It’s nature’s ongoing irony—we are at our hottest when we’re young, but sex gets hotter when we’re “past our prime.” I guess I have something to look forward to!
This doesn’t seem to be just a rumor, either. People consistently rate their satisfaction with sex higher with age, and sex in retirement and nursing homes is extremely common!
Obviously, youth is the standard of biology because the purpose of our sex drive is reproduction. We can’t help but be attracted to healthy potential mates with a long viability before them. Our bodies are attracted automatically to young, fit, and beautiful bodies.
But it seems our souls and imaginations top mother nature. Sex gets even better with age. Here’s why.
The biological window comes with competition. Aging mellows our attitudes.
Young women are more wound up, and dudes are constantly sniffing out the presence of others. Jealousy and anxiety are common among young people dating. Many of us also jump through hoops to “improve” our looks.
We become much more relaxed about each other as we age, and about ourselves. That allows us to enjoy ourselves more.
We have more experience with sex, and also with life.
We can all figure out the mechanics, hot positions, and how to have—and give—explosive orgasms. But no matter how much we invest in great sex, we only have a bird’s eye view of sex and relationships. We don’t understand our own bodies and minds and how we relate and how we change over time, because we simply haven’t had that time. No amount of experience can replicate the experience of more years.
Time can give folks a fuller view of the machinations of the opposite sex, change their perspective on their own motivations, show us what we didn’t know we wanted, or what we thought we did but didn’t.
Sex is deeper with age, even it’s more casual, because our context is greater.
People are more likely to become polyamorous, or explore kinks and other aspects of their sexuality, when they are older.
While it is currently in vogue among young people to experiment and have multiple partners, this has not always been the case.
Even so, the odd college threeway or a flirtation with BDSM doesn’t necessarily lead to too much more right away. But those experiments are revisited in our 30s and 40s and we become more committed to exploring what moved us most later on.
Sex gets better after divorce.
This is not universally true—there are loads of studies showing that many in long-term monogamous and poly marriages have happy sex lives—so don’t go getting divorced with the hopes that sex will magically be better with whoever is next.
But for the many folks who stayed—for the kids, or for cultural or religious or social reasons—in a less than happy marriage, or in a marriage where their sexual needs weren’t being met, their divorce shows up in the statistics where sex gets better. They end up joining the numbers for happy sex with those who already are enjoying it.
Sex is less selfish.
When you and your lovers are older, they become real people and the motivation for sex is less about “taking” and “needing” and fulfilling biological compulsions.
Sex becomes more about giving pleasure than taking it. This is a kind of tender intimacy—indulging the kinks and fantasies of our partners because they are human beings, not because we have to possess them.
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