Can an older woman really find love again? Or even just hot sex? I was 45 and mom to two young sons when my marriage imploded, and was nearly 48 when we divorced.
“Why couldn’t this have happened 10 years ago, when I was younger and prettier?” I thought at the time. “Who will want me now?”
Like many women, I wasn’t looking forward to aging. The narrative on growing older is ageist and sexist — that we become invisible, irrelevant, undesirable. What was there to look forward to, especially as a newly minted single woman?
Yet, much to my surprise, it didn’t quite work out that way. And, given an uptick in movies, series and novels featuring older women, the good news is that ageist stereotypes are being challenged — even busted. One example is the 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give, starring Diane Keaton, who at the time was 57, and Jack Nicholson, 66. The plot unfolds with Keaton’s character engaging in a hot affair with the much younger Keanu Reeves, then 39, but ends up with Nicholson, in true, passionate, sexy love.
Then there’s the immense popularity of the seven-season series Grace and Frankie, featuring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, who launched the series when they were in their mid-70s. After their husbands come out as gay and marry, the two women become bestie entrepreneurs who create a company designing vibrators fit for arthritic hands.
More recently, Emma Thompson plays a 55-year-old inexperienced widow who hires a young sex worker in 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and gains the sexual confidence — and orgasms — she craves.
What is it about women discovering a renewed lust and a hunger for flings — or more — when they’re post-menopausal?
Sociologist Susan Pickard, director of the Center for Aging and the Life Course at the University of Liverpool, sees this longing for a later-life love affair as “a vehicle for radical change, greater agency and further ongoing self-development, whether it ultimately ‘works out’ in relationship terms or not.”
Gillian, a writer in her late 50s in upstate New York, wasn’t looking for a new relationship when she ended her 25-year marriage eight years ago. She married young and had not dated much, so all she wanted was to have no-strings-attached sex that focused on pleasure, which she did end up experiencing with many men.
Like many women who initiate divorce at 50 and older — the so-called gray divorce — Gillian discovered that it got her out of her comfort zone and opened her up sexually. “I felt like I was making up for lost time,” she tells me, “like it was a rebirth and this opportunity I didn’t do earlier --sow those wild oats, as they used to say.”