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The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heartsick.
The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Allman.
I'm Cheryl Strayed.
This is Dear Sugars.
Share some little sweet days with me.
I check my mailbox every day.
Oh, and the sugar you send my way, Hi Steve.
Hi, Cheryl.
So today we're doing one of those episodes like so many of our episodes that really rose out of our inbox.
I was going through letters in preparation for this season and I came upon really a whole trove of messages from people in their 50s 60s, 70s and beyond who were asking us about sex.
That's right.
I mean, this is the thing.
We have a culture that neuters anybody who's above 50.
We certainly don't discuss and we don't show images of people of that age having an erotic life, having an erotic imagination.
And when you suggested the show, I thought about two books that I'd read within the last year, both of which I think are so brilliant at bringing out of the shadows the reality that we're going to have a body, our whole lives and therefore desires and an erotic life.
And the first one was this novel, Our Souls at Night, by the author Kent Harrefin.
I love this book.
It's a very short novel that's about a widow and a widower who decide that they want to have a romance.
It's not a heavily, deeply sexual romance, but it is... deeply intimate.
And there's an absolutely spellbinding scene of them having sex.
I want to just read a little passage because I think it just captures kind of how restrained and beautiful the novel is.
So Addie, the female character, says to Louis, the man who she's seen around town they live in a small town.
She says, well, I'm just going to say it.
I'm listening, Louis said.
I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.
It's very early in the book.
And you realize, oh my gracious, this is going to be an entire novel that is about two older people.
And it's really very much about their intimate life.
The other book that I thought about was Scary Old Sex.
It's a book of stories actually by this writer, Arlene Heyman.
And she writes very graphically about what it is like to get it on in your 70s and 80s.
And her language is just beautiful.
She's totally unflinching.
Here's a little bit of what she has to say.
Aged flesh is so fertile, she writes, grows excrescences papules papillomas, skin tags, moles that have to be checked yearly.
Yet the hair thins out, underarm and pubic, as if the soil had changed to one that no longer supports the verdant shrubbery but instead nourishes an astonishing variety of wild mushrooms.
Beautiful, if you have an eye.
There he was, every wrinkle exposed as if he were in a Lucian Freud painting.
He had loose flesh on his chest, small sagging breasts beneath his nipples and little pink outgrowths here and there.
His pubic hair was colorless and sparse.
What I love about both of these books is that they look directly at the body as it ages, without neutering it.
I love what you just said, looking at the body that has been made invisible by our culture.
That's what we're going to do today.
We're going to talk to a wonderful guest who has some expertise in giving counsel to people over the age of 50 who still want to have that sensual life or that sex life, or don't.
People who are grappling.
That was one of the things I loved about finding these you know, letters from this age group about this topic is I realized with some disappointment and also some pleasure that it never stops being interesting.
It never stops being fraught.
Right.
We have, you know, 20 and 30 and 40 somethings agonizing about sex.
And we have 50 and 60 and 70 and 80 somethings agonizing about sex.
Right.
Dear Sugars, I'm female and 68.
Although I have appreciated the magic of Viagra in the past, I now wish it had never been invented.
My 72-year-old boyfriend and I have the.
He wants it, she doesn't issue in our relationship and we have, over the four years we've been together.
He needs Viagra to have sex, and I don't have any big desire for sex anymore.
I've been madly in love a number of times in my life and I've enjoyed wonderful lovemaking and had more than my fair share of romance.
Thanks to one past boyfriend, I know a lot about the sex toys people use, including the vibrator, which I still have and which gives me more pleasure than having sex.
That's the way it is for me now.
I've had enough lovemaking.
I don't desire more.
I don't desire anything new or different.
My boyfriend is wonderful in so many ways.
He's nice looking, he shares his feelings, he's generous and he dotes on me.
He's embraced all my friends and activities.
He can fix or build anything.
He's financially stable, a sharp dresser and in good enough health.
He has wonderful manners and he's up for adventures and traveling.
In other words, he's an ideal companion.
We don't live together, although he'd like to.
His dominant love language is physical touch and mine is quality time.
With this sex elephant in the room always hanging over my head, I've become less open and sharing with him and I've purposely created more distance.
