Web Sex Log

Just as our perception about life changes as we grow older, the same applies to our feelings about sex.

When we are younger, especially during the period of our sexual awakening, we tend to be ruled by lust, and this tendency seems to carry on as we experience the joys of relationships and sex.

We may meet our prospective life partners during this period and amidst rivers of sexual intimacy and love, we plan for our futures and start raising our families.

“While sex may seem to be the most important thing in the world when you’re younger, our perceptions about it may change when a woman hits her 30s.

“She’s probably a few years into a committed relationship and has settled into a sexual routine of sorts. The first flush of sexual excitement has died and she may have a young family, one of the factors that tends to affect female sexual desire,” said Australian sex therapist and relationship counsellor Dr Rosie King.

She explained: “Humans tend to experience a phenomenon called skin hunger, a craving for skin-to-skin contact. This acts as a powerful motivator of sexual activity.

“For women with young children, this skin hunger is met by regular contact with the children. The same does not apply to men as they tend to not be as involved in the care of young children. As a result of this, their main avenue to fulfil skin hunger is still sex.’’

As to be expected, women with young families also tend to lack sleep and have to deal with privacy issues. “These factors have an inhibiting effect on sexual desire. The 30s would undoubtedly be the time when there is a great desire discrepancy between men and women,” Dr King said.

She added that many marriages are strained as a result of desire discrepancy. “Because a woman’s sexual desire is low, the wheels may fall off in the relationship. The relationship may become toxic as while he chases her, she withdraws from him.

“Indeed, parenting is probably the biggest challenge to a woman’s sexuality in her 30s and sets a tremendous challenge to many marriages,” she said.

In a couple in their 40s, the challenges differ. “This is the point when men tend to be career-focused while women are preoccupied with their growing families and careers. Because couples tend not to focus on their relationships, there is a danger that they will drift apart. There is often less time to talk, what more issues of affection and sex,” Dr King said.

She says that couples in their 40s should make time for sex at least once a week or fortnight – even if they don’t experience a high level of sexual desire.

“The sexual contact will be good for the marriage as the couple spends some intimate time together. There is a saying ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it’ and one should remember that regular sexual activity facilitates sexual functions,” she said, adding that medical conditions such as erectile dysfunction (ED) may also rear its ugly head when a man is in his 40s.

As a man hits his 50s, he may begin to question his masculinity as it is harder to achieve an erection, which at this stage of his life is less firm.

Indeed, his days of achieving a Grade 4 erection may be far behind him – at least without the aid of medical treatment.

“The Pfizer Global Better Sex Survey indicates that there is a strong association between erection hardness and sexual satisfaction, so this could be a fragile time for the relationship.

“While worrying about this, the man would also have to deal with less intense orgasms and a longer recovery period,” she said, adding that while a young man takes an average of 19 minutes before he is good to go again, a 55-year-old man may take anything from 24 hours to a week.

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For women, the 50s is a time when there may be changes in the balance of relationships. “Couples find themselves in an empty house while work pressures may increase.

“For some, life may be easier but this is usually the time when the impact of menopause is felt. This is hardly a pleasant situation and these women must have the patience and understanding support of their husbands,” Dr King said.

To keep the relationship on track – no matter what age bracket a couple falls into – it would be important to constantly communicate with each other.

“Communication is key if a couple hopes to remain close. It not only acts as a sexual enhancer for women but keeps the relationship strong as the couple talk about their greatest fears and desires,” Dr King said.

Sex After 35 - Why Its Different, Why It Can Be Better

As couples approach the middle years, our bodies, lifestyles and sexual responses change. Both men and women have physical, psychological and hormonal changes which are normal, gradual and subtle. The changes can even improve a couple’s sex life!

For women, some of the changes are caused by menopause, which occurs when female hormones decrease, bringing a halt to menstruation. On average, that happens in the early 50’s. But the process often begins in the early to mid-40’s and spans four or five years. During this premenopausal period, a woman’s vaginal tissues may become thinner, drier and slower to lubricate. She may lose protective fatty tissue in the pubic area while gaining weight elsewhere. Once pleasurable, intercourse may now feel uncomfortable, even painful.

Not understanding these natural physical changes, she may complain that her husband is being too rough and withdraw from sex. Her husband may mistakenly believe she has lost interest in him.

Men go through hormonal changes too. Testosterone, which influences a mans sex drive, reaches its peak between 20 and 30 and gradually decreases thereafter. A French study of 1408 healthy men ages 20 to 60 showed up to a 25 percent decline in testosterone over four decades. This is why products such as Natural Sex work for some since, they often result in more free testosterone in the body). Primarily as a result of reduced blood flow, a middle-aged mans erections are not as firm as when he was young.

