How the Heck Do I Date at This Age?

 

How the Heck Do I Date at This Age?” is the title of a new workshop I just debuted in Milwaukee, and I’m ready to take it on the road! I discovered it needs to be a three-hour workshop because it covers so many topics, questions, and interactive discussion.

Here’s my description of the workshop:

How the Heck Do I Date at This Age?

 You’re ready to connect for dating, sex, love, companionship – but dating as a senior feels awkward and downright weird. What are the guidelines? How do you navigate online dating and avoid the pitfalls that send potential dates running in the other direction? When do you bring up safer sex, your personal sexual issues, or sex at all? Whether you’re widowed, divorced, or a longtime single, you’ll find this interactive workshop illuminating and fun, and you’ll get to find out how other single seniors meet and mate (or try to). All genders and orientations welcome; sense of humor helpful. Thirty million Americans age 55 and older are single, so welcome to the club with no rules! Joan Price, author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty and Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex – and a widow trying to figure out how to date at her age – leads this workshop.

During this fun-filled workshop, you’ll create a list of the qualities you’re seeking in a date/lover/sweetheart/mate, because if you don’t know what you’re asking for, the answer is “no.” You’ll also write your profile, should you wish to pursue online dating. You’ll get plenty of information and honest (polite, but honest!) feedback about your dating situation (or lack of dating situation). By the end, you’ll have an action plan and plenty of food for thought. Bring paper and pen or a laptop — and a sense of humor!

“So where do I have to go to attend this workshop?” you ask. Ah, I don’t know yet. Invite me to come to your region to present it, or email me to put yourself on my contact list for an upcoming workshop in the San Francisco/ Santa Rosa, CA area.

10/11 addendum: For use in this workshop, I’m collecting online dating profiles (our age only) that are either terrific, appealing examples or awful, waste-of-space examples. If you encounter either, please copy it without identifying the person except by gender and age and email it to me privately. This isn’t about whether the person meets your personal taste requirements — just whether the profile is a great example of how to write one, or a terrible example that no one would want to answer. Again, do not identify the person even by handle or URL — this is not about embarrassing people, just giving us content to discuss.  

Your Questions about Senior Sex

When I give a talk about senior sex, my favorite part is answering your questions. I feel both proud and humble that you trust me (and the audience) enough to voice your concerns.

I’ve been traveling to tell people about my new book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex and talking at bookstores, sexuality shops, a senior center, a restaurant, and my 50th high school reunion (!) about the myths and realities of older age sexuality. Here are some of the most frequent questions and topics you’ve been sharing:

 

  • The #1 question from partnered seniors is how to revive a dull, infrequent, or nonexistent sex life. I talk about scheduling sex and understanding that at our age, desire often follows physiological arousal rather than the other way around. In other words, getting started with touching and kissing will get you in the mood after your body starts responding — don’t wait to be in the mood.
  • Single seniors ask about the importance of safe sex, hoping (from the wording of your questions and the looks on your faces) that I’ll tell you we probably don’t need condoms at our age. I tell you the opposite of that — yes, we need to use condoms, and we should do so whether someone tells us his or her health history or not. The fastest growing population for new HIV infections is the over 50 age group.

 

    •  Women whose partners experience erectile difficulties often don’t understand what’s going on (“Is it because I don’t attract him any more?”) or what to do to keep the sensuality going in the relationship (“Isn’t it cruel teasing if I want to touch and be touched?”).
  • Both men and women scoff at the idea of sex toys until I tell them why a well-placed vibrator can mean the difference between orgasm or not.

Is it any surprise that that one place people were reluctant to ask questions was my high school reunion? It’s understandable — we were with people we hadn’t seen since we were 17 and our main sex problem was how to hide our activities from our parents! When I saw that my classmates were uneasy about asking questions, I said, “If you’d rather talk to me privately, I’ll be giving consultations in the corner.”

For the rest of the weekend, people came up to me to request their “consultation in the corner”!

Your comments are welcome. If you were in my audience, what question do you hope I’d answer? If you’re brave, include the answer you think I’d give!

If you want to be in my audience for real, click here to see my upcoming events. I’d love to meet you!

Dear John, I Love Jane: book review

Dear John, I Love Jane — isn’t the title perfect? — is a 2011 anthology edited by Candace Walsh and Laura André (who happen to be a couple) and written by women who left their straight life/ relationships/ husbands because they fell in love with women.

Some always knew they were attracted to women, but bowed to society’s norm and married men anyway. Others had no idea they could or would fall in love with a woman.

