Is My Libido About to Fall off a Cliff?

Investigating the claim that older women don't want sex.

Quick note: It’s especially hard to grow an anonymous newsletter. If you enjoy reading To the Bed, please share it! Also, I have had requests for an Ask Me Anything post. Feel free to ask me questions in the comments — or submit questions anonymously here — and I’ll address them next week.

Over the summer, like every other 40-something woman I know, I read All Fours by Miranda July. Or, rather, I inhaled it. It seemed like she wrote the book for me — her ambivalence about marriage, her awakening sexuality, and her fear over what was to come in perimenopause all deeply resonated.

Some of what I read terrified me. After an appointment with her gynecologist, July’s unnamed protagonist finds a graph online titled “Sex Hormones Over Life Span” that suggests that, at age 45, her estrogen levels — and therefore, she concludes, her libido — will precipitously drop, never to be seen again.

“We’re about to fall off a cliff,” she tells a friend. “We’re going to be totally different people in a few years.”

This was not welcome news to me. I kept wondering: How many months do I have left? How many more fun sexual encounters will I get to have before I dry up and never want to see a penis again? Maybe this is why I’ve been having so much sex lately: I fear I’m entering the sunset of my sexual life, even though the sun only rose about three hours ago. Am I about to become Norway during an endless January?

No. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to believe it — and I also don’t actually believe it. Because the notion that female sex drive dies in middle age is woefully inaccurate. Yes, older women sometimes do lose interest in sex — but it’s typically not because their bodies are failing them.

Just like July’s protagonist, I, too, saw my gynecologist recently and I asked him what would happen to my libido during and after perimenopause. He reassured me that although there are certainly hormonal changes in my future, hormones are not the main driver of sexual desire. The main determinant of female sex drive, he said, is what’s going on in a woman’s life. (Yes, I may be the last woman on earth to have a male gynecologist, but I love him.)

Data supports his claim. Studies that have tracked women’s sex hormones over time haven’t found a consistent relationship between hormone levels and sex drive. (Similarly, in men, testosterone levels are not consistently related to libido.) Desire is now thought to be largely shaped by context, not biology. And in fact, some older women find that their sex drive increases with age because of their changing life circumstances — they don’t have to worry about getting pregnant and are no longer constantly being touched by young children.

Or some, like me, may suddenly find themselves single again and intrigued by new opportunities. I had zero interest in sex throughout my marriage. Then, a few months ago, as I pondered the freedom that divorce might bring, my desire lit up like a Christmas tree. Just thinking about sex can completely soak my underwear. (Anecdotally, I find that my desire peaks around the time of ovulation, so clearly, hormones play a role — but these monthly fluctuations are minor compared to the changes I’ve observed as a result of my divorce.)

Sex is a totally different experience for me now, too. My husband and I almost always had to use lubricant because I hardly ever got wet enough. By contrast, the other day, I reached for my vibrator while in bed with my A/C repairman and accidentally grabbed the lube and he actually laughed at me. “I don’t think we need that,” he said.

Of course, not all older women have these experiences. Many find that their sex drive dwindles with age. But that’s not necessarily driven by biology — it’s often a direct result of circumstance. In one large study, researchers surveyed more than 24,000 postmenopausal women, asking them what prevented them from having more sex, and only 16 percent blamed low sex drive. The primary causes of lack of sex? Their partners had either died, were unwell, or were experiencing sexual dysfunction themselves. Menopause-related symptoms such as vaginal dryness and pain were contributing factors, but they were not nearly as common.

A partner’s erectile dysfunction can be a big issue. A friend of mine recently started sleeping with a guy who can’t stay hard, and …. well, she just canceled her next date with him. Oral sex and sex toys are wonderful! But sometimes, you really want an actual penis inside you for more than five minutes. In a small qualitative study, older women shared the various reasons for their lack of interest in sex. A common theme was that their partners had difficulty maintaining an erection long enough for them to orgasm — and that their partners then became defensive or frustrated, making the whole experience miserable.

Of course women will have less sex if this starts happening. Who wants sex if it’s unsatisfying and you have to constantly stroke your partner’s ego? Perhaps, too, over time, women give up on sex because they realize they’ve never been, and never will be, a priority. The more time you spend in a world that consistently prioritizes men’s pleasure over your own, the more your rage will fester, and the less appealing men — and sex — will become.

Still, there’s reason for hope. I’m in a unique position right now to be able to pick my lovers and discard the ones that don’t do it for me; no wonder I’m constantly horny, and I hope things stay that way. I’m also getting more assertive, which means my sexual needs are increasingly being met. (We should all speak up about what we like; don’t miss this fantastic essay by

Rebecca Woolf

.) But more than anything else, I am deeply reassured to learn that my libido does not have a biologically determined expiration date — that we’re not all doomed to sexless lives once we turn 45. We have time, and we also have control over the factors that shape our desire. We can’t control everything, of course. And we might have to make hard decisions and speak up for ourselves in ways we never have. But we are certainly not powerless. And I, for one, am going to do everything I can to ensure that the flame of my desire does not go out anytime soon.