(NOTE CONTENT) While most people don’t think about sex in their golden years — or don’t want to think about it when it comes to other people — psychologists say they should.
Well, about the former, not the latter.
Specifically, a new study that spanned decades revealed that people who had an optimistic view of their own sex life in the years before they reached, shall we say, “a certain age,” actually had better sex lives than those who just bought into misconceptions that once you’re old, bedrooms are just for sleeping.
In the study, which was published in the journal The Gerontologist,researchers concluded, “Sexually optimistic participants reported more sexual satisfaction and higher sexual frequency a decade later.”
They added that as the participants’ bodies aged, “functional limitations” did set in, but even as those aches and pains made getting around more difficult, they didn’t necessarily translate into making getting it on more difficult.
While such limitations “tended to suppress sexual frequency for women, the probability of having weekly sex was significantly higher among such women if they had high rather than low sexual expectations.”
So seeing your sex life in a “glass half full” prism had its benefits in the bedroom, whereas negative predictions about doing the deed in your later years tended to become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for those subjects who participated in the study.