Starting Again After Fifty: Sex, Bodies, and Being New at This

You have not done this for a long time.

Maybe a marriage ended. Maybe someone died. Maybe you have simply been on your own for years and stopped expecting it to change. And now there is a possibility, and somewhere underneath the interest there is a low hum of dread about the practicalities.

Nobody talks about this. Men are supposed to be straightforwardly pleased at the prospect. A good number are also quietly terrified, and the two sit together perfectly well.

What men actually worry about

The body, first. It is not the body that last did this. There is more of it in some places and less in others, there are scars or a surgery or a back that objects to certain things. You know what you look like now and you are not sure how to introduce that to someone.

Then performance, which by midlife carries a weight it never had at twenty five. A first time with someone new is exactly the situation most likely to produce the watching, because there is no history to fall back on and every reason to want it to go well.

Then the sheer awkwardness of not knowing the choreography. What people expect now. How soon. Whether the way you used to do things is hopelessly dated. Whether you are supposed to have views about things that did not have names when you were last single.

And underneath, often, grief. If your marriage ended badly there is a version of yourself you are trying not to be. If your partner died, being touched by someone else can bring up something that has nothing to do with the person in the room.

The thing that helps most

Say it out loud. Early, and to the person you are actually with.

Not a speech. A sentence. That it has been a long time. That you are a bit nervous. That you would rather go slowly than pretend.

Men expect this to be humiliating and it is close to the opposite. The other person is almost always relieved, because she is very likely carrying the same thing and waiting to see whether it is safe to say so. Two people in their fifties silently performing confidence at each other is a much worse evening than two people admitting they are out of practice.

It also does something practical. It takes the test out of the situation. Once you have both said you are going slowly, nothing has to work in any particular way, and the pressure that would otherwise have produced the difficulty is largely gone.

Going slower than feels reasonable

The instinct is to get through the first time so that it is over and the worrying can stop. Understandable, and often a mistake. Rushing at it is what produces the experience you were dreading.

What works better is deciding, in advance and preferably together, that the first few times are not about intercourse at all. Not as a rule imposed on you but as a decision that removes the thing you are most anxious about. Touch, closeness, being undressed together with nothing that has to follow. Most men find that the anxiety drops away considerably once there is nothing to fail at, and that what happens after that happens far more easily.

About your body

Being seen is the part men mention least and worry about most.

Here is what I can tell you from the work. Almost nobody is looking at your stomach. The people who are interested in a man in his fifties are, on the whole, interested in a man in his fifties. The scars and the softness and the greying are not obstacles to be got past on the way to attraction. They are frequently part of it.

You may not believe that. Most men do not, at first. But the belief that you are getting away with something, and that being seen properly would end it, is worth examining, because it will follow you into every encounter until it is dealt with.

If it does not go well

Sometimes it does not. Something does not work, or you feel nothing, or you find yourself crying afterwards for reasons you cannot explain.

None of that means you are not ready or that it will not work next time. Bodies that have not done something for years are often clumsy at first, and grief has a habit of arriving through the body when it has been kept out of the conversation. If you have a history that makes being touched complicated, there is more in this piece on men and trauma.

You are allowed to want this

A surprising number of men over fifty have quietly decided that this part of life is finished, and have not examined the decision. Sometimes it is a genuine choice and there is nothing wrong with it. More often it is a conclusion drawn from one bad experience and never revisited.

There is a lot of life left, and being new at something in your fifties is not undignified. It is just being new at something.

There is more on what changes and what does not on the page for men over 50.