Sex in your 60's

Iris, a 66-year-old friend of mine, recently met a new partner after years of being alone. She is quite shameless about her toy-boy (he is actually five years younger than her). 'It's a mistake to think that people don't enjoy sex when they are older,' she says. 'I still feel as passionate now as I did when I was a younger woman, and in some ways more so, because now I can really enjoy it for what it is, without other responsibilities and without caring all the time about how I look.' She adds that, 'Being over 60 doesn't mean you don't want to be desired, touched and to feel close to another human being.'

There is additional evidence to suggest that having sex when you are older can actually prolong your life. In 1997, a study published in the British Medical Journal examined the relationship between frequency of orgasm and mortality. It found that mortality was 50 per cent lower in the group with higher orgasmic occurrence than in the group with lower orgasmic frequency. Simply put, this suggests that the more orgasms you have, the longer you are likely to live. Although there have been no studies to definitively state that having regular sex can guarantee a long life, it's clear that sex and health appear to reinforce each other.