You know you have a fortysomething body when . . .
You select restaurants because they’re quiet.
Sleep no longer means just flopping into bed. You have elaborate rituals involving medication, eyeshades, earplugs and a particular type and quantity of pillows.
When reading a document online, you increase its magnification to at least 200 percent.
You’ve bought a scale with a bigger digital display so you won’t have to weigh yourself wearing glasses.
You have gained and lost the same ten pounds so many times you feel a certain affection for them.
6
how to have sex
“DO YOU HAVE A LOVER?” Charlie asks, as we cross the Place de la République.
Charlie is a friend from high school who’s visiting Paris with his wife and son. We’re on a walk, alone, near my house. He’s just like he was when I first met him: handsome, whip smart and magnetic. I was madly in love with him at fifteen, but so were a lot of people. He married Lauren, his college girlfriend, who now has a big job in medical research. Charlie works part-time and looks after their son.
His question takes me by surprise. We’ve never discussed this topic before, and it’s outside my skill set. Simon and I don’t swing or have an open marriage. Our main objective is to be asleep by eleven p.m.
“No, I don’t have a lover,” I reply, trying not to seem flustered. “Do you?”
“Yes, Lauren and I both do,” he says, grinning at me.
“How often do you see your . . . special friend?”
“About once every three weeks,” he says. “For a while Lauren had a lover and I didn’t. And it was awful. And I just had to think, ‘I will find someone and this will get better.’ And it did.”
He says it’s exciting to see that your partner is attractive to other people. And there’s the energizing swoon of having a crush. “You don’t have to go all the way with someone. Sometimes it’s just the electric charge of their hand touching yours.” Meanwhile, back at home, “Your relationship stays dynamic. I don’t want to be stuck in a rut.”
Charlie seems to relish my shock at hearing all this. He’s always been the guy with the tantalizing new idea. When we were fifteen, I felt similarly blown away when he introduced me to reggae music. I wonder whether he’s bringing up the topic because he wants to cheat on his lover with me. All these years later, there’s still the same fizzy energy between us. Talking to him brings back a part of myself that I’d forgotten existed. He’s a madeleine of my teenage mind.
I tell him about my one puny extramarital adventure: Years ago, I kissed a man I met at a friend’s wedding. I was drunk and happy, and we were all on a farm. It didn’t go any further than that, and afterward, I felt that I’d transgressed. Monogamy is a strange idea, but I’ve always assumed that it is nevertheless an important one.
Charlie isn’t impressed. “Flirting, and making out with people at weddings, that ought to be just permitted,” he says. At a rural wedding he went to with his wife, they swapped with another couple and had sex side by side in a cabin. “What I really want now is for us to share a lover,” he says.
He makes all this seem so normal, I suddenly feel like the only idiot who doesn’t have an open marriage. I’m at 1.0 for infidelity; he’s at 8.0.
Charlie urges me to “take a lover,” and he warns me that one won’t be enough. “The important thing is to do it at least three or four times. Because the first couple of times you’re so self-conscious, you can’t really relax and enjoy it.” Then he encourages me to do it soon. At my age, he says, “You’re still cute, but you’re not sure how much longer it’s going to last.”
* * *
—
Are these my last viable years, before I fall into the sexual abyss?
I’m getting that message from others, too. “Do you feel like you have five years left before no one wants to sleep with you anymore?” a writer in his late thirties asks me. A Canadian friend who’s about my age tells me that, as he rounded a corner recently, he came face-to-face with a “fifty-year-old woman” who suddenly grabbed his crotch and kissed him on the lips. To emphasize how unwelcome the encounter was, my friend keeps repeating, “She was fifty!” There’s practically no group of people you’re allowed to mock on television anymore. The exception is older women: you can say how repulsive it would be to see them naked.
There are exceptions. A friend who’s a social activist tells me, encouragingly, about an “incredibly hot” sixty-year-old woman whom he met at a wedding.
“She was a Bond girl,” he explains.
“You mean she looked like she could have been a Bond girl?” I ask.
“No,” he says, “she was literally in a James Bond movie when she was younger.”
American women in their forties still have sex on a fairly regular basis. But according to national statistics, a third of women in their fifties haven’t had sex in the past year. And nearly half of women in their sixties haven’t. The seventies are practically celibate. The findings for British women are similarly grim. Men claim to fare much better at all ages.
I usually avoid even saying the word “menopause,” out of an unscientific fear that, by uttering the word, I’ll trigger it. (After all, just looking at a baby can trigger the release of breast milk.) But I summon the courage to do a Google search, and learn that menopause typically begins around age fifty-one, bringing symptoms like vaginal dryness, loss of breast fullness and my personal favorite, “vaginal atrophy,” in which the birth canal loses elasticity. All this happens just as sexual activity really starts to drop off. Though the symptoms and the sexlessness all sound very unpleasant, I have to admit that there’s an evolutionary logic: What good is a sex drive if you can no longer reproduce? Perhaps Charlie was right to warn me that I’m approaching my sexual sell-by date.
