Do Old People Have Better Sex? Aging Leads To Better Quality Of Intimate Acts

It’s long been thought that the older a person gets, the more their sex life deteriorates. However, some older people actually have thriving sex lives filled with fun and exhilarating sexual activity, CNN reported on Friday. A new study analyzed sexual activity among people ages 20 to 93 and found that although elderly people don’t have sex as frequently as they get older, they were still having quality and enjoyable experiences when they did engage in sexual activity.

The study asked 6,000 participants to rate the sexual aspects of their current lives. The basic findings showed the quality of a sex life does get worse with age, mostly due to declining health and sexual functioning. However, researchers discovered people 60 and up were more concerned with the quality of their sexual encounters as opposed to the quantity, which was a factor that took precedence among young adults.

Researchers concluded that changing priorities during the aging process is what led to the decline in sex people were having as they got older. For instance, older people placed less importance on how often they had sex. However, they viewed the amount of thought and effort invested in sexual activity to be more important, causing them to report more satisfying and meaningful experiences than when they were younger.

Because of changing sexual priorities, increased knowledge, skill and preferences, older people were actually found to have better quality sex lives when compared to younger adults, despite having sex less frequently.

“Since wisdom is ‘the quality of having experience, knowledge and good judgment,’ our study suggests that life experience is fostering sexual wisdom,” researchers Miri Forbes, Nicholas Eaton and Robert Krueger wrote in the report.

Despite societal stigmas regarding older people and sex, elderly folks were also just as experimental when they have sex as young people. A 2013 study found interests in sex declined among people 57 to 85 years old, but 85-year-olds still reported having sex at least one time within a year. About a third of 75 to 85-year-olds admitted to giving or receiving oral sex within a year. The study said the decreasing sexual interest among elderly adults was mostly due to declining health and lack of a partner.