I know he's hurt and angry and I think there's a lot of passive aggressive behavior by both of us.
Hmm.
Hmm.
First, you're a terrific writer and it's almost painful to read this because you're very succinct about the problem here.
His dominant love language is physical touch and mine is quality time.
I mean, the gentleman you describe is an ideal companion and every box for you is checked.
The problem is there's what sounds like a big box for him that you just don't want to check.
And it really is a...
It's not that you don't have an erotic life.
You do have an erotic life, but you're more interested in being sexual with a vibrator than with his body.
And I think you're clear-eyed about that.
But I think you also have to recognize how frustrating that must be For your partner.
It's tough because this is not a letter where we can say, oh well, you can just figure this out.
Just go to a sex therapist.
It sounds like you really are closed for certain kinds of business that he's very much interested in.
So then the question becomes well, what can we do for one another that doesn't cause us to withdraw our intimacy, to withhold our intimacy?
Mm-hmm.
Frustrated, I think that you have more of a love problem than a sex problem, actually.
Yeah.
My sense is honestly, that you want to be friends with this man, that you are better friends with this man than lovers.
There are just so many clues in your letter.
There are the things that you say, and then there are the things you don't say.
And one thing that you don't say is...
I don't want to lose this relationship and I'm agonizing because I fear that I will, that he is going to be happier with another woman.
You're actually suggesting to him he might be happier with another woman.
Right.
And you know, I think, that if you really felt like you wanted to keep him as your boyfriend, that you would be asking us how do we find the middle ground here?
And I don't really see you asking us that.
Yeah.
I see you saying, how do I communicate with him that I'm not interested in sex?
And maybe you don't want to with anyone.
And maybe you don't want to with this person.
You haven't said this in the letter.
But what you have made clear is that you are not sexually attracted to him.
You were only briefly.
And the description of all of his, the qualities you see in him that you love.
Is is such a lovely list of somebody you love deeply as a friend.
And so maybe the solution to this is to stop trying to pretend that you want to be someone you aren't with this man, and that is his lover.
I completely agree.
And my sense Cheryl, is that the fear you are carrying around frustrated is if I say I just want to be friends with him and close off the possibility of erotic involvement.
All of that good stuff that I get from him.
He can build and fix anything.
He's embraced my friends and activities.
He's a sharp dresser.
All the quality time that you want to have with him will be withheld.
Yeah.
I also think that there is this possibility of romantic celibacy, and maybe more so in this age group than any other.
But we know from our inbox that, frankly, couples of all ages have this.
Couples who have just had kids and they go through a period of a sexless or nearly sexless era of their relationship, and yet they still keep their romance alive.
And so if it is true that you really want to continue to have a romantic relationship with him.
I do think that, in fairness to him, you need to make it very clear that you want a romantic celibacy.
And that is that you are exclusive with one another and you are to the world boyfriend and girlfriend, but you don't have sex.
And maybe he'll agree to that and maybe he won't.
But I do think it's just like at any age.
Any advice we've ever given anyone is that you have to be honest about what you want and what you need and what your limitations are, so that the other person in that relationship can make informed decisions about him or herself.
The Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team.
We'll see you next time.
So we're back discussing a letter from Frustrated and we're going to actually call our guest now in hopes that she can offer more insight into this letter.
We're going to call Dr. Pepper Schwartz.
She joins us today from Seattle.
She's a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and has written more than 25 books on love and sexuality.
She currently writes a love and relationships column for AARP and is the on-air expert for Lifetime TV's Married at First Sight.
Let's give her a call.
Hello?
Hi, is this Dr. Schwartz?
It is.
This is Cheryl Strayed.
Hi, Cheryl.
I'm here with Steve Allman, my co-host on the podcast.
Hi, Pepper.
Hi, Steve.
I love your name, Pepper.
I want my name to be Pepper.
Hi.
It's funny.
Little known fact.
In my first book, which is a novel called Torch, one of the characters is named Pepper.
She's an ex-nun who fell in love with somebody and stopped being a nun.
And her name is Pepper Jones Kaczynski.
So I just feel like I'm meeting, you know, an old character from one of my books.
