Olive: Finding Sexual Pleasure at age 45

Olive is a 61-year-old professional woman with long, greying hair. Her personality matches her smiling brown eyes, warm and gracious with a vibrant laugh. I can easily imagine her as a pretty, lithe athlete and cheerleader in high school surrounded by her school girlfriends and her large, Puerto Rican family. She tells me that when her closest cousin got pregnant at age 16, she avoided sex herself until she was age 22. “It was not going to happen to me. I wasn’t worried about it from the Church perspective; it was about safety and about getting pregnant. We all had boyfriends, and we all did the heavy petting, but I was so anxious. All my friends had sex before me. We talked about it and giggled.”

In her world of peers, being sexual was a dangerous exploration and fodder for fun girl-talk. But, at home she observed a more confusing experience of sex. Her father was physically abusive towards her mother. During episodes of violence, Olive would take her two younger siblings into her room to protect them. “My father would hit her and then you’d hear them having sex. I didn’t understand that. When I got older my father was inappropriate with the things that he would say to me, like ‘Oh your mother’s frigid,’ or, ‘Your mom’s not good in bed.’ I remember just cringing inside like, what am I supposed to say. I mean it was my dad.” 

In college, she found the Chicano and women’s movements. “I was coming out of a very machismo culture. My dad was very machismo. My mom, on the other hand, told me not to let anyone tell me I could not do something because I was a woman.” While a student, she had her share of what later would be called MeToo events. For example, she joined the Latin American studies class that read novels in Spanish. “The professor called me in and was pretty much asking for the favor of sex. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he said, ‘If you don’t, I will fail you.’ ‘You will fail me? I want to study.’ I just dropped the class. I never felt like I could tell anybody. When I hear about the MeToo movement, I remember when those things happened to me. I applaud women who are having the courage to come out and at least talk about those things.”

At 22, she decided to have sex. “I remember when I decided I was going to do it. I was like, ‘Ok, it’s time. I just have to have sex.’ I wasn’t seeing anybody so I just picked a guy. It’s sad but I wanted to get it over with. The sex was really uneventful and dumb. But I wanted to understand the context of the conversation that people were having. I was curious.” After that, she had a first love relationship, and, over her lifetime, she has had about ten partners, both male and female.

Olive has been married twice. Sex with her first husband felt dull. “To me it felt more like something you had to do. It was just part of getting through the marriage. Like, ‘Ok, alright, let’s just do it. I don’t care.’ I never felt a sense of intimacy with him. But it’s interesting because if you were with your girlfriends and talking about it you would say it was great, just because you had to.” Olive and her husband divorced after he had had an affair. She describes him as a good guy and a good father, even as her friend, but says he was not a good partner.

When I ask her about masturbation and orgasm she responds, “That didn’t happen for me. There wasn’t anyone talking about that with me.” She can’t even recall if she had orgasms in her first marriage. “If I did, it was uneventful. I just really can’t remember,” she sighs. “I didn’t know that sex wasn’t just about the guy.” She would not discover pleasurable sex and masturbation until later in life. First, she would try sex with women.

After her marriage, she wondered if perhaps she was a lesbian. “I had never been all that sexual of a person. So, I tried women. But that did not work out,” she chuckles. “It was ok but I wasn’t sexually aroused. I wasn’t being honest with myself. The truth is that I really like having sex with men. I do. I just didn’t pick the right one. And I wasn’t the kind of woman that could just have sex with anyone because of sexual diseases and getting pregnant. I could never ask a guy if he’d had a test, but I was worried about it.”

Olive sounded just like many of my patients when she said, “I was trying to see what sex would be like. And it was just like, ‘eh.’ It wasn’t that big of a deal. It was so fast, like, ‘Ok, was that it?’ It was so duh. I can’t say I felt like a euphoria or excited about it. Because it wasn’t that great.” Before her forties, she had had two partners with whom she had been in love, yet the sex was still disappointing. She experienced desire and arousal but no orgasm. Without the practice of masturbation, she had relied on either luck or a talented partner to experience an orgasm. And, in her case, neither one had happened. Yet she had sung a different tune with her friends, sharing with them how great sex had been. I have witnessed high school girls bragging to each other about the awesome sex with their boyfriends; then later, some of those same girls would tell me, privately, that sex was boring. Unlike many of my patients, Olive had not been having sex in order to feel loved or to keep her boyfriend. At least, originally, she had approached sex with curiosity. But when sex did not live up to its reputation, she blamed herself, again, just like many of the teenagers in my clinic. She concluded that she was never that sexual of a woman and that perhaps she was a lesbian.