The stories are engrossing, well-crafted, intimate, and dramatic. I felt I was sitting in a room hearing these women’s personal stories — their conflicts, thrills, misgivings (sometimes), and declarations.

When Seal Press offered me this book to review, I emailed back, “I hope some of the stories highlight women over 50.” I was surprised and pleased to learn that several of these authors are over 50, and in case you want to read their stories first–as I did–here are their names: Leigh Stuart, Sheila Smith, Susan Grier, Meredith MaranKami DayMicki Grimland, and Katherine Briccetti.

I loved many of the stories, including “Memoirs of a Wanton Prude” by Sheila Smith, who first fell in love with a woman at age 69. As a teen, she was taught that gays and lesbians were “Sick! Immoral! Perverted!” and she fought back her feelings until age 50. Still, she stayed with her husband, “reading lesbian books and [keeping] my feelings about women under wraps. A divorce and a few years of solitude readied her to meet Diana, who taught her that “Lesbians are about intimacy”: “It wasn’t so much she wanted to go to bed with me; it was that she wanted to wake up with me.”

One of the most moving stories to me was “The Right Fit” by Kami Day (also over 50), who was raised Mormon and was taught that “Heavenly Father had made one man whose penis would fit just perfectly inside my vagina,” and that perfect fit would be revealed on her wedding night. It wasn’t. But 15 years later, the perfect fit arrived: Michele. And 15 after that, they are still together, “using only about half the mattress in our double bed.”

The writing is terrific — often lyrical, sometimes funny, and full of surprises. For example:

  • “I have always been far more turned on by our magical, slippery little orchid than by their — what is that? A puppet? Some sort of sea creature?” (Veronica Masen)
  • “My body has a need that’s burning a hole through the mattress. My brain is hanging on for dear life to what remains of my heterosexuality.” (Meredith Maran)
  • “I had never imagined kissing another woman, but now I did, wanting to know the gentleness of soft skin, the taste of female, this female.” (Susan Grier)
  • “I had recurrent dreams of making out with Ellen DeGeneres in a rustic Spanish house in Santa Barbara.” (Leigh Stuart)

Dear John, I Love Jane is an important book. It is more than a lesbian anthology — it’s about women making choices at first that go counter to what they really want or need (and isn’t that especially true of our age group?), then facing and accepting — and being thrilled by! — their true natures. It shows women’s sexual fluidity in a way we seldom see or acknowledge.

When I was writing Naked at Our Age, several women over 50 sent me their stories about marrying men (some quite contently, others battling their nature) and in later life discovering love with another woman — or wanting to experience sex with another woman and not yet putting it into action. If this book had been out then, I would have recommended it. I recommend it now!

Purchase the Dear John, I Love Jane on Amazon or order from your independent bookseller.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Ron, age 66: “Ladies are sooo inventive!”

I love getting reader stories, and Ron, age 66, has opened my eyes to the adventures of a remarkably open and sexually active man who is enjoying his single life tremendously. Of Scots heritage, Ron enjoys wearing kilts “for their obvious freedom and comfort and fun.” He illustrates:

Dating a lady my age, we’re out for lunch at a chain restaurant sitting in a booth and suddenly her bare feet are under my kilt lovingly massaging my boy parts. No one can see. We know. Ladies are sooo inventive.”

Ron does a lot of online dating, and enjoys women our age.

I have met a lot of wonderful women. Despite the protest on the Internet profiles, a common first date includes making love at the lady’s initiative. Most often I’m the boy toy and they want to use my body for their own pleasure. I think its wonderful.

Since there are more single women than men of our age, Ron has a concept of the ideal retirement community which includes “man sharing”:

What if say three lonely ladies got together and chose a compatible man to share an nice large home with. Share the rent, share the chores, share the love. Seems it would sure beat living alone. I’m sure someone’s way ahead of me on this. Gotta be happening already. For the longest time I thought of it as something I, as a surviving male would do – go out and find three women who would be up for such an arrangement. Lately, I’ve realized such a group would be better formed if the ladies bonded first then sought out the male to share together.

Ron’s satisfied lovers already pass him on to one another:

Looking back over my lovers since my divorce there have probably been seven or eight who were “referrals” from previous lovers.  Its probably a woman thing that I don’t understand – but deeply appreciate.

What do you think? Men, do women “refer” you to their friends? Women, if you date a man who leaves you with a smile on your face, do you tell your single friends to get in touch with him? Though I have no direct experience with this, I must admit it’s an intriguing idea!
Thank you, Ron, for your willingness to go public with your story!