How, even in the face of less estrogen and more distractions, not to mention a snoozing clitoris, the thrill of midlife sex most definitely ain’t gone.
I love sex. L-o-v-e it. I’ve been an enthusiastic aficionado since I was 16 and lost my virginity on a poolside chaise lounge to my high school boyfriend. For some 27 years, I’ve thought of myself as a highly sexed individual, basically walking around in a constant state of, shall we say, readiness. So I was somewhat puzzled when it suddenly dawned on me that, hmm...lately, things have been awfully quiet down there. I haven’t felt the urge to have sex with my husband in ages. Come to think of it, I haven’t even thought about sex in . . . well, if I couldn’t remember, then clearly it had been too long. What gives? Where oh where had my sex drive gone?“At age 40, women tend to reach a fork in the sexual road,” Lauri Romanzi, MD, a urogynecologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College, tells me. “You either head down the path of ‘Oh my god! It’s never been better.’ Or you’re walking the way of a waning libido.”
Why the shrinking sex drive? There are the usual big-ticket derailers of desire: chronic medical conditions such as thyroid disease, hypertension and diabetes that start to show up as we move further into middle age. To the best of my knowledge, I was clear on those counts. But there are also the garden-variety wet blankets, things like not sleeping well and feeling stressed or depressed.
Plus, we can’t forget that great big buzzkill: declining hormones. At first, the change took place so quietly, I never noticed. “At 35, your hormones start sliding down the bunny slope of decline,” Romanzi explains. “As you get into your forties, they’re heading down more of an intermediate slope, and there’s less estrogen coming out of your ovaries every month. When you reach your fifties—and menopause—it’s like hitting the black diamond slope. Your estrogen drops to almost nothing.”
This has some not-so-nice effects on our womanly parts. “Your vulva and vaginal skin are chockablock with estrogen receptors. The hormone helps the skin stay elastic and resilient; it also keeps the capillaries plump and healthy so they can easily engorge. Women don’t get erections, but we have our own hydraulics going on down there, and all of that can be terribly muted by estrogen deficiency,” Romanzi says. The net result? “You may find you don’t lubricate as much as you once did. Your clitoris, which used to be unbelievably, exquisitely sensitive, becomes much less so.”
