Menopause involves a lot of changes that can affect your sexuality, your intimacy, your body image, and your relationship/marriage. But menopause doesn’t have to mean the end of sex.
The French approach: The notion of a linear decline in sexual desire with aging is absent from French culture, which is the culture I was born and raised in until adulthood. You don’t need to give up on sex after menopause. Sexuality and pleasure are not the monopoly of youth. This is the French approach I bring to my work with menopausal women and their lovers.
Peri-menopause, with all its varied and humbling features, can start early for some women, sometimes as early as forty. The more common features include night sweats, a short fuse (you’d have a short fuse after a few wet nights!), headaches (dehydration from all that spontaneous sweating), discomfort with intercourse, weight gain, and foggy brain. Other less talked about peculiarities include no longer liking red wine, difficulty with orgasms, what I call ‘no-reason anxiety,’ which grips you upon awakening until you realize there’s nothing to be anxious about, increased vulnerability to altitude sickness, and many other vagaries such as less interest in sexual frolicking.
I offer sex therapy services to people in Marin County and the San Francisco Bay Area, and internationally, via phone or Skype.
Menopause doesn’t mean you cease to be a sexual person if you don’t want it to. Think you might want to work with me? Let’s talk about it further. Contact me
Here’s a great article about sex and aging: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/magazine/sex-old-age.html