Sex and the Seasoned Woman

Book excerpt: A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. . . . She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, mellow. She can be maternal and playful. Bossy and submissive. Strong and soft. . . . The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life. In her most groundbreaking work since Passages and The Silent Passage, bestselling author Gail Sheehy reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon–increased vitality in women’s sex and love lives after fifty. Sex and the Seasoned Woman is the story of an intimate revolution taking place under our very noses. Boomer generation women in midlife are open to sex, love, dating, new dreams, exploring spirituality, and revitalizing their marriages as never before. This is a new universe of passionate, liberated women–married and single–who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age and are now realizing they don’t have to. As life spans grow longer and as societal constraints continue to loosen, older women–once free of the exhausting demands of young children, needy husbands, and demanding careers–find themselves ready to pursue the passionate life. They embrace their “second adulthood” as a period of reawakening. Written in Sheehy’s singularly compelling style, combining interviews and research, this book gives voice to more than a hundred fascinating and colorful women. The inspiring stories tell of wives who reinvigorate their marriages after their children leave the nest as well as divorced, widowed, and long-single women who find new dreams and new loves. Sheehy delineates a crucial link between cultivating a new dream and reopening the pathway to intimacy and sexual pleasure. She also examines the latest medical breakthroughs addressing symptoms that have unnecessarily curtailed women’s sex lives. From women who find their sexuality reawakened by a younger lover, to couples whose marriages survive health crises and grow stronger, to women who finally find a soulmate in their sixties, to stories from seasoned sirens in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, these portraits cover an enormous range of experience. In them, Sheehy locates the universal patterns that enable us all to recognize and understand our own lives.