Waving a bright pink vibrator, Sylvia worries about one of her neighbours walking past the window. She is 81, and she and her husband, Paul, who is 73, started to use sex toys about 10 years ago, mainly because Sylvia needed a bit more stimulation to become aroused. The pink vibrator is new. “I haven’t really, to coin a phrase, got to grips with it,” she says, laughing. We speak one evening over Zoom, Sylvia and Paul sitting close together in their living room. They have been married for 32 years, and sex has remained important to them. Paul stresses that he prefers to call it “making love”. “We don’t do ‘sex’ – sex is purely physical – we are genuinely sharing our love for each other,” he says. The first time they made love, he says, “it was a remarkably intense physical and emotional experience.”
Sylvia rolls her eyes: “He’s much more romantic than I am.” She has always, she says, “had a very lively libido”. They used to have sex most days, but Sylvia is still feeling the effects of Covid, so it’s down to every 10 days or so. She has, she says, “an arthritic knee, which is a bit of a nuisance”, and arthritis in her wrists can make some previous positions harder. “I think it’s been well over a year since you were on top of me, and it’s a position we both like,” says Paul to Sylvia. “That’s the age impact,” she says. But both agree that their connection, their intimacy, is deeper now. “Over 30-odd years, we’ve learned what works, what doesn’t,” says Paul. “We have a real sense of intimacy.”