Well, I love the fact that you used my name, but I would never have been a nun.
Nice to know.
Good.
That's good.
That's good.
So Pepper, we've been discussing a letter from a woman who has a great boyfriend but she doesn't want to have sex with him.
And we're going to ask you for your insight into this next letter, which comes from a different perspective.
Steve, will you read the letter?
I will, dear sugars.
I listened with intense curiosity to your two episodes on sexless or sex starved relationships, because i too have found my once frequent rich, varied and spiritually fulfilling sex life at a total and complete standstill.
After four or five decent years of sex with my second wife, things slowed down.
At first it was a bit less sex that morphed imperceptibly to appointment sex that then transition to almost nada, to really and truly nada.
That sound you hear is the sound of grinding teeth and twisted emotion, among other things in the wreckage of the slow motion pileup.
I believe my situation must be quite common because it has a biological twist, making things even more complex.
My wife, who just turned 60, is six years older than me and suffers from postmenopausal atrophic vaginitis, and her libido has flatlined, most likely in great part because of this condition, although that causality is not entirely clear.
To say the least, my libido has not declined, or if it has declined, it has done so at a much slower rate than hers.
During the appointment sex phase of our relationship, she claimed she enjoyed the sex once we were actually having it but needed to get into it before she got into it, so to speak.
Eventually, she started feeling pain during intercourse and we stopped having sex.
I've been experiencing a lot of self-love these last number of years, but I really miss the intimacy.
She says, other than her real concern for me, she is quite happy not having sex.
Complicating matters is the fact that she has expressed feelings of inadequacy and emotions and thoughts in the larger context of confronting the fact that she is and we are aging.
In other words, the more I probe and attempt to initiate, the louder the negative feedback loop gets for both of us.
She also makes the self-evident observation that, like many other things, having sex so late in life is new.
We, all of us, are in uncharted or barely charted territory because until very recently, we were dead before such problems as declining libido and postmenopausal atrophic vaginitis became a problem.
She enjoys giving and receiving oral sex as much as I do a lot, but it is with penetration that we both experience the greatest pleasure and most profound orgasms and well, spiritual connection.
We're open and communicative about this problem but despite her acute awareness of both my needs and desires physically, psychologically and spiritually and the other non-intercourse options that we tried and enjoyed when the libido ain't there, it just ain't there.
And in any case, when penetration is no longer an option, we're both left feeling a bit cheated.
I am more than a little confused, ashamed and saddened about being the one who is always attempting to initiate physical intimacy and of course I miss and long for her reciprocal desire for me.
It does make me feel inadequate ugly unattractive, like there's something wrong with me, though I've concluded my looks are not the problem.
Our bond is strong beyond words.
She is my best friend, my fiercest critic and, at the risk of sounding cliche and silly, she makes me a much better person, a much better man than I would be otherwise.
This is undoubtedly soulmate territory and, without question, I would, by a very wide margin, rather have a sexless relationship with her than no relationship with her or a relationship with someone else.
I panic at both the thought of losing her and at the thought of starting another relationship.
But the problem is there, and it's not going away.
It's the stone beast, the unblinking gargoyle above our heads.
We fight more frequently and bitterly and the fights, I'm convinced, are more layered, deeper and influenced, if not caused, by our lack of sex.
We're also aware that hormonal treatment is an option, but I'm concerned about asking her to alter her body's natural course with what amounts to a potentially harmful chemical solution, solely for me and my needs.
We have discussed the possibility of me taking a lover, but that strikes me as extraordinarily risky on many levels.
Hiring professionals could also be an option, were it possible to do so in a non-exploitative fashion, although I'm not sure how either of those options would solve the problem of the absence of intimacy in our relationship.
We are walking through a minefield that is already exploding in our faces.
Any thoughts?
Yours sincerely, Gordian.
What a letter.
Yeah.
Full of questions that a lot of people ask at different times of their life, but certainly a lot of people in this age group are coming up against.
What did you make of this letter, Pepper?
Well, I thought he was very eloquent.
And for a while I thought they had no sexual contact, until I realized he doesn't consider oral sex or whatever else they're doing together as sex.