However, none of these changes should interfere with a full sex life. For example, if a woman has vaginal discomfort, the solution may be as easy as a shift of position during intercourse or use of an inexpensive, over-the-counter water-soluble lubricant. A 40-year-old man’s softer erections don’t prevent him from reaching orgasm.

Indeed, experts say the changes themselves can actually enhance the relationship and make for better sex - if the couple discovers ways to capitalize on them. Here’s how to have the best sex after 35:

Reset the pace. “Sex in the young is fast and furious,” says Dr. Herant Katchadourian, professor of human biology at Stanford University. “It ignites and fizzles out like fireworks.” A man in his 20’s achieves orgasm within two to five minutes after intercourse begins; his female partner may take 20 minutes or more to reach her peak of excitement. “While she’s still warming up, it may be all over for him,” says marriage, family and child counselor Bernice Itkin of San Francisco.

But as a man ages, the tempo changes from allegro to largo. Because of a normal slowing of blood flow and changes in muscle tone, men in their 40s or 50s require more time to reach a climax, and their orgasms are less forceful.

Now a man’s timing more closely matches the woman’s. He may become more in tune with her interest in slow, sensuous seduction. With this kind of synchronization, it’s no coincidence that women respond enthusiastically. According to a 1994 University of Chicago study, women in their 20s are least likely of all age groups to achieve orgasm during intercourse. Women in their early 40s are most likely - and by a wide margin. By concentrating on how he is increasing his partner’s pleasure, a man can increase his pleasure as well.

Take action. “A young man can get an erection at he drop of a hat - or bra,” says Judith Seifer, president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. But after 35, he may be turned on less by what he sees than by his partner’s kissing and caressing. The University of Chicago study found that 51 percent of 25-to-29- year-old men became excited when they watched their wives undress. By the mid- 40s, the percentage dropped to 40. Once couples learn to pay less attention to what they see and more to what they do, says New York City sex and marital therapist Shirley Zussman, their sex lives improve dramatically.

Balance the seesaw. When they were first married, the man remembered, he always took the sexual lead, pulling his wife close and whispering his desire to make love. But now, 20 years later, she often makes the first move.

Again, hormonal changes are bringing the couple into closer balance. Men and women both produce testosterone and estrogen, but the proportion of each changes over the years. The male’s shifting levels of estrogen and testosterone may make him more willing to follow than to lead, happy for his partner or wife to set the pace. And as a woman’s estrogen declines and her testosterone becomes proportionately greater, she may become more assertive.

Dare to experiment. As partners become older, more experienced and more trusting of each other, they may become less inhibited in their views of what constitutes satisfying sex. “When we were first married, I couldn’t have imagined myself saying ‘Touch me there,’” one woman says. “The scenario has changed now, but it’s not that we’re all that different. It’s that our relationship just got deeper.”

Says Zussman, “It’s a time for new ideas, or a new look at old ideas. “Cuddle up in front of a warm fire. She recalls one 40-ish couple seeking to put more zest into their relationship. “Do you ever shower together?” Zussman asked. The two looked at each other. “We used to,” the wife said sheepishly. “Try it again,” the therapist suggested. They did - and it worked.

“Intercourse isn’t everything,” Zussman says. “It’s like the old travel slogan: getting there is half the fun.”

Achieve more from less. The University of Chicago survey showed that nearly half of 25- to 29- year-olds said they made love at least two or three times a week, including 11 percent reporting four times or more. By the early 40s, the number had fallen to 30 percent. The largest proportion, 45 percent, reported sex “a few times per month” (possible due, in part, to fatigue and the demands of child-rearing). Yet more than any other group, men and women in their 40s considered themselves emotionally and physically satisfied by their lovemaking.

As the frequency drops, couples should realize that each encounter can become more special, a moment to be anticipated and savored. In a secure relationship, there is less emphasis on how often, and more on how good. “I find that people in their 40s or so remember this moment or that moment, whereas to the younger ones, it may be all a blur,” says Zussman. “When it’s no longer an everyday thing, it means more.”

A gratifying sex life after 35 calls for a series of adjustments. Some people confront them poorly: the 45-year-old male who skitters off after a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, the middle-aged woman who flirts to prove that her allure hasn’t faded. But for couples, who understand the normal and inevitable changes, and meet them together, sexual pleasure can be greater than ever. Their sex lives will be rich in their 40s, 50s - and far beyond.

Sex After Kids

Tending to small children is not a particularly romantic thing. Poopy diapers and vomit just don’t bring out the vixen in most women.

There’s no doubt about it, small (and sometimes large) children can put a damper on a woman’s sexual desire. The exhaustion factor is there quite often. There can be some resentment about the division of labor in the household. Hormonal changes can occur. Breastfeeding keeps prolactin in a woman’s body and that suppresses sexual desire.

