Coming of Age: Part 1

A Valentine For Grown-Ups

And All Those Who Will Someday Be Over Fifty

Part One of Two

Every six seconds, an American man or woman enters the sexual wilderness of life after 50. There are close to 60 million of us in our mid-50s and beyond. We are boomers, seniors, wise and sexy elders. We crisscross and belong to all walks of life. At no point in the course of history have we lived so long and expected so much of human relationships. Yet when it comes to sex, we remain somewhere between the gray and dark ages.

Many of us are lost souls, aging in a society that still worships the Pepsi generation bombarded by images of 20-something, wafer-thin beauties and studs with pecs that we can no longer match. Young people remind us in their dances that sex is "dirty"— torrid and grinding. We may have our moments, but surely there must be a more gentle, affectionate, caring sexuality appropriate to our age. Viagra cannot be the only answer.

At age 49, I was walking with the man I was dating, ambling along a lovely rural road. In the distance we saw a couple perhaps in their nineties walking slowly, holding hands. Studying them on the quiet country road, he turned to me and said, "if we are fortunate, that will be us — in bed as well as walking”. I knew I wanted to age with wisdom, and companionship, love and sex. A good man was getting harder to find. A hard man, for whom both love and sex mattered, was getting even harder to find. I married him.

I had a paucity of role models for what I wanted. And, I knew from my women friends, I was not alone. Our parents’ generation didn’t have our views and couldn’t supply our needs. They didn’t discuss sex. My friends and I had to invent our own confusing path defining sex and sexuality for grownups. We were surrounded by a society that stubbornly clung to negative images about elders having sex. The thought of older people making love still tends to stir reactions ranging from amusement to disgust. The idea of couples in their 80s or 90s having intercourse remains unfathomable to the younger set. Unfortunately, it remains unspeakable to those having it as well.

We are not aging as our parents did, and many of us we are unwilling to simply get old and become useless, to be put out to pasture until we die. The truth is slowly and subtly dawning on our society that life today includes a new age.

There was a time when people who had gone through childhood, adolescence, and the "productive years" of adulthood came rather abruptly upon old age, or at best what we call the senior years. But now, we are discovering a time in-between, truly a new age. Writers, theoreticians, and philosophers are fumbling in the dark trying to name this period. Metaphorically speaking, they are under the covers, periodically letting their feet hit the floor to carry them beyond the safety of their past to grope, fumble, and reach towards an understanding of love and sex for a new population in the new millennium. A half-century is no longer so very old. A new paradigm is in the making and we are re-learning to develop it as we confront our new challenges. As sexuality wanes, sensuality gains. Perhaps, instead of retirement, we will now call it re-firement. Let us learn to live as we are coming to be.

Life is too hard to do alone,

Dr. D.

Dorree Lynn, PH.D.

About the Author

Dr. Dorree Lynn is co-founder of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Psychotherapy and a practicing clinician in New York and Washington, DC. Dr. Lynn served on the executive board of the American Academy of Psychotherapists and she is on the editorial board of their publication, Voices. She is also a regular columnist for the Washington, DC newspaper, The Georgetowner. Dr. Lynn is a noted speaker and well known on the lecture circuit.