Senior Sex, The Elephant In The Room

Couples lying awake at 2 a.m., each pretending to be asleep. Widows untouched for years because no one told them it was permitted. Doctors who will discuss anything but this. A culture that pretends sexuality has an expiration date - when bodies, hearts, and the longing for connection all say otherwise.In Senior Sex: The Elephant in the Room, clinical psychologist Ivan Gulas confronts the conversation that medicine, marriage, and modern culture have all refused to have. Drawing decades of clinical practice - and on his own life as a man in his late seventies, married for fifty-seven years - Gulas writes with the directness of someone who has run out of patience for the silence.This is not a self-help guide. It offers no techniques and no prescriptions. What it offers is rarer: a vocabulary for the questions older adults have been carrying alone for years, and a clinical framework - the Comfort Model and Stress Model of monogamy - that helps couples stop blaming each other for what is actually a structural collision between long marriages and aging bodies.Across twenty-six chapters, Gulas takes up topics most books on aging refuse to address: the biology no one wants to acknowledge, the asymmetry of desire when one partner can no longer participate, the aftermath of prostate surgery and pelvic pain, the loneliness of widowhood, the ethics of seeking sexual fulfillment outside a marriage when one partner is permanently incapacitated, and the conversations adult children would prefer not to have about their aging parents’ inner lives.Written with the empathy of a clinician and the honesty of a participant, Senior Sex is for the couple who have run out of words for what they have lost; for the widow who is healthy and vital and starving for touch; for the husband whose body has betrayed him; for the wife who still wants what her partner can no longer give. It is also for the doctors, therapists, nurses, social workers, and clergy who serve older adults and have no idea where to begin the conversation.