SEXUALITY AND EMOTIONAL GROWTH: EMILLY’S AND NADIA’S STORIES
This was the case until a few years ago for Emily, a sixty-two-year-old who suffered from chronic back pain. Initially she was very concerned to protect her back, and she put sex off limits. But with support and reassurance from various health practitioners, she experimented and found enjoyable ways to have sex with her partner. In particular, she chose times when she was warm, well rested and feeling sexy, and with plenty of pillows available to support her back.
For Nadia, who was plagued by intermittent heavy bleeding in her mid-forties, the problem was finding a time when she could have sex enjoyably. ‘I had never felt like sex during my monthly bleeds, but at least they previously lasted only four or five days. This stage was much worse because I was bleeding for fifteen days without a break and I felt so ugh! My husband didn’t mind having sex while I was bleeding, but I just couldn’t come at it.’ Since Nadia’s menopause at the age of forty-eight, she and her husband have resumed the satisfying sex life they enjoyed in earlier years.
that those who have neither a desire for nor interest in sex, or who have deliberately chosen a lifestyle in which sexual activities play little or no part, have every right to their decision. On the other hand, those older people who enjoy sex or want to enjoy it should be given the information and treatment they need if problems arise.
In attempting to put the presence or absence of sexual intimacy into some sort of general framework of midlife relationships, Hathorn and Bates identified a significant obstacle. ‘One of the major problems was that our interest was in both men and women, yet it seems that most of the well-known developmental theorists of the past have focused only on men. It is as if woman were an afterthought and had to be “fitted in” to men’s cycle of growth
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