There’s a particular look people give you when you mention, in passing, that intimacy is still part of your life at 65, or 72, or 80. It’s a small, involuntary flicker of surprise, quickly covered over with politeness. I’ve watched it happen to friends of mine at dinner parties. I suspect some of you have watched it happen to yourselves in the mirror, that same flicker turned inward, as though wanting closeness at this age were something to be a little embarrassed about, rather than simply true.

Let’s deal with the myth plainly, because the research on this is now genuinely extensive, and it says something quite different from what the culture at large assumes. A large US national poll found that around 40 per cent of people aged 65 to 80 remain sexually active, and – this is the part I want you to sit with – nearly two-thirds of older adults say they’re interested in sex, whether or not they currently have a partner to share it with. A separate large-scale review of the research, published in Sexual Medicine Reviews, concluded that adults remain sexually active well into their 70s and 80s, and that the physical changes of ageing don’t inevitably switch that off. One study of adults 60 and over found sexual activity was still reported by 73 per cent of those in the 60-to-66 bracket. Another, interviewing 100 single adults aged 60 to 83, found 97 per cent said sexual intimacy mattered to them in a relationship, and nearly three-quarters said they wouldn’t consider dating someone who wasn’t open to it either. That’s not a generation quietly winding down. That’s a generation being remarkably clear about what it still wants.

What actually changes isn’t desire — it’s the shape of it

Here’s the more interesting, more useful finding buried in that same research, and the one I think gets missed most often: what shifts with age generally isn’t whether people want intimacy, but how they experience and express it. As one psychologist not involved in the research put it, older adults don’t become asexual, they may simply become less sexual in the narrower, intercourse-only sense – while the desire for closeness itself remains fully intact. Researchers reviewing decades of studies noted that as people age, sexuality tends to become more multidimensional: more kissing, more touch, more shared activity and physical closeness, with intimacy and connection often mattering more than genital function specifically. Sexual satisfaction, in other words, doesn’t reliably track with frequency. It tracks with emotional closeness, with feeling genuinely seen by the person beside you.

I think this reframe matters enormously, because so much of the shame people carry into their 60s and 70s isn’t really about desire fading. It’s about desire changing shape while the cultural script insists it should have vanished entirely by now, leaving people quietly convinced something’s wrong with them for still wanting what they want.

The barriers are real, and they’re not really about age at all

None of this means every 65-year-old is having, or wants, the same sex life they had at 30, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours either. But the research is fairly consistent that the things which actually get in the way have very little to do with the number of candles on your last cake. Health conditions, certain medications, and — this one shows up again and again — partner availability, particularly for women, who are considerably more likely than men to find themselves single later in life through widowhood, are the real determining factors. One survey found that among partnered adults over 65, nearly half remained sexually active in the past six months; among unpartnered women in the same age bracket, that figure dropped to just 1 per cent. That’s not desire disappearing. That’s a genuine, structural gap in who has an available, willing partner to share intimacy with, and it deserves to be named as exactly that rather than folded into a vague story about ageing bodies losing interest.

What I’d actually want you to take from this

If you’re someone who still wants closeness, romance, touch, and yes, sex, at this stage of life, the research is unambiguous: you are not the exception. You are, by a considerable margin, the norm, sitting quietly among a great many people making exactly the same assumption about themselves that you might be making right now, each of you privately convinced you’re the odd one out.

And if that desire has changed shape for you — if it now looks more like long, unhurried touch than anything else, more like the particular comfort of someone’s hand finding yours in the dark — that isn’t a lesser version of what you had before. According to the people who’ve actually studied this properly, it might just be sexuality doing exactly what it’s supposed to do as we age: becoming less about performance, and more about presence.

Nobody told desire it had a retirement age. It never got the memo, and neither, I’d wager, have you.

Have a question for Bess? Write to her at community@startsat60.com with “Dear Bess” in the subject line.