I am a perfectly nice, respectable fortysomething woman (me) who blogs about staying sexy after forty (which including getting sex).  Why?  Because I'm not getting any? Because I'm getting some and it sucks? Because if I don't get some soon my partner will be getting gone? Or was just because when I hit menopause, the floor dropped out, the ceiling blew off, and I found myself floating in limbo, devoid of all desire and dreams?

Yes, menopause was the beginning of my sex problems and the end of my sex life. If you’ve ever gone through a long period of not getting any, you know just how depressing and lonely life can become. Good sex, at least for me, goes with connecting, feeling good in your body, intimacy, romance and fun. All you have to do is look at what happens to a marriage when you take sex out of the equation. I got one word for you: divorce.

Now, I’d like to say the disappearance of my sex life and my marriage along with it would have been enough motivation to propel me to search for help years ago. But that would be too logical and too entirely unlike me. Remember at the time, I was in menopause and off my rocker.

No, it took something far more awful, horrible and shocking to get me to do anything. I saw my ass and it was fat. I’d been watching a home movie one evening, scrutinizing this flabby middle-aged woman as she slumped across a room with her back to the camera. I was about to say to my friend, “who’s the fat ass?” when I realized in a flash of heart-exploding panic that the fat ass was me. My friend tried to reassure me that the camera adds weight. “It doesn’t need to,” I screamed, as I ran to hide in the closet, under my clothes that didn’t fit anymore.

Sometimes it takes a cold hard look to really get that you aren’t the 20-year old college dorm queen you used to be—all giggly, firm and fabulous. In an instant, I saw myself the way everyone else does: a sloppily aging woman skidding into fatigued obsolescence. I felt like I’d been dismissed from the gene pool, left to watch from a frayed deck chair while all the other lithesome reproductive beings copulated with Darwinian intensity. They mattered. They belonged. They weren’t in menopause.

Here’s my bottom line: I know from first hand experience that menopause can snap you out of the most tenacious youth fantasy faster than you can say, “I’m a little homicidal this year.” But I also know there is a whole new world after menopause. Happier, sexier, healthier, more exciting, and filled with seasoned sex.

Move over little kitty, the tigress is here:  http://seasonedsex.com.