Right.
And so there's a mindset there that we could examine.
And I also felt that there was a lot of myths about aging and about what would be natural and what's unnatural.
We can put stints in a heart that isn't working.
It's not natural, but it saves our life.
And we go on a much better person, not to mention being alive.
And the atrophy of the vagina is something that is really important, really can be helped and not that hard.
So in some ways, the larger issue is this woman's what we call aspect of female sexual dysfunction.
There's four of them.
One's desire disorders, one's arousal disorders, the third is pain, and the fourth is orgasm issues.
And I'd say the first two may be operant.
And the first one especially is, which is actually pretty common in across age groups, although it becomes more common as women and men, but more often women get older, that you know.
They just lose desire.
And that's retrievable if you're bothered by it, if you have a good relationship, if it's not explained by other kinds of issues or complications of medicines.
But there seems to be not a will truly to for her to approach this in a systematic way and say okay well, what's that about?
They love each other.
They have what he feels is a really good relationship.
And it sounds very profound.
Why would you not explore every single aspect?
Right.
So first of all, I want to, let's just break this down.
You've said about 10 things that I want to ask questions about.
Yeah.
So let us begin with.
Really, I guess, like you said, I mean some of these issues the post-menopausal atrophic vaginitis.
This is maybe impacting her ability to feel desire and arousal.
Is that correct?
Well, she says it is.
Is that a medical issue?
I don't know what that is.
Okay.
She's talking about a medical issue, but it could be a psychological issue and it could be a very interesting interaction of both.
Now, I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not going to pretend to be one, but my knowledge of vaginal atrophy, just to simplify the language, is that you know use it or lose it.
It's like anything else.
If I stopped using my left arm for 10 years, I would have no muscle left and I probably couldn't pick up a pincushion.
That's why I have to exercise my arm to make sure it works.
And if it wasn't working, I wouldn't say, well, there goes my left arm.
I would say, oh, no, I've got to do something about this.
So if you aren't using your vagina, or if, in fact, the tissues become more fragile and they do, then what can you do about them?
You could do a topical estrogen that even the most careful books say it really stays local will plump up those tissues.
You can help that vagina regain its resiliency, but you have to do something about it.
And of course, you could do estrogen as a postmenopausal treatment that millions of women can handle, if in fact they don't have a tendency or a history of cancer.
So there's a lot you can do to take care of those tissues.
Doesn't sound like she's done any of them.
Yeah, and that's one of the concerns I have about this letter.
I agree with you.
He sounds very eloquent and charming and loving.
I mean, I think it's very deep and romantic and sweet that you say you would far and away rather stay in a sexless relationship with your wife than have a relationship with somebody else.
And I think that that's formed such a beautiful basis of your love.
But I also think that...
Maybe your partner is hearing that a little too loudly and clearly and not hearing the other part, which is I miss you as a lover and this is hurting me.
And I'm sort of an old hippie in my heart too, where I'm like, oh no, no chemicals must touch this sacred body of mine.
But then you raise a good point.
If I need heart surgery, I'm going to get it.
Right.
And so why are we thinking in a different way when it comes to maybe, treating postmenopausal conditions or erectile dysfunction or the things that do come into play with age?
That's right.
We put sex in another category.
Another telltale thing was this high idea of that, well, we'd be dead already.
So, you know, we don't have to deal with this because in 1650, we would have died by 37.
Well, had a lot of advantages since then and an extension of life.
And why shouldn't it be all those kinds of gifts? that make us feel good as long as possible.
The fact is, one of the gifts of sexuality, it's not just intromission, it's not just orgasm, it's also all the endocrine, the system being lit up like a Christmas tree when you're turned on and especially when you have an orgasm.
You have an orgasm, you both get a big flush of oxytocin, the bliss hormone, that still works.
You can still do that.
It's still wonderful for both you and for the relationship and the bonding.
Our sexuality is in a little box that's separated from our blood flow, our hormones, our brain.
It's all one big loop.
It's all wonderfully connected.
And it doesn't turn off at age 60 or 70 or 80.
It may become a little bit less intense.
It may be harder to achieve.
It may be more sporadic.