How does Olive discover satisfying sex later in her life? She meets a man who can talk about sex and help her to explore her sexuality. It is a beautiful story because she finds happiness. Yet, I cannot help but point out that her story is like a classic fairy tale. Her handsome prince notices her and shows her a world of beauty and adventure. Wow. As women, do we want to raise our girls to hopefully stumble upon a partner who will teach them about sex in their own bodies? What if someone had talked to Olive about masturbation and orgasm when she was younger? What if she had been raised to feel comfortable talking about sex, at least enough to ask a man if he had been tested for STIs ? What if she had been raised to expect sex to be pleasurable for her? Would she have been less likely to settle for sex that was, to quote her, “eh?”

Olive is a woman who had the brains and strength to avoid unwanted pregnancy and to walk out of a number of potentially abusive situations. Yet, even for her, she did not know how to advocate for her own sexual pleasure. She didn’t even know what sexual pleasure could be for her. We may think that public self-confidence translates into the bedroom. But not always. Olive is a good example of a strong, outspoken woman who did not speak up for herself sexually.

A different woman I interviewed assured me that the world of sex for her daughters is different. “They are more comfortable with their bodies and feel more empowered,” she assured me. I happen to know her 29-year-old daughter. When next I saw the daughter, I told her about my sexual life story interviews. Unprompted, she said, “Oh, this is so needed, Jane. It takes like until you're 30 to figure it out. We’re just faking it like our mothers did. Plus, with all the porn now, it gives everyone these false images, like sex is supposed to be like that. That makes it even harder to figure out what works for us.”

Back to Olive - by the time she met her second husband, she was in menopause. “I had my last period at 44, just before I met my second husband. I felt great! I would hear about hot flashes and all this moodiness, but I thought it was great. I didn’t have the messiness of periods or feel bloated and gross half the time. I felt like my body was more available. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only woman who can say that.”

Olive had known her second husband years previously. “I knew he was a player. He was always that person.” Soon into their dating they were having long talks about sex – whom they had slept with, their disease risk. “I had never had that conversation with anybody. It was a long, mature conversation.” She credits him with bringing the communication to the relationship. Before long, the talks centered on the things they were going to do together in bed. “He was more adventuresome. He always wanted to talk about sex. He was demanding. It was just fun. There was also a lot of intimacy, a lot of foreplay, really talking to each other, looking deeply into each other’s eyes. We played around with the romantic side of it. There were candles. It felt very magical. We couldn’t wait for the evening to come because we were going to have our time.” Up until that time, she did not know she could experience such a sexual relationship. “The first time I ever truly enjoyed sex was with him. It was fun. That was it. We had a lot of fun having sex together. I did different things with him I’d never done before. We would talk about it. I was absolutely madly, truly in love with him. We were totally connected. We could talk for hours. We had great intimacy, and he was truly a friend.”

She explains that her second husband allowed her to soften; she didn’t need to be responsible and in control. Beginning as a girl protecting her brothers from the drunken rages of her abusive father, she had become a woman always watching for danger and keeping things together. “He was probably the first person I’d been around that I felt really had my back. I could let go because someone else was going to take charge. It was huge.”

“But it was so short, because then he got sick. It was less than a year from his diagnosis until his death.” After a decade together, he died.

With tears spilling from her eyes, Olive tells me about experiencing the loss in her body. She offers that the first time she ever masturbated was after her husband died. She was 52 years old, vibrant, healthy and without the love of her life. “And,” she says, “It wasn’t until after he died that I started having problems associated with menopause, maybe because I wasn’t having sex. The vaginal dryness, not on the inside but on the outside, is still, oh god, I just cannot keep it lubricated. I tried the Estring [vaginal estrogen] but it did nothing. And I can’t use anything with dimethicone. I’m so tired. I don’t know what else to do. I’ve talked with everyone.” I ask her if any health care providers have helped. “No. I can’t remember a health care provider asking me. After [my husband] died it got even worse. ‘Oh, she’s a widow.’ Hello! I was only 52 when he died. They don’t ask you.”

For the past few years, she has been with a new partner. She believes that his libido and erectile function are compromised due to both mourning the death of his wife from cancer and his own health issues. “I care about him, and I love him. He’s the sweetest man. He’s funny. We can have a good time together. It’s not going to be the end of the world if we don’t [have sex].”

What does Olive wish someone had told her as an adolescent? “‘Sex can be fun. It can be great. You have a voice in it. You get to decide some things, too. It’s not just about the guy.’ I don’t think I ever really knew that part. ‘It’s good to worry about things like sexual diseases and pregnancy. Keep your head about you on that. But hold out until you have somebody you can actually talk to. Guys are interested in talking about sex, too.’ I think about some of my young guy friends; they were probably confused, too. Probably nobody ever talked to them either. A good partner is somebody who’s interested in you, who listens when you say, ‘Oh that hurt.’ Someone who takes cues and is interested in your orgasm, wanting to please you as well, so it is mutual. I’ve learned how important intimacy is. ‘You need somebody who is at least talking to you, who is interested in how you’re going to feel.’”