Midlife sex: here's what's NOT happening

Pretending we’re all wild for sex is just bad for morale, writes Shane Watson

Good grief. Of all the lies that are peddled about getting older - you feel more creative, you have a new lease of energy, sex is better - the sex one irks me the most.

I mean, sex probably is better (you are more comfy in your skin, less self-conscious and so on), but how would you know?

You are too exhausted, busy or stressed to remember to do it. When you do, it's woo hoo fireworks all the way, obviously. But, let's be honest, it's not happening as much as people say it is, and pretending otherwise is bad for morale.

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Here are some other things that are not happening on the midlife sex front:

Sex in unusual places. Like halfway down the stairs or in a photo booth or in your shower at home. Come on. The shower is barely big enough for one. You graze your elbows if you don't stand still.

In any case, when you are well into midlife (bordering on late life), only someone who has recently lost 20kg and had a hair transplant is thinking about what I believe they call "somebody film me" sex.

Sex in the daytime. Or in the middle of the night. Sex at any time that isn't a Saturday night when the stars are in alignment.

Sex that starts with your clothes on. Because you get to a certain age and you're far more concerned with preserving the buttons on your blouse. Crumpling stuff that you want to keep shipshape for the following day will put you off. Your stretchy dress getting overstretched will make you twitchy. You just get more respectful of clothes in midlife.

Acrobatic sex. By which I mean any positions other than the least challenging. I think they're called repose and half-resting. Anyway, low-impact sex starts around the time you begin to experience phase one physical loss. His back goes; your shoulders (frozen). He gets cramp. You get a nerve-pinching sensation in your hip. One or both of you is making a weird whistling wheezing noise. You pause to work out who is making the funny clicking sound.

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Hotel-room sex. This certainly can happen. But midlifers are funny about hotels. We think we're going to be all caution to the wind and breaking out the café au lait silk undies but hotels bring out the consumer rights inspector in us. We want to know why, for this money, we are overlooking the airconditioning unit.

We can't turn down the heat and it is old-people's-home hot. We get the kind of neurosis brought on by paying for a sex-friendly environment. Men, meanwhile, get stuck into the TV.

Turning off the TV in order to have sex. Not happening these days. There's all the recorded stuff, going right back to Mad Men. Not being funny, but there seems to be a lot of distractions - property websites, Instagram, YouTube videos of pandas clinging to keepers' legs - that were not an issue previously.

Preparation. This has fallen off a cliff. We ladies can't be doing with all the pre-event grooming because it's not worth the money unless you are guaranteed action. But, conversely, you may feel you are not match ready if you don't. Tricky.- The Daily Telegraph, London