Last week I did a Facebook Live about seven secrets to having the best sex of your life after 50. The first secret was radical honesty. Then a gentleman in the comments gave me a reason to go much deeper into what I mean by that.
Sex, he pointed out, has been completely different with every partner he’s had. Each relationship contained its own special pieces, and if he could somehow gather all the best parts of those experiences together, that might constitute the best sex of his life.
Let’s talk about this.
Of course sex is different with every person. How could it possibly be otherwise? Each of us walks into the bedroom carrying a completely unique body, nervous system, emotional history, libido, imagination, intellect and spirit. Add chemistry, polarity, timing, trust, hormones, relationship history and whatever mysterious alchemy makes us want to crawl inside one human being while feeling perfectly friendly toward another, and it’s rather miraculous that any two people manage to figure each other out at all.
And yet, sometimes we do. Sometimes we meet someone who awakens something in us that nobody else ever has. Maybe one lover made you feel completely uninhibited. Maybe another could make you laugh until sex became ridiculous and wonderful. Maybe someone made you feel exquisitely beautiful. Maybe there was a person with whom you experienced a depth of presence that made time disappear. Maybe you once experienced that strange, delicious dissolution of separateness we talk about in Tantra, when for a moment you weren’t entirely sure where you ended and the other person began.
Here’s the tricky part: that person may not have been a particularly good life partner for you. Ah, humanity. Extraordinary sexual connection does not automatically equal extraordinary life compatibility. The person who takes you to God might also be someone you absolutely should not share a checking account with. But that doesn’t make what happened between you meaningless.
Gather the gems.
I think one of the great privileges of getting older is that we have a history to draw from. We’ve lived. We’ve loved. We’ve had experiences that taught us something about ourselves, whether we realized it at the time or not. Instead of looking backward and thinking, “Why can’t my partner be more like that person?” ask a much more useful question: “What exactly was so precious about that experience?”
Was it freedom? Surrender? Playfulness? Feeling intensely desired? Slowness? Adventure? Safety? Spiritual connection? Was it the freedom to be completely outrageous without feeling judged? Was it lying together afterward with absolutely nowhere else to be? Was it a particular kind of touch? Was it being able to ask for exactly what you wanted without embarrassment?
Get underneath the person and find the quality. The gem isn’t really about your former lover anymore. The gem belongs to you. It tells you something about the conditions under which your erotic self comes alive.
Radical honesty means being willing to know that about yourself, but it doesn’t stop there. Radical honesty also means being willing to acknowledge how important those things actually are to you. That’s harder. It’s relatively easy to say, “Oh, I really enjoy long, slow sex.” It’s much more vulnerable to say, “Lingering together after orgasm makes me feel profoundly connected to you. When we immediately move on, I miss something that is spiritually and emotionally important to me.”
Those are two very different conversations. One communicates a sexual preference; the other reveals your heart. If we’re going to ask our partners to meet us more deeply, we have to give them a fighting chance of understanding what we’re actually asking for. Your partner cannot honor something you’ve never had the courage to reveal.
That doesn’t mean presenting them with a list of all your previous lovers and the wonderful things your exes did in bed. Please don’t. The point of gathering the gems is not to compare lovers. It’s to harvest wisdom from your own erotic history. Take the person out of the story and bring the wisdom home.
Maybe what you learned from one relationship was that you need playfulness. Maybe another taught you how important erotic surrender is to you. Maybe someone else showed you that you crave novelty. Maybe you discovered that sex becomes sacred for you when there is enough time to stop performing and simply be present. Now you know something about yourself. Tell your partner.
And then—and this is crucial—invite their curiosity rather than demanding their compliance. You might say, “I’ve realized something about myself that I want to share with you,” or, “I had an experience years ago that taught me how important this feeling is to me.” Maybe it’s simply, “I’d love to explore this together and see what happens,” or, “I want to try something with you.” That’s very different from, “This is what I need you to start doing.”
You are opening a door, and your partner gets to decide whether they want to walk through it with you. Sometimes they will. Sometimes they’ll surprise you. Sometimes they’ll discover that something they initially thought sounded ridiculous is actually delicious. And sometimes they’ll say no. Radical honesty has to make room for that too, because the goal isn’t to mold another human being into your perfect lover. The goal is to create enough truth between you that both people can show up as themselves.
This is also where, for some couples, the conversation may eventually wander into territory our culture still gets very nervous about: ethical non-monogamy. I don’t believe ethical non-monogamy is right for everyone. It requires enormous amounts of communication, consent, self-awareness, emotional responsibility and care. Done carelessly, it can create tremendous pain. Entered into carefully, mindfully and mutually, however, it can also offer profound freedom.
There is something breathtaking to me about loving another human being without confusing love with ownership. To be able to say, “I love you enough to want you to be fully alive, even when every part of your aliveness does not originate with me,” can be an extraordinary expression of love.
That does not mean abandoning agreements. Quite the opposite. Ethical non-monogamy asks us to become exquisitely clear about agreements, boundaries, honesty, sexual health, jealousy, attachment, responsibility and consent. And it certainly isn’t a clever workaround for getting something your partner doesn’t want to provide. It has to be something both people are genuinely free to choose.
For some couples, opening a relationship may create possibilities neither person imagined. For others, monogamy itself is the deeply desired container, and the work becomes discovering how much unexplored territory still exists between two people who have chosen one another. Either way, the principle underneath it is the same: tell the truth.
Tell yourself the truth about what you’ve loved, what you’ve missed and what makes you come alive. Gather the gems from the lovers and experiences that helped you discover those things. Then bring those gems into the relationship you have now—not as comparisons, not as weapons and not as demands, but as information about your own heart. Invite your partner’s curiosity.
I absolutely believe after 50 is the ripest season for the best sex of our lives, because by now, we’ve accumulated enough life to have some idea who the hell we are.
The question is whether we’re brave enough to tell the truth about it, and make love with it.
I’m Dakini Leah
I help committed couples over 50 redefine their sexual intimacy so they can have the deep connection and satisfaction they crave and deserve.
Let’s connect. Call or text 970-462-9609 to see if you qualify for a complimentary discovery session.
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