Berman Sexual Health

My first glimpse of what I came to recognize as a seasoned woman came in a chance encounter at an Oakland restaurant. A popular entertainer who was seated at the next table overheard me talking with my husband about my book. She leaned over to ask what it would be about. It's about sex, love, and dating among women over fifty, I blurted out. The entertainer's dinner companion rolled her eyes: 'she's the poster girl for dating and sex after fifty!

The entertainer, whom we'll call Bebe to protect her anonymity, was eager to elaborate. Bebe had been raised in the South with parents who were in love until the day they died. She had fully expected that she, like they, would marry for life. And happily, she had enjoyed an extended sexual honeymoon with the man she married in her twenties. It was in her forties that Bebe began to notice the cracks in their marriage. But it's like you see a hairline crack in the wall in your California house and you say, Not to worry. A couple of years later, you notice the crack is now a quarter inch wide don't panic, it's a plaster thing. Then one big shake and the whole house tumbles down and you say, Wow, how did that happen

In retrospect, she understands. Her frustration with her marriage was an echo of the complaint that fortyish husbands used before feminism went mainstream: I've grown and, unfortunately, she hasn't. In Bebe's marriage, as in many more today, it was the husband who resisted taking risks to grow. It took her five years to get up the courage to ask for a divorce. She took that final step a few months before her fiftieth birthday.

You must be crazy, she told herself. You're going to spend the rest of your life home alone watching reruns of  The Brady Bunch. But it wasn't like that at all. Quite the opposite, she says; it's been the greatest adventure of her life.

The sociologist in me cast about for a context into which to fit this revelation. In fact, even while Bebe was settled into staid married life, a new public square of midlife singles was being flooded with divorced and never-married women and men. All the old rules were up for renegotiation. What was it like out there I prodded.

In the first couple of years after her divorce, Bebe said, she had felt shell-shocked. I went through a stage of mourning and learning to be alone. But people kept coming into my path. I met men at the airport, the grocery store, at church. Because once I started opening my eyes, there were really men everywhere. It wasn't like I was shopping, but they were flirting with me, talking to me, asking me out. Her therapist told her, You have a neon sign on your forehead that blares: Available.

Pretty young women with firm bodies scared me as long as I saw myself as having to compete with them, she explained. But what I found is I'm not in the same pool as they are. The older men who are looking for twenty- or thirty-something hard bodies are not the men who would look at me to begin with. These are two different universes.

Bebe's first dating experience turned the usual calculations on their head. He was a young man she met in churchand not just a little younger, fifteen years younger than she. I was flabbergasted, said Bebe. I was thinking, This gorgeous young man wants to go out with me She bit the bullet and asked him, Do you really know how old I am He said he didn't care. She told him anyway: fifty. He didn't seem fazed. He said she was smart and interesting and he just liked talking to her; he wanted to pursue it.

I asked Bebe if it was a revelation to her to have sex with somebody that young after living so many years with her husband. Her eyes danced and her voice jumped an octave.

{mosbanner:id=1:right:0}Oh, yeah! It was quite wonderful. Bebe quickly qualified her expectations. I never looked at him as somebody I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I don't think he looked at me in that way, either. For six months we enjoyed each other's company and had a lot of fun. I believe people come into your life for a reason. He was the one who came into my life to say, It's gonna be okay, you can do this. Getting over that hurdle was the big one.

Most of our grandmothers would find this a strange conversation. Half a century ago, there were certainly exceptional 50-year-old women who had lovers, and married people in their sixties and seventies who still enjoyed each other sexually. But it wasn't the norm. As the boundaries of our life span continue to expand in startling ways, the social definitions of age have shifted with the force of tectonic plates, altering just about everything.

Not all of us are as flashy as Bebe, nor do we all want to be, but I soon found that she is at the forefront of a trend. She is honest enough to admit that she misses some things about marriage. When it was going well, we had great companionship. But like most women over 50 who can afford to walk away from a relationship if it has become a safe but hollow shell, Bebe savors her independence. She may have a neon sign on her forehead blinking Available, but it doesn't advertise Looking for Husband. She is looking for fun, companionship, maybe intimacy, but definitely satisfying sex.