* * *
—
And yet, France has a slightly different sexual narrative for women.
Over the years, I’d been surprised by the French couples in their sixties perusing lingerie racks together, and the plum movie roles for women d’un certain âge. My Australian neighbor marvels that, every week after her Pilates class, a fit woman in her seventies changes into lacy ensembles.
These norms aren’t confined to a few well-maintained ladies in Paris. National sex statistics tell a similar story. Among French women in their fifties, just 15 percent haven’t had sex in the last year (compared to 33 percent in America). Among those in their sixties, just 27 percent haven’t (versus 50 percent in the US).
In France, too, women have less sex, on average, as they get older. But it’s a gentle decline, not an abyss. Most French women remain sexually active well into their sixties, and possibly beyond.
To be sure, youthful beauty is celebrated here. There are taut twenty-two-year-olds in many advertisements. A Parisian professor in her sixties warns me, over soupe à l’oignon, that after age fifty “women in France are decapitated.” The difference is that people who aren’t young and gorgeous generally expect to have sex, too. It’s just something that most healthy adults do on a regular basis throughout their lives.
When I arrive at the fiftieth birthday party of a Parisian friend—a scientist and mother of three—several dozen people are in her living room drinking red wine, eating Moroccan food, flirting and dancing to the Village People. (My generation’s nostalgia music is similar in America and France.)
“Not bad for fifty!” I remark to one of her friends. When he looks confused, I realize that I’ve misread the dance party. It’s not a performance of youth. It’s a straightforward, exuberant celebration.
Nor are such moments meant to be a last hurrah. The fifties and beyond can be sexy decades here. Through a colleague, I meet Hélène, a married sixty-eight-year-old French journalist and grandmother. Hélène isn’t a Bond girl, but she’s
fit and well put together in a sweater, knee-high boots and a leather pencil skirt. She emits an attractive, kinetic energy, and she knows it.
“There are thirty-year-old women who don’t radiate, and there are older people who radiate. I’m an older one who radiates,” she tells me, smiling warmly. “I love life very much, very much. Enormously. So I think it’s that that comes through. A little light in the eyes, a desire to wake up in the morning.”
She says radiating like this is an active choice. Early on in her life, “I decided one thing: that I will be belle dans mon âge—beautiful within my age. I’m not going to resort to artifice or face-lifts and all that. No face-lift. But I’ll be elegant, and wear makeup, and please myself.” She repeats this last part for emphasis: “I will please myself.”
Hélène pleases herself by having brief, secret affairs. She says her fifties were a sexual heyday. “I’ve done things that were totally crazy. I mean, meeting a man on the street, who I like, and going to a hotel with him. I did that. I’m still capable of doing that.”
Hélène is very discreet about these affairs. Her husband is “someone for whom I have a lot of respect, whom I love. I don’t want him to know about my naughtiness.” One of her lovers liked her to wear garter belts. So after an assignation with him, she would stop at her parking garage and change back into regular stockings in her car.
She smiles at the memory of her most recent adventure, two years ago. In her mind, she’s swooning. “It was with a very handsome man, younger than me. We met, we liked each other, I went to a hotel with him. The relationship lasted two months, I think. And then I ended it.”
Hélène is a well-off Parisian with a country house and a university degree. She can afford hotel rooms. But she’s following a cultural script that other older French women describe, too.
Indeed, the same professor who told me that French women are “decapitated” at fifty also says that, over the years, she’s had a series of brief, discreet affairs.
She, too, is married and a grandmother. She’s very committed to both roles. However, “there’s a time for work, there’s a time for your family and then there is time for yourself,” she explains. With a lover, “You will feel loved and appreciated as yourself, not as the ‘wife of,’ or the ‘mother of,’ the professional. You will be loved as yourself, just you, disconnected, just you, the inner core.”
Being mindful of what’s happening is part of the pleasure. (Another part, I suspect, is shocking an American writer with your stories.)
In the French telling, these private experiences also pay dividends in the rest of your life. The professor says that “in your work, you will do it better because you feel so good. You will reverberate when you talk to your children and your husband, because you will feel so good.”
She adds that she doesn’t want to be remembered as a dutiful mother and wife. “Come on, how boring. No! It’s very, very important that when you die in the end, you will think, ‘I had a great time in my life. I had all these moments that were stolen, that were just for myself.’”
* * *
—
Which version of sexuality is the real one, the Anglo-Saxon declinist narrative or the French idea that we can stay sexy—and sexually active—much longer? I decide to study the research. Sitting in a café in my neighborhood—where all the servers call me “madame”—I read an Australian academic paper titled “Sex and the menopausal woman: A critical review and analysis.” (I do my best to keep the title hidden.)