But I had this real feeling that she was using and they were thinking that maybe age has some kind of expiration note on it.
And I don't think so.
Yeah.
Pepper, I'm curious about that because I will say that I think a lot of people think there is.
And they have reason to because in our culture, we neuter people over the age of 50.
We desexualize them.
And we do think there is an expiration date.
It becomes comic if they're still having desire or still having an erotic life.
And I'm curious what you think of that, Pepper and talk to us about sexuality among people who are older.
Well, there seems to be a divide.
And I think a lot of it is, you know, whether somebody is looking for a retreat within aging.
I'm not going to watch my figure anymore.
I'm going to retire and not push myself to be curious or interactive in the world.
There are people who say, I want to stop dealing with these things.
And in particular, I think body image becomes part of it.
You know, I'm going to just let myself go male or female in a way that they would not have done in their youth, because they know that it would inhibit having people who are sexually interested in them and, in fact, in their own joy of their own body.
The other thing is they may have a perfectly fine body, but to them it's not because, as you say, we only have models of perfect bodies.
Even young people.
You know, the vision we have of what it takes to be sexy is a pretty high standard.
But then there's the other group of people who do embrace their sexuality lifelong, who are comfortable with their bodies or at least accept the changes, who realize that no, maybe my orgasms aren't as strong as they were, as easy as they were, my erections aren't as hard as it was, but you know what?
I like what I've got and I'm going to use it and enjoy it.
And I'm going to fight for it because it's part of my youth.
And the same way I might want to play the same sport I used to play, but maybe not as well or as hard, but I still like to be In the game.
They feel that way about their sexuality.
Of course, our society, as you said, Cheryl, discourages the latter point of view.
You have to fight for it.
But in the same way, I think the baby boom generation, now entering their 70s, has fought for a lot of the other ways.
We are young wearing jeans dancing, liking our music, whatever it is that we feel like still keeps us vibrant.
This is a really important one to hold on to and not to give up on.
But hey, I see women in their 30s and 40s telling me in workshops if I never have sex again, it's okay.
Maybe it's never really having enjoyed sexuality because their partner's not particularly good at it, or they've never really given themselves permission to enjoy it.
There's still a lot of disturbing ambivalence and stigma about the topic that can reach way down into younger ages, much less these older ones.
We just notice it more when they're older because they feel freer to say it and act on it.
In a monogamous marriage, you're your partner's only choice, and it behooves you to try and be there for them in a way that's neither begrudging or sacrificial.
But interactive, you have a problem and it takes the two of you to solve it.
And that's love for me.
You work on it because you love that person.
And sex isn't something that can be exempted from that bargain.
In fact, it's one of the most important things that has to be dealt with, because you both signed up to give each other that special gift.
And it did not have an expiration date on it.
It didn't say, okay, after 25 years of marriage, much less, this is a relatively new marriage.
Right.
One thing that comes up in this letter from Gordian that we also saw in the letter we discussed before we had you on the phone and also frankly, a lot of letters in our inbox.
And this is the post-menopausal woman who is saying you know what?
I'm not interested in sex anymore.
And I am perfectly fine with that.
I'm just done.
And I'm curious about that.
I must say, as a 49-year-old woman who is, I've not gone through menopause yet, but it scared me reading those letters because there really was a chorus of female voices saying I'm not interested in sex.
And so what are your thoughts on that?
There's a lot of research to indicate that for women who really loved and enjoyed sex before menopause that they're more likely to love and enjoy sex after menopause than women who had much more ambivalent feelings about it before.
That doesn't describe everyone.
But, you know, I mean, menopause can happen pretty darn early.
So it certainly could happen in the 40s.
It's a continuing process, not like a day event.
And I don't think that there's any automatic turn off for your sexuality.
I think It is a measure to how good you felt about it, how important it is to your own sexual identity.
Because when I find women who have lost their spark but they really felt it was important, they're desperate to find an answer.
They don't want to lose it.
Just to give you some reassurance, Cheryl, I'm 72.
I love sex.
It's a big part of my relationship with my husband.
I would fight like hell to keep it, and so far, so good.
Oh!
Thank you, Pepper.
