"How to LOve Someone Again After Infidelity"

While this article speaks much to the sexuality part, I would suggest that the lack of honesty and integrity in the offending spouse might be more important to the offended. The title does not say multiple affairs, or the EQ, etc.

Stephen Snyder M.D.

How to Love Someone Again After Infidelity

Reading the new book, "The State of Affairs"

Posted Nov 08, 2017

Affairs don’t typically spell the end of a marriage. Precise data are hard to come by, but research suggests that the majority of couples stay together after infidelity.1,2  

But what are the chances of being happy again, after an affair? Or for rebuilding trust? For that matter, what does it even mean to rebuild trust after infidelity?  

The Erotic Equation

In 2006, couples therapist Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity caused a stir among sex and relationship therapists (and their clients) by suggesting that married sex was more difficult than most people realized. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell,3 she saw a fundamental contradiction at the heart of erotic marriage. 

Modern couples, she noted, were driven to satisfy two fundamentally opposite impulses—the yearning for safety and the longing for adventure. As she put it, “Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage." Perhaps the reason conventional couples therapy is often helpless to revive sexless relationships is because the project to unite the erotic and the domestic was flawed from the start.

What saved Mating in Captivity from being a far gloomier book was the sheer force of Perel’s personality — exuberant, playful, with a European-born feel for the ironic. Hearing Perel speak was often so much fun that people tended to overlook the seriousness of her message. 

The advice she gave to people in erotically frustrated marriages was challenging: Allow yourself to feel more deeply the otherness of your partner. You never really possess each other. You just think you do.

That’s a difficult thing to keep in mind, but for some people, it can be more erotic. As she says, how can you desire what you already possess? Give up the illusion of possessing the other person, and eros might have a better chance.   

After the Affair

It's not surprising that Perel’s next book, The State of Affairs, would be about marital infidelity. Nothing makes you realize you don’t fully possess someone like finding out they’ve been sleeping with someone else. Infidelity surely ranks high on anyone’s list of the major causes of human misery. In the book, Perel herself makes an analogy to cancer. 

In recent years, she tells us, her practice has been exclusively devoted to couples affected by infidelity. So I was eager to hear what she had to say about whether and how couples can find happiness after an affair, or whether and how couples might learn to trust again.

Source: photo credit: Karen Harms

Since her previous book so often suggested acknowledging the “otherness” of your partner, I wondered what she might recommend to couples trying to heal from this ultimate act of otherness.

After an affair, according to Perel, couples that stay together fall into three categories: sufferers, builders, andexplorers.

For sufferers, the affair remains a black hole permanently fixed at the center of the relationship. What follows can be a lifetime of emotional pain.

Builders, relieved to have put it in the past, simply soldier on. The affair is sealed over, and nobody goes there again.

It’s the third category, the explorers, that most interests Perel. If I understand her correctly, they’re like the couples in Mating in Captivity who learned to draw erotic inspiration from each other’s "otherness," only more so, since there's no otherness quite like that of an unfaithful partner. 

It’s not easy, she notes, to be an explorer: You have to realize that every marriage is built on shifting sand, and that no relationship is entirely safe from jealousy or betrayal. But it’s the explorers, she contends, who emerge from the trauma most fully alive.

This is a challenging perspective, darker than I think most American readers will feel comfortable with. But she argues it with exceptional clarity, humor, and grace.

A Most Dangerous Game

The State of Affairs is full of stories of people who became more fully human as the result of an affair: The over-responsible married woman who discovers her inner rebellious child when she falls head over heels for a tattooed landscaper. The husband who is a dutiful provider both in and out of the bedroom, but finds that having paid a stripper for a lap dance, he can for the first time in his life simply receive.  

I think most readers would find all this to be well and good, as long as these people’s emotional growth left them better able to tolerate ordinary monogamy, but Perel has never been comfortable accepting such limits. Instead, she leaves her subjects free to figure out for themselves how to live their lives. We hear from all three points of the triangle: those who’ve secretly introduced a third person into the relationship; those who’ve later discovered the existence of a third; and, in one especially poignant chapter, those who have been the third.

Erotic love, she seems to say, is a dangerous game — and always will be. Accept that fact, and you’ll be more likely to recover from infidelity with your faith intact.

