Older adults are often passed over in conversations about intimacy. But they may be having more fun than everyone else.
Intimacy among older adults is getting more time in the spotlight, with shows like Grace and Frankie (Credit: Netflix)
A closer look at senior intimacy
Increasing public interest in senior dating and sexuality is a new phenomenon.
When Dr Stacy Lindau started as a medical student in the mid-1990s in Rhode Island, US, she was taught to ask her older patients about their sexual histories – but she noticed her teachers weren’t doing that themselves. Nevertheless, she did ask – and the questions about her patients’ past experiences elicited a “twinkle in their eye”, she says. “They came to life and had a story to tell.”
If simply asking older patients about their intimate lives had this positive effect, it certainly seemed like an area worth studying to figure out how to address their overall wellness. But Lindau noticed that while studies had been conducted to focus on the sexual behaviours of younger adults, none centred on those 60 and up. The studies on younger people received funding because their cohort was most affected by HIV/AIDS, suggests Lindau, a popular and crucial research subject at that time. However, as effective treatments for HIV/AIDs extended the lives of those living with the virus, research on the subject shifted to encompass older people. Meanwhile, the “successful marketing of erectile dysfunction drugs” added another influence that “really opened the door” for studying sexuality among older adults, says Lindau.
This helped Lindau get funding for the study she and colleagues conducted, published in 2008. Featuring more than 3,000 US adults aged 57 to 85, Lindau’s study revealed that more than half of people between 65 and 74 years old had had sex at least once in the previous year, but that older adults weren’t particularly likely to discuss their sex lives with physicians. The study also served as a template that paved the way for similar longitudinal studies on intimacy among older adults in both the UK and Ireland.
Meanwhile, in her clinical work, Lindau continued to discuss the sex and dating lives of people in their 60s and 70s. Along with learning about her older patients’ continued interest in maintaining active sex lives, she also learned that dating apps had “become more mainstream” among older people, allowing them to put themselves out there in a way that wasn’t quite available in the past.
“Another theme I heard is what a gift it is to age,” says Lindau. Her patients, many of whom had survived cancer or other illnesses, were learning how to embrace the aging process in part by adapting their sex and dating lives to their current realities, essentially turning age-related obstacles into creative learning experiences.
This attitude is reflected in the aforementioned studies focused on intimacy among people in their 60s and older, and in Kleinplatz’s research on people in that age group from all over the world. “We learned that ‘great lovers’ are made, not born,” says Kleinplatz. “Typically, the peak sexual experiences began in midlife and beyond.”
In other words, these researchers showed the path to sexual fulfilment was one that almost necessarily took time. And that “sexual wisdom” Forbes discussed in her research doesn’t just make intimacy possible at older ages – it often makes it better.
“Typically, the peak sexual experiences began in midlife and beyond" – Dr Peggy Kleinplatz (Credit: Getty Images)