I Told the Daily Mail My Story: Why Bad Sex Isn’t Inevitable in Midlife

This week the Daily Mail published a feature about my story. The headline they chose, “I once thought bad sex was inevitable in middle age. Here’s how, at 48, I found out I was oh, oh, oh so wrong”, made me smile. But underneath the tabloid sparkle is something I mean with my whole heart.

The lie I told myself for years

For most of my life I believed a familiar story: that it’s normal to be unsatisfied in a long relationship, that the passionate years are simply meant to fade, that wanting more was selfish. So many women carry that same quiet belief. I stayed in relationship after relationship that left me longing, including an eleven-year one that ended only when he chose to leave. It took me until my mid-thirties to begin the real work of understanding myself, and a personal-development course to start looking honestly at the beliefs about love and worth I had carried since childhood.

What changed

The turning point came at 44, at a tantra workshop, the first place I had ever been that treated intimacy, connection and pleasure as meaningful, rather than awkward afterthoughts. I wanted my husband to walk that road with me, but he couldn’t, and in 2019 I made one of the hardest and most necessary decisions of my life: I ended my marriage. A year later I met my current partner, and for the first time experienced what I can only call true lovemaking rather than simply having sex. The difference was profound, and I spent many of those early months in tears, as years of held-back feeling finally surfaced.

At 50 I left my career in IT to train as a sexological bodyworker, learning about trauma, biology and consent. In 2021 I opened my practice here in North London.

Why I do this work now

Today, at 54, I work with women and couples to reconnect with desire, intimacy, and the simple experience of feeling at home in their own bodies. Much of it begins not with touch but with conversation, because so many of us were never taught to say a clear yes or no, or to understand how our own arousal works. Watching a woman rediscover her own body, often for the first time, is the most moving part of my work.

For years I thought something was wrong with me for wanting more. Now I know nothing was wrong at all. I simply needed to find my way back to myself.

You can read the full Daily Mail feature here: I once thought bad sex was inevitable in middle age…