The paper makes a strong case for the French approach, explaining that women’s sex drives don’t inevitably decline with age, and that “some women report improved sexual desire and functioning at midlife and beyond.” Yes, falling estrogen levels can cause problems like vaginal dryness and the infamous “atrophy.” But these are symptoms of sexual functioning, not of sexual desire. They mean that a woman now needs lubricant for intercourse in the same way that, if her eyesight declined, she would need glasses. No one would argue that she’d lost the desire to see.
I soon realize that this isn’t just the view of a few Australian feminists. A paper led by a researcher from America’s National Institutes of Health concludes that “menopausal status, at least in the early stages, is only minimally associated with sexual practices and functioning.”
Some women do lose their sex drives in midlife. But cultural narratives play an important role, too. Another paper, in the Journal of Aging Studies, notes that “ageism and sexism, which together promote a view of older women as undesirable or inappropriate sexual partners (even among women themselves), lie at the heart of these patterns.”
In other words, if the people around you insist that you’re no longer sexy after a certain age, or that you’re going to fall into a sexual abyss in your fifties, this is more likely to actually happen. Or as the writer Susan Sontag put it, “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination.”
* * *
—
I forgive my friend Charlie for absorbing some of America’s cultural norms. I think he was mostly trying to flirt with me and have fun. And I realize that—in the absence of much professional status—he has invested in building his sexual status. He’s highly skilled at making women swoon.
“He’s a courtesan,” says Simon, who meets and likes him. “In Holland he’d be considered completely normal.”
Anyway, Charlie’s view of my sex appeal hasn’t changed much so far. As we walk across northern Paris, I wonder if he’s going to suggest that we pop into one of the many small hotels we pass. I’m not sure what I’ll say if he does. But he doesn’t. He wants an open marriage, but not an open marriage with me. In fact, I realize that our dynamic hasn’t changed at all in thirty years. I still adore him, and he still adores making me swoon. There’s still understanding, affection and frisson between us. And that’s still the end of it. It will probably be like that thirty years from now, too, when we’re hobbling across some other city together, discussing another big idea that I’m late to. I also realize that I’m okay with that. When I was younger, I needed my relationships to be resolved and defined. Now I see that some people occupy an in-between place, and my world is richer for it. I’m lucky to have Charlie in my life exactly as he is.
You know you have a fortysomething sex life when . . .
You no longer care (or remember) how many people you’ve slept with.
You realize that you shouldn’t marry the person with whom you had the best sex of your life.
The thought of any adult you know having sex, even your own parents and grandparents, no longer makes you squeamish.
You have a back catalog of fantasies that you can call up at will.
You sometimes fantasize about your own partner.
You can’t imagine exposing your naked body to anyone else.
7
how to plan a ménage à trois
I SAID I’VE ONLY HAD one extramarital adventure. That was true. But I had a marital one, too. It began on the eve of my husband’s fortieth birthday, when I would soon turn forty myself.
The question on his birthday is always, what do you get for the man who has nothing? Simon isn’t a shopper. Standing in front of his closet, he once declared that he has enough pants to last the rest of his life. When I inquired about his plans for a drawer containing dozens of stray socks, he said, “My heirs will sort it out.”
For his fortieth birthday, I decide to buy him a vintage watch. It will declare to the world that—despite his tattered sweaters—he’s an employed adult.
It’s an expensive, nonreturnable gift, so I mention my plan to him one night before bed. (This is the main time that we talk.) He balks, and says that what he really wants for his birthday isn’t a good, it’s a service: a threesome with me and another woman.
I’m not exactly shocked by this request. He’d floated the idea of a t
hreesome before (though never as a gift). And although I’d never done it, going to bed with two women is a standard-issue male fantasy, and the plot of most heterosexual pornography.
Simon’s request is spontaneous, but serious. And just as spontaneously, I say yes. As a journalist, I have trouble resisting a deadline. (He’ll turn forty in about six weeks.) I also like the idea of a gesture to show that I’m not slipping quietly into middle age. Plus, I’m pretty sure that Simon would lose the watch, or submerge it in the bathtub. (His exact words are “I’d lose it, and break it.”)
And frankly, I’m procrastinating. I need a distraction from the parenting book that I’ve been struggling to finish but can’t figure out how to write.
We agree on the threesome in principle. But the idea is so exotic that for a few weeks it just sits there. Occasionally, I mention the name of a female friend.
“Would she be acceptable?” I ask Simon.
“Absolutely,” he says each time. It turns out that practically every woman we know—all of my female friends and the wives of practically all of his male friends—would potentially make the cut, including the pregnant ones. Simon doesn’t want to spoil his chances by being picky.
That hardly matters, because at first I’m too embarrassed to raise the topic with anyone we know. And though I’m a novice, I’m pretty sure that recruiting a friend would be a mistake. There’s the enormous potential for awkwardness on the day itself, and long afterward. And I don’t want someone creating a wedge in our cozy twosome. I’m envisioning this as a one-off.
Anyway, I wouldn’t know which girlfriend to ask. Straight women don’t often discuss their same-sex fantasies with each other. I’m not sure who’d be tempted by the idea and who’d be appalled.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 5