The level of intimacy in the marriage generally goes up when children arrive. Sometimes that level is too high. All the issues that must be handled when children are part of the picture can overload a couple’s ability to be connected romantically.

I have found that most couples don’t begin to get back to anything that resembles their earlier sexual relationship until the youngest in the house is three. Until that time, most couples have less energy for sex. That’s the nature of raising little children if you’re doing the parenting instead of a nanny.

In my opinion, that’s where “dating” comes in. Pick a Saturday night for a date. Get a sitter. Make sure that you get a nap that afternoon (that’s your husband’s duty to assure). Then, go out for dinner and some time for emotional connection between you as adults. The sitter puts the baby to sleep and you come home as soon as the coast is clear. That’s your time to have some sex that isn’t hurried or sleepy.

Put those “dates” on the calendar as often as you feel is appropriate. Your husband then has at least that to anticipate. You feel less pressured on the other days. (Sometimes feeling less pressured leads to an occasional spontaneous sexual connection springing from general good will.)

Does great sex start at forty?

The news that has emerged from a global study, involving 30,000 people - that it is the over-40s in “gender-equal” countries who have the best sex - is, for those over 40 in such places, cheering, but not exactly news. We knew that. If it discomfits the young, and the institutionally chauvinistic, then, well, even better. Advertisers who peddle the notion that only the under-25s have any right to make the beast with two backs should also think again. Or simply think.

There are one or two flies in the lubricant, though. Men, for instance, tend to be rather more satisfied than their (female) partners. This would appear to be an exclusively heterosexual study, but anomalies in the data suggest that something else may be going on. How to account for the difference between those Japanese who say they are happy in their relationships (15%) and the Japanese who say they are happy with their sex lives (50%)? I may not be able to do the maths, but something fishy’s going on there.

One can have some fun with the national characteristics: “Austrians aged 40-80 claim to have the highest satisfaction with both their relationships and sex lives, followed by Canadians and Swedes,” the report concludes. So it would appear that even the condition of being an 80-year-old Austrian is no bar to having fantastic sex, which may be alarming for the rest of us, but bully for them - even if it is not something we may care to dwell on. And how come the Swedes only come third? (Then again, I know quite a few Canadians, for some reason, and one or two of them are so randy they make me feel like Philip Larkin, so I can’t claim surprise there.)

The over-40s in the affluent west have been aware of the improved quality of their sex lives for some time now. For a start, they are often rather grateful to be having sex at all. The young, for whom sex can be an unthinking duty, an obligation foisted upon them by the predominant culture, probably find it as exciting as a flat alcopop. Not that I spent my youth having what I considered a satisfactory amount of nookie; there was a bit of an alarming drought until I left university. The old adage “Who do I have to screw to get a drink round here?” was, for all practical purposes, reversed to “Who do I have to buy a drink for to get a screw round here?” The answer, then, was, “an inordinate number of people”.

I asked a few friends in their 40s how their sex lives were shaping up. The results of my survey: 40% of respondents said, “Get lost” (not their exact words), 30% said, “Mind your own business”, 20% said, waggishly, “It all depends with whom”, and the rest said, “What sex life?” My sample was hardly statistically significant, I suppose, but it did make me wonder what the pollsters from the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviours were doing to get so many ready answers to their questions. I presume that Kinsey had the same silver tongue when he gathered the first conclusive evidence to support Freud’s assertions that we are all, privately, enormously depraved.

One friend was more usefully forthcoming. “When you’re young,” she said, “you simply haven’t a clue, and that goes for both men and women. Once you’ve got a bit of experience under your belt you start getting confident and considerate.” I could concur with this. Only the fact that I was fizzing with testosterone could explain how I persisted in the search for physical ecstasy in the face of my miserably incompetent attempts to Do It Right. One recalls one’s ignorance, not to mention sheer bad manners, and blushes in shame. With the years comes an appreciation of basic sexual etiquette, which for the man means - how shall I put this? - the sexual equivalent of holding the door open for the woman (oh, all right then, letting her come first); and, for the woman, not kicking up a fuss if he suggests you keep your stockings on. Or start wearing them in the first place. I gather that some men had a pretty hard time of it during the high-water mark of militant feminism, when the idea that all sex was rape was floating about; suggestions in the lingerie area could only be entertained in the privacy of one’s own head.

On warning my wife that I was writing about this, she not only told me to be discreet, but said: “I suppose you’re going to say, ‘It all depends with whom.’ ” (See unscientific sample above.) For while it is true that sexual ennui for married couples may set in after the first seven weeks - I mean years - a certain mutual effort can rekindle the spark. But the Global Survey suggests that a certain amount of over-40 sexual happiness comes as a result of ditching one partner at around that age and finding another one. Which is generally easier for men in the first place, hence the gender imbalance, and in the second may account for quite a bit of the satisfaction testified to by respondents.

