain this time, no fumbling, no fear of being caught. I was a grown woman with children who were not in the vicinity and a husband from whom I was separated. I owed no one an explanation and the stranger in bed with me had no expectations. I could be timid and meek or bold and loud. I could come quietly or scream so the inhabitants of the hotel rooms down the hall could hear me. Finally, for the first time in my life, I did what I wanted with a man without judgment from myself. I felt free and I felt powerful. Sex gave me that, and so naturally I wanted more, and I pursued that mission with single-minded zeal.

Four years later, I continue to honor my newfound sensuality. I love to touch and to be touched, to kiss with passion, to peel my clothes off the minute I am reunited with the man I’m dating. He scoops me up and ravages me and I inhale him until my body and senses are filled. I am not just satisfied, I am alive, I am vibrating with desire.

We deserve to give ourselves permission to enjoy sex and not to let anyone — be it parents, husband, kids, or society at large — dictate what that means for us. Could I have done this inside the confines of my marriage and who I was inside that marriage? I’ll never know if I would have rediscovered my sexuality and prioritized it if I hadn’t felt that doing so was a matter of survival. I’m just glad I’m here now.