It seems that President Joe Biden and his first lady, Jill, 81 and 72 respectively, are pleased to share that they still enjoy a bit of #furiousjumping after 47 years of marriage. Good for them. The idea that older people can and do enjoy making love needs to be shouted from the hilltops IMHO. Although maybe not in Waitrose.
I imagine many will be shocked and, yes, disgusted. Such a particularly British attitude, I reckon: “Pull the curtains, turn out the lights and don’t tell the neighbours.” Having lived in Italy and Spain, I’ve seen many more public physical demonstrations of affection between older couples. Cuddles, kisses, holding hands, dancing cheek to cheek. What’s not to love?
But what I want to know is do Joe and Jill, like so many boomer married friends, now have separate bedrooms and is their highly excitable dog allowed in the room? Kick out the partner but keep the cat or dog? Yes, people snore and sweat and wake more often for the loo, but it seems to me that once you set up a separate domain, you miss out on more than you gain.
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Although now the kids have moved out, I guess there’s always the sofa or kitchen counter for that impromptu encounter …
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I was married for 32 years and despite three children, three pets, his relocation to Germany for work and terminal leukaemia diagnosis we always fancied each other, always enjoyed a bit of rumpy-pumpy, and never (shock horror) had affairs. I have a card Jerry sent me when he was undergoing chemo, expressing amazement that I still wanted to rip his clothes off even though he was bald and bloated by steroids. And he felt the same about me, harried and exhausted as I often was, in stained charity shop clothing and covered in dog hair.
Call it whatever you want — making love, having sex, f***ing — but I call it bonding. The glue that, alongside taking it in turns to make the tea in the morning, the shoulder massages and, yes, taking out those blessed bins, keeps a relationship together. Reassurance, acceptance, delight and play.
Sex with someone you trust is fun, an aspect that seems forgotten these days with all the pressure to perform and all the pharmaceuticals that impede, whether it’s the anxiety and depression medications that affect younger men’s libido or scheduling the Viagra or vaginal lubricant when you’re older. Orgasm can most certainly get rid of that headache and is certainly a much nicer way to get the heart rate up and break into a sweat that trudging off to the gym in the rain.
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Maybe, like so much, a good sex life is only something you really miss when it’s ripped away. I was 50 when my husband died and was thrown into complete chaos by the lack of a man to hold and comfort me in bed every night, to reassure me that I was loved. One recently bereaved friend said that he misses holding hands with his wife in bed; another misses the long warmth of another. Better than a hot-water bottle or electric blanket any day. Sex may signify penetration to so many but it can and does mean so much more.
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My recent relationship, which ended a couple of weeks ago, only served to confirm everything I’ve always believed but was beginning to suspect after a hiatus of eight years that I would never experience again. Sex at 74 can be just as delightful and life-affirming as it was at 50 and far more fun than on my own!
Don’t be alarmed! Yes, people in their eighties still have sex
by Rowan Pelling
Those of us who never subscribed to the concept of TMI are feeling grateful to Joe Biden this week for oversharing his sex life. It seems the US president is prone to telling people he still likes to get frisky with his wife, Jill.
A new book about the first lady — American Woman by Katie Rogers — reveals that Biden tells aides “good sex” is key to maintaining a long-lasting, happy marriage. A revelation that has reawoken the world to the shocking fact people can be sexually active well into their eighties and beyond.
I fondly remember a conversation I had with a gynaecologist in Cambridge who told me that his oldest patient was in her nineties. She regularly requested topical oestrogen for her energetic trysts with a “toyboy” in his eighties. Meanwhile, a friend’s uncle got himself into trouble in his residential care home for carrying on simultaneous affairs with two elderly women residents and was duly expelled.
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But then none of these kinds of stories came as big news to me because my late mother’s diaries record that when she was almost 50 and my dad was 77, her first thought on missing a period wasn’t “here comes the menopause”, but “maybe I am pregnant again”.
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That may sound like the mindset of a fantasist, but I can see her reasoning: she had notched up five children with a man 27 years her senior and had the last when she was in her forties. In fact, Mum was always so open about her physical attraction to my father, despite the age gap, that I tucked away the idea that physical intimacy was key to stable relationships from a young age.
It disturbed me when I visited friends’ houses in conservative Sevenoaks in the 1980s and discovered some of their parents slept in separate beds or — shock, horror — separate rooms. I couldn’t help noting those households felt far more buttoned-up than my chaotic, loving, pet and child-filled one.
Later, when I was a student at St Hugh’s, Oxford, I was intrigued to note that Iris Murdoch (then in her late sixties) — who was a great friend of the principal of my college, Rachel Trickett — was quite open about her enjoyment of sex with her husband, fellow-academic John Bayley.
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Indeed, I discovered they were famous for being late to lunch parties and telling their hosts that they were sorry but had felt an urgent need to stop off on the way for alfresco lovemaking. It seemed to me — and this idea has only been reinforced by later observations — that people who love one another and are interested in having an erotic life will somehow maintain some kind of sex life until death or infirmity prevents it.
Of course, you can see why the Biden story is being propelled into the headlines now, at a time when the president’s mental agility is questioned daily — doubtless wafted along by Biden’s PR honchos.
Nothing says “virile” and fully functioning quite like the boast that you’re still making love in your ninth decade. More than that, there’s good evidence to support the idea that regular sex promotes good health and happiness.
• My first weekend away with a new love — aged 74
Age UK’s website points out that sex can be viewed as a useful cardiovascular workout, akin to having a walk, and that intimate physical contact has been shown to lower blood pressure. A 2018 study of nearly 7,000 older people from academics at UCL and Anglia Ruskin University demonstrated a strong link between continuing an active sex life and enhanced wellbeing.
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None of which means the president and first lady are breaking their brass bedstead. As most of us age, sex becomes a slower and more civilised — though no less savoured — affair.
Quality becomes the benchmark, not quantity, and a degree of erotic strategy is required to ensure there’s not too much painful friction, or the terrifying crack of a bad back or hip. Good for supposedly “Sleepy Joe” for leading from the front and showing us all that you can stay in the game as long as your partner desires you.
