Dalliance, affair, love, intimacy: how should we approach sex as we age?

As sex lives ebb, the wider world can get more interesting. Robert Dessaix asks, does it really matter if we’re out of the sexual running, even in a society as sex-obsessed as ours? If the Roman poet Lucretius is to be believed, the whole universe is “a dance with Venus” – a sexual performance. “Love” just provides some of the footwork for amicable copulation. Or something to that effect. In his day, of course, with high child mortality and a ripe old age far from assured, reproduction must have been at the top of everyone’s list. Nowadays, in the west, average life expectancy is much longer than it was in Rome at the beginning of the first millennium – indeed, a quarter of the population where I live can hardly walk in a straight line without assistance, let alone cavort around Venus’s dancefloor – yet we are still fixated as a society on arousal and performance. What is the point of living on into old age in such a society? Why soldier on? Even if you could still dance, who would dance with you? Continue reading...
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