I mean, that honestly, that makes me feel so good because I have worried reading those letters.
And I do want another question, since we're talking about this dynamic is the two letters we've discussed today on this episode happen to be concerning heterosexual relationships?
I'm curious, if you are familiar with is there a difference between between homosexual and heterosexual relationships when it comes to sex and aging?
Well sadly, it's more of a difference between men and women, because you do see the problem in lesbian couples.
I do study American couples of about 12000 people a couple decades ago, of which about 1000 couples were lesbian and almost 2000 couples were gay males.
And you did see then that the couples whose sex life diminished the most over time were the women.
On the other hand, they're very different lesbians then than they are now.
There's a lot of very young, lusty women who are lesbians and they're into sex in a much bigger way than women who are 20, 30 years older than them.
So we may see some generational issues here as well as some gender or types of couples.
But you do find differences in sex life desire in gay males as well as gay females, but most of the gay males they do have the answer that our letter writer doesn't want, which is okay.
We're more likely to open up the relationship than not and supplement our issues that way.
And somehow those gay males who do that seem to be generally able to do that in a way that I think most women would not and most heterosexual guys would not like.
And I think Pepper, you said such a really important thing when you said in a monogamous relationship, that is the deal.
You know, it does matter that you try to help meet each other's needs.
And part of that Gordian, I think for your partner is is for her to really engage with these things that are preventing her from having sex and desiring sex.
And for your part, maybe what that is is maybe being a little more open about your definition of what sex is.
That maybe it's not really always going to be intercourse.
Maybe that oral sex... you haven't reached to the spiritual heights with it yet.
You know, like you haven't, or you haven't experienced all that that might have to offer when it comes to connecting with your lover.
And part of sex, you know especially, I think, sex in old age or sex in relationships that have lasted a long time.
It's really approaching it like a beginner, all the time, always trying to learn and do new things.
I think both of them need to think about the way that they're defining intimacy and sex.
For one thing, they both like oral sex giving and receiving it and that's fantastic.
But that gets sort of swept under the rug because and I think this is typical of men What I really want is intercourse.
I want to have that sense of making love that is mutual.
That is, those Christmas lights being lit up in both of us at once and us being able to give one another that pleasure.
And that's what I think for reasons that are beautiful and good and also reasons that are sort of needy and have to do with masculine narcissism.
Straight masculine narcissism.
Yeah, heterosexual straight.
But my point is that I recognize in Gordian's letter that feeling that the other kinds of sex don't matter.
And I think that's a mistake.
And I think it's part of the negative feedback loop is that she knows that the expectation is that he really wants to have a certain kind of sex and the other kinds of sex don't really count.
And it's painful to feel that you have to try.
It's humiliating.
I get the subtext, Gordian, is that there's a feeling of hopelessness about her approach.
Like, I'm just going to pack it and I don't want to have to do that work.
I don't want to have to, you know, have the conversation or feel inadequate, or have to, you know, consider this or that medication or ointment or whatever it is.
Or to go to a workshop or a sex therapist, you know, which I'm sure, Pepper, you could speak to.
But I'm imagining that you see couples where there's one partner who's saying I want to keep this spark alive and another who is more reluctant, right?
I think almost any sex therapist will say the number one thing that comes into their office is either mismatched desire or desire no desire.
With somebody who still wants to maintain a sexual relationship and has reached their wit's end on it is now at the sex therapist or psychologist's office.
Maybe the good and the bad news is that this is quite common and therapists really are used to hearing this complaint and they can be very skilled at helping a couple work their way through it.
So at the very least, since there seems to have been a situation of loggerheads there, they owe the marriage going to a skilled professional.
They go to their family doctor and ask for a reference and then go do that together.
I mean, I think they could get rid of this feeling of discouragement that you know just absolutely ekes out of his words and get into something where they feel there's possibilities of changing this and making them feel wanted and creating her desire at a higher level and their satisfaction is a much higher level.
Yes.
Well, Dr. Schwartz, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
And I hope you keep on doing it for all the days of your life.
There you go.
Not to worry.
She's got it covered.
Thanks so much.
Fun talking to you guys.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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