Pauline and I first met at a book event last year; a small gathering in a London arts club that marked the paperback release of the memoir I’d written, chronicling my young widowhood in my 30s. Pauline sat inconspicuously at the back of the darkened room and, when the Q&A was over, she quietly introduced herself, quickly drawing attention to the section she’d most connected with, the chapters where I explored self-pleasure and sex in the early months of my grief.
Younger people like me “got it more”, she told me, referring to her thirst for physical intimacy as a newly widowed 72-year-old. More often than not, people didn’t get it: “They don’t imagine that you’ve had a sex life.” But why, she asked? And what did that signify for others her age? A few days later, she sent me a Spotify link to an early 90s Bruce Springsteen song – Human Touch – describing how his melodious yearnings for “somethin’ to hold on to” summed up her recent frustrations as a more mature widow, a year after her husband’s death. The electrical wires were humming again, but she was increasingly feeling as if she had been put on mute by everyone around her.
“In the first few weeks, people recognised that I was bereaved, they came at me with all sorts of platitudes,” Pauline tells me, months after our first meeting, over the clatter and din in a central London café. “But I soon realised nobody recognised that what I was missing was the physicality of Peter as well as the psychic and emotional sharing that we had. The feeling of him, and his solid body, was what I craved.” We’re meeting again, in a noisy coffee shop, because Pauline feels like her sexuality, in her early 70s, is being silenced in ways she’s unhappy with. And if Pauline is feeling this way, then perhaps others are, too.
When Peter, her husband of 31 years, died of leiomyosarcoma – a rare type of soft tissue sarcoma – after a short illness in 2021, Pauline was left grieving for many intimate things. A dog-eared Sunday supplement left out for her on the kitchen table was one. But the physicality they shared was undeniably another – and not something she felt encouraged to share. “We enjoyed an active and happy sex life throughout our marriage, which was only cut short in the weeks prior to his decline,” she recalls. And yet when he died: “I couldn’t say, ‘Oh God, I wish I was in bed with him, entwined together, with his arms around me, kissing, and doing the things we used to do.’”
One friend recommended she take up gardening more frequently, wholly unaware that what Pauline was most in need of wasn’t a pair of secateurs. “Some of them seemed quite shocked when I said I wanted to buy a vibrator,” Pauline smiles as she talks. Masturbation soon began bookmarking Pauline’s days, morning and night; a welcome respite that briefly lassoed her out of her grief. “I looked forward to it. I found I could be quite noisy and I’d never been noisy before. I would liken it to that feeling of being transported somewhere.” She was owning her desires in a way she had never experienced before.
“There’s still something ‘funny’ about people having sex in older age, it’s like a joke,” neuropsychologist Alice Radosh says, on a Zoom call from her home in New York, as we discuss these intersecting lines in widowhood, and the ways in which they can convince older women like Pauline that their desires should be suppressed. “You’re up against a real brick wall in terms of making people feel comfortable,” she says, delving deeper into the taboo-ness, “because we’re not often given the message that we are able to talk about this, not only following the death of a partner, but just generally, as women and men age.”
Radosh speaks from experience. When her husband of 40 years died of multiple myeloma in 2013, she was perfectly capable of handling the bills and repairs, but what she really struggled with was the loss of sexual intimacy after decades of physicality with her longterm partner. To add insult to injury, the literature she sought for guidance totally missed the mark. One study suggested she get a dog. Another, to hug her grandchild. But the one that pushed her over the line was the sage advice that she should visit her hairdresser. “Anyone who thinks Bart was anything like my hairdresser really doesn’t know what he was like in bed,” she laughs.
In this void of research, Radosh did what any researcher in her predicament would: she decided to co-author her own study in 2016. Surveying more than 100 older women (55 years and above), her findings showed that she wasn’t alone in what she called her “sexual bereavement”. Not only did the majority say they’d definitely miss sex if their partner died, an equal number revealed they’d want to talk about it when the time came. And yet, in spite of this, 57% of participants admitted it would not occur to them to initiate a discussion with a widowed friend. “Before I did my survey, I spoke to friends and a number of them said, ‘Well that doesn’t matter any more.’ The feeling was that that’s in the past.” What Radosh’s survey proved beyond all possible doubt was that this was a myth and a damaging one at that: sex wasn’t a past tense activity – and it did matter.
“We had such a spicy and satisfying relationship that I thought, why is this a secret?” Joan Price, an author and advocate for ageless sexuality, says of her and her late husband’s marriage, on a Zoom call from California, echoing Radosh’s findings. “I never heard that people at our age could be so much in love and have so much exhilarating sex. Why was this under the covers?”
Determined to shake up this ageist narrative, Price started writing about senior sex at the age of 61. Head to her Twitter and she’ll introduce herself to you with an equally spicy: “Glad to meet you. I’m Joan Price, and I talk out loud about senior sex.”
She’s been doing it for more than 18 years now: writing books (The Ultimate Guide to Sex After 50 and Naked at Our Age are just two), reviewing sex toys and giving webinars with the help of gynaecological props, such as the 3D clitoris she’s holding in front of her webcam right now. She uses this silicone aid to help her illustrate the vast intricacies of the female anatomy to seniors who come to her seeking advice. If knowledge is power, then there are many women out there who remain disenfranchised through a lack of basic anatomical understanding of how their own bodies work. Price is on a mission to change that.
When her husband died in 2008, Price was faced with yet another taboo that no one was talking about: sex after grief. “Men and women are being told they’re ‘doing grief wrong’ if they try to come back to partnered sex too soon,” she says. “We don’t stop being a sexual being when we lose someone. It may take a break. The break may be days, years or decades – but we can always come back to it when we’re ready. And dammit, people need to stop telling us we shouldn’t.”
Price’s tireless advocacy doesn’t come without its trolls and dismissals. “When I was starting out, I got a lot of what I call ‘the ick factor’,” she says. Which goes something along the lines of: “Ewww! Seniors having sex? Disgusting!” It’s raw and unpleasant – and she still gets this kind of feedback. Just recently, for instance, a journalist told her that despite respecting her work, he couldn’t imagine his own mother having sex at her age. To which she replied, “At what age do you plan to retire your genitals?”
Why do we still treat seniors as if they’re some kind of alien species, asks Price: “We’re expected to be under a rock about our sexuality. We’re expected to keep it quiet if we’re feeling it. I say no. No, we don’t have to be done with it.” Like both Radosh and Price across the pond, Pauline isn’t done with it either. She’s having sex again. Not only that, it’s the best she’s ever had. Granted, it hasn’t always been “plain sailing” (her varicose veins, for instance, were initially “an area of embarrassment to be negotiated”), but she talks openly with her new partner and, as a result, the experience has turned out to be a life-affirming one.
The clock is ticking, she says – and she wants to live in the moment. “I never thought anyone would look at me without my clothes on again,” Pauline says – but she was wrong. “I’m on the crest of a wave and it’s no holds barred. I’ve always been very inhibited, but now I feel I can do anything I want…” she looks up at me with a smile. “I can even walk around naked if I want.”
