Why aren’t middle-aged women having better sex? That is the question that the French sex coach Marie Morice wants to answer. They should, she feels, be having great sex. “Women in their forties and fifties are at the peak of their sexuality,” she says. Could it be that they are worn down by decades of marriage? No longer find their husbands attractive? Nervous after divorce? Either way, she is on a mission to help them to find sexual fulfilment.
Morice, who is 48 and has lived in London for 30 years, trained first as a life coach and then as a sex coach. Her clients are mainly divorced midlife women.
“A sex coach is like a sports coach, really,” she says. “I help my clients explore their goals around their sex life, and then we look forward and find solutions to attain them.”
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She split from her husband six years ago, after 17 years of marriage (“We married young, I was not very experienced”) and she believes that her burgeoning sex drive was a factor. “Around my 40th birthday, I stopped taking the pill, and was much more conscious of my libido shifting, changing — in a good way. And sometimes my sexual needs were a lot higher and different to what we had both been used to.”
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She sees this often with her clients too. “As their bodies are changing, that shift from reproductive sex to recreational sex works really well for some couples but not for others,” she says. When considering ending her marriage, she was juggling a successful 25-year business career, as well as raising two children, who are now teenagers. She remembers thinking, “I wish I had someone to talk to about these very turbulent years I’m going through and how to navigate them.”
Now she is that person. Some of her clients are married and want to enhance their sex lives, but the majority are not. “They’re either going through divorce or separation or have been through it, and they want to reconnect with their sexual selves.”
Her £150 hour-long sessions are usually online, one-to-one, although a few clients prefer meeting in person. Most, Morice says, find between four to six meetings to be “transformative”.
“In this particular stage of our lives, physiologically, women are able to have even deeper orgasms and pleasure,” she says. Here’s what she advises.
Discover what’s holding you back — and do something about it
A lot of women, newly single in midlife, feel trepidation, Morice says. “There are pensées limitantes (limiting beliefs) we’ve built up over time, especially if the marriage has been complicated and dysfunctional, where you have that little voice in your head telling you, ‘I’m not entitled to pleasure.’
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“Often, these women are not even sure what their own sexual needs are.You can re-establish the confidence that you can have your own desires and they might be different to those your partner had.” It’s why one question she asks clients is, “Are you willing to commit to your sexual success, do you agree to allow yourself your sexual pleasure?”
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Morice also helps clients to embrace the physical challenges of the menopause. Dropping levels of hormones might lead to pain during penetrative sex, she says. “I recommend localised oestrogen from your doctor.”
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Many women just out of a long relationship want to have fun, no-strings attached sex, and to feel desired, Morice says. She went through a phase of meeting younger men and says she loved it, even if the sex wasn’t always very good. “I felt empowered, I felt younger — and enjoyed those amazing younger bodies, I’m not going to lie.”
But Morice is also careful to warn her clients that when you’re intimate with someone new after years of being with the same person, it can be emotionally intense and confusing. “I talked to one of my clients today — she was feeling a lot of guilt about having sex with someone new, even though she’s enjoying herself.” She adds: “It’s a shock. You can think, I’m in love with that person, when what you’re actually experiencing is deep intimacy and connection around sexual chemistry.”
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It happened to her, she says. “I did say ‘I love you’ very quickly — I thought, ‘I’m having great sex, therefore I must be in love with this person.’ Actually, I wasn’t in love with him.” He all but ran out of the bedroom, she adds, but that’s OK. “I know now that we had a mismatch of expectations.”
Stand in front of a mirror naked
Post-divorce, many of her clients confess to a lack of confidence. “It’s common for women to tell me ‘I hate my body — my partner’s been telling me he doesn’t want to have sex with me because I’m no longer what I used to be,” she says. “But to be sexual you need to be comfortable in your own skin.”
For homework, Morice instructs her clients to take some time to look at their bodies uncritically. “I tell them to notice the parts of their body they actually like,” she says. “Then I ask them to look at themselves naked, and if they’re comfortable, explore — what does your vagina, vulva, clitoris look like? This is about reconnecting with yourself as a sexual being.
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“I find a lot of women don’t own sex toys,” she says. “As a coach, I give them permission to explore, and also offer recommendations. Ultimately, a sex life that brings you pleasure comes through self-pleasure.”
What turns you on? And, importantly, what turns you off?
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Morice asks her clients to consider their “brakes” and “accelerators”: what turns them on and off. “What are your fantasies, what is it you don’t like and like?” She has a list of 400 sexual preferences she shares with clients to inspire them. “It can be about wanting to be touched and cuddled,” she says. It can also be about leather, blindfolds, dressing up, and more.
“It sounds a lot,” she says. “But our needs, our likes, our dislikes are practical. Whether it be tickling, ice cubes, or role play, clients rank whether something is a ‘green/ yes please’, or a ‘perhaps’, or an ‘absolute no-go’. This serves as a map of what they might want to explore.”
Have a sexual wish list — and don’t keep it to yourself
Once women have a clear idea of their needs and dislikes, Morice guides them in how to convey this to a potential partner. Recently, she and a client used roleplay to rehearse what the woman wanted to tell her partner before having sex.
“Rehearsing a script helps you to voice your needs,” she says. “But it also helps with consent, because you’re saying, ‘Yes, I’m consenting to having a sexual relationship with you — and by the way, these are the terms.’ She adds: “My client reported that she actually had an amazing orgasm.”
