Study: Elderly people are having more sex than you think

                                                                                  Photo: Courtesy

 

It's not a great thought coming up to Valentines' Day... but your gran could be having more frequent sex than you. Or maybe enjoying it more. Those are the surprising results from a study published this week that surveyed over 6,000 50-90 year olds in England.

She's probably having more sex than you thought

A lot of sex surveys stop measuring what people do in bed after the age of 45. But people go on having sex for longer than that.

31% of women aged 50-90 have sex at least twice a month, the study found. And 54% of men over 50 have sex at least twice a month.

A quarter of 16-44 year old women have sex once or less a month, so these young women could well be having less sex than their grandparents.

And she is enjoying it more than you.

As women get older, their sexual satisfaction actually INCREASED, researchers found.

Men got less satisfied with sex as they got older. And a fifth of men were dissatisfied with sex fairly consistently from 50 to 90.

Approximately 15% of sexually active women aged 50-59 were dissatisfied with sex lead researcher David Lee said. That fell to about 5% of sexually-active 80-89 year old women. Astonishingly that is lower than the dissatisfaction rates reported by sexually active women aged 16 to 44 - 12% of them were unhappy with their sex life according to the National Survey.

She likes kissing just as much as 40 years ago

Interest in kissing and petting didn't change much as people got older. Older people reported the same amount of affection as younger people. Roughly 31% of men and 20% of women reported kissing and petting on a regular basis.

Research into long-term successful relationships shows that physical affection helps partners remain intensely in love with each other. That means it might be the key to success in marriages and partnerships that have survived into old age.