The best sex of Cory Hunter’s life — at least so far — didn’t happen when he was a young buck in his early 20s. It was two years ago when the Sausalito, California-based photographer was 42.
“My boyfriend and I hiked two-and-a-half miles toward Horsetail Falls, near Lake Tahoe, on this boiling hot day,” he remembers. “Then we bushwhacked a bit to a spot where no one was around, and spent an afternoon without our clothes on, laying out on these huge, baking boulders, messing around with each other in the clear water.”
The sex wouldn’t have been the same for Cory at age 24 (and not just because he was having it with women then).
“I think it’s a bunch of reasons,” he says. “One, it took me a hell of a long time to find someone who appreciates exactly the same things as I do. Two, I take a lot better care of myself now than I did in my early 20s.”
Michael B., a 52-year-old corporate attorney from Salt Lake City, says he hit the pinnacle of his sex life — or at least one of them — last summer, when his parents took the two kids over a long weekend for the first time since COVID hit.
“My wife and I flew to New Orleans and stayed out late on Frenchmen Street,” he says. “Back in our hotel room, I shot a series of sexy photos of her — which I’d been threatening to do for years, or a decade maybe. And it led to mind-erasing sex.”
After a year of just grinding away at home, he says, “it was everything we needed.”
Hitting your sexual peak in middle age isn’t a rarity. In a recent OnePoll survey, 45 percent of people reported having the best sex of their lives as they’ve aged, long past the years when pop culture and song lyrics tell us will be our prime sexy-time years.
Why? Because in our 40s and 50s, context matters more than carnal hydraulics.
“Sex, when you're young, is often mostly about getting to sleep with someone hot, and performing well,” says New York City-based sex therapist Stephen Snyder, M.D., author of Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship.
Not because those things don’t matter to us anymore. But our priorities change.
For one thing, you and your partner are more likely to know exactly what feels good to you, and how to do the things that will get your partner (and yourself) off.
And then there’s humor. You might be more confident in yourself than you were in earlier years, and able to laugh at yourself in the act — which can be a surprising aphrodisiac.
Sung C., a 41-year-old commercial real estate developer in Ohio, found this out recently when he had a quickie with his wife in the closed-out backroom of a bar, with a mechanical bull looking on.
“We were laughing so hard,” he says. “I didn’t think I had that in me.”
Maturity, trust and novel circumstances all add up to memorable sex in middle age. But don't forget to unleash your inner teenager, Snyder says.
“Don't just kiss your partner goodnight. Instead, grab them, kiss them deeply, reach inside their shirt — whatever turns you on — just for a minute or two, then fall asleep still a little bit turned on.”
In sex therapy, Snyder says, “We call this ‘simmering.’ Teenagers do it all the time. Older couples should do the same. Just a minute or two every day can pay off big-time in quality sex later on.”
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