I leave you with the words of one of my more forthcoming respondents: “I have three small children running round the place, and no locks on the doors. If I want to have sex with my wife we either have to leave the country or hire a babysitter. And not in the way you’re thinking. And don’t forget we’re not getting any younger. Thank God we don’t feel like doing it every day. We have sex about as often as we have lobster for dinner. And you know what? They’re both great.”

‘Sex is all luck and circumstance and the evidence rarely reliable’

What a fortunate society we are. We have the best sex, particularly if we’re over 40, because, unlike Japan and Taiwan, we have high levels of gender equality. I am not convinced by this finding, because a) people tend to fib wildly about sex, b) the study is funded by the drugs company Pfizer, c) it contradicts my own research and d) it contradicts itself.

People in long-term relationships have the best sex, says the study. But it also finds that people who are divorced and widowed have the best sex. What confusion. My own research indicates that hardly anyone of my generation is still having fabulous sex. People in long-term relationships often go off the boil sexually after a few years of heaven and a couple of children, and the divorced and separated often can’t find any sex at all, or can no longer be fagged to look for it.

Never trust these study findings, I say. There was another recently reporting that women’s average number of lovers had gone up in the last decade from two per lifetime to four. In my experience, we baby-boomer persons tend to have a much higher score than that. My friend Sheila (all names in this article have been changed to protect both the sexually promiscuous and the persons that don’t get any) had two lovers a day for some time, one am and one pm. Heaven knows how many she had in her lifetime. Chloe had three in one afternoon at university in the spring. Annabel had three in one month, then none for four years. I would put the average score at 10 to 20. All the pupils and teachers at the art school I attended in the 60s slept with nearly all the other pupils and teachers - except me, the odd one out, a late developer who remained a virgin until 21.

“Sex is an art,” said our painting teacher rather poncily. “It needs practice.” So some of us practised and practised. “How’s your boyfriend?” I asked my friend Janet. “He’s all right, but he’s only a practice one.” And don’t think it was just art schools, because my friend Andrew tells me that in Chalfont St Peter, with its privet hedges and net curtains, people were carrying on like rabbits. Same in Ruislip, where I grew up. Oppressed by the suburbs, some of us really went to town, having sex, sex, sex.

Then we grew up and things calmed down. Here we are, 50 to 80: the sex may be better quality, sometimes and with a bit of luck, but there is scarcely any of it. Andrew, just turned 60, defies the study’s verdict that long-term married persons are at it like knives. At home with the wife, things have rather fizzled out sexually, and should he lurch towards other women, they tend to run away because he’s bald and ageing. Gender equality does not help, we find, when one is older. The body can easily let one down. Things go wrong, bits are removed, or atrophy, or cease to function, or are less attractive. Partners prefer football, or leave, no replacements appear, and even if they do, one’s children may disapprove. They may find it distasteful and kick up a stink. Annabel’s daughter, aged 14, screamed for two and a half hours when her mummy’s new lover first attempted to stay the night. How is one to have a magical sex life under such circumstances?

And one person’s sex god is another person’s ghastly mistake. One may be good at it with one person and rubbish with the next. Some of us are only allowed one person. Then how do we know what standard they are, with nothing to compare? Andrea met a fellow who she thought absolutely hopeless at sex. He wore unattractive knickers, had no sense of humour yet thought himself irresistible. His next girlfriend thought him the world’s best lover. You can only tell your best friend about a bad lover’s knickers. You cannot tell a study.

Perhaps sex is unstudiable. It is all luck and circumstances and the evidence is rarely reliable. Some people brag (mostly men), some are modest, some have no shame, some have lots of shame (mostly women, because there still is no gender equality, whatever age you are). A woman who has 50 lovers is still, deep in nearly everyone’s heart, a slapper. A man with 50 lovers is just doing what a man has to do.

Every now and again a study tries to dredge up details about older persons having fun sex, but how difficult it is to find examples. No one wants to talk about it, and who can blame them? If you adore it and do it all the time, you’re a show-off. If you’re no good and haven’t done it since 1986, you’re a pitiful loser. I was once sent on a search for sexy persons over 70, and at last found a chap prepared to bang on about it. He had a glass pump with which he could enlarge and perk up his penis, which he longed to demonstrate, but I weedily packed up my notebook and ran away. His wife hid in the kitchen, cooking lunch.

Other than that, I can’t find anyone who will talk frankly about their sex/no-sex life. “A second bedroom is what everyone’s looking for at our age,” says Marjorie. “You can read with the light on late, make a little haven of your own. It’s bliss to get away from the snoring. Then it’s quite fun meeting the long-term partner in the morning.” You might even start fancying them again. You only have to do it once in 12 months, and that’s called having “an active sexual life”. It says so in the study. Is this what we practised for?