How much help will this book provide, for couples trying to find their way back together after an affair? Many readers will find it frustrating, since it contains no easy answers. But anyone affected by infidelity — i.e. most of us, in one way or another — will surely recognize themselves in it.

References

1. Parnass S: The Impact of Extramarital Relationships on the Continuation of Marriages. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 21: 100-115, 1995. 

2. Haltzman S: The Secrets of Surviving Infidelity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 

3. Mitchell S A: Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. 

For those with fibromyalgia ~~ from 2003

This is research from 2003. 

Cognitive Function & Fibromyalgia

Monday, April 28, 2003

By: Jennifer Glass, Ph.D Denise Park, Ph.D,

Reprinted from FMresearch from 2003Online

“I can deal with the pain, but the memory and thinking problems really worry me.”
“The physical symptoms weren’t as frightening as the memory problems.”
“The most devastating effect for me has been the cognitive impairment.”
If you have fibromyalgia (FM), then these quotes may describe what you have felt as well. Many FM patients complain of cognitive (or mental) symptoms such as memory failures (both long-term and short-term), difficulties with attention, and with finding the right words. Our research focuses on these cognitive problems in FM patients.

Our research shows that there really is cognitive dysfunction in FM patients. This is important because even though FM patients report cognitive symptoms, physicians and scientists must consider the possibility that because FM patients experience many symptoms, there may be a tendency to mistake normal, everyday lapses on cognition as something more serious. However, we have found that FM patients perform more poorly than age- and education-matched controls on tests of several different types of cognitive function. For example, FM patients could recall fewer words when given a list of words to remember and recall later. FM patients also performed more poorly on a test of working memory. Working memory refers to your ability to hold something in mind briefly while you use that information for some other mental process. It is your mental desktop. Multiplying large numbers in your head is a good example of a task that uses working memory. In addition, FM patients had lower scores on vocabulary tests, and had lower scores on a verbal fluency test. In the verbal fluency task, people are shown a letter and are asked to write down as many words as they can think of that start with that letter. It tests how quickly you can access your stored knowledge of words. Thus, our results show that FM patients do indeed have some cognitive dysfunction.

In fact, the cognitive performance of FM patients was equivalent to that of adults who were twenty years older than the FM patients on several of our tests. Moreover, the FM performance and that of the older adults was worse when compared to control subjects the same age, gender, and education level as the FM patients. Our research on aging shows that memory declines reliably every decade, and our results with FM patients suggest that FM patients were cognitively twenty years older in their performance on some tasks.

However, there was one key difference between the FM patients and the older controls. Older adults are typically slower than young adults on cognitive tests that measure how rapidly they process information. This slow processing explains many other symptoms of cognitive aging. But the FM patients were faster than the older adults, and in fact, were just as fast as the younger, age-matched controls. So although FM patients may perform similarly to older adults on some cognitive tasks, the underlying cause is not likely the same.

An important question is whether the cognitive dysfunction seen in FM patients can be related to other symptoms of FM. For example, FM patients are often also depressed, and cognitive dysfunction occurs in people who are depressed. Maybe the cognitive dysfunction in FM is simply due to depression. Our results show that this is not the case. All of the patients in our study were carefully selected so that no one with major, clinical depression was included, but we were still able to demonstrate cognitive problems in our sample. Moreover, depressed patients are often slow and are FM patients were as fast as the age-matched controls in their ability to process information rapidly. In addition, we measured depressive symptoms in our study. FM patients, even though they were not clinically depressed, reported more depressive symptoms than the control groups. This isn’t surprising since the other symptoms of FM are themselves depressing and discouraging. Even though the patients reported more depression symptoms, those symptoms were not related to cognitive problems. In other words, the patients with the worst cognitive performance were not necessarily the patients with the most depression symptoms. We also did not find any relationship between anxiety and performance on the cognitive tests.

Yet another symptom that might be related to cognitive function is sleep disturbance. Perhaps the patients who have the most disrupted sleep have the lowest cognitive scores. We looked at this by having patients wear activity monitors. The monitors were worn on the wrist like a watch and measured how much a person moved around. During the night, most people don’t move much, unless they wake up. By looking at the data collected from the activity monitors, we could tell how often a person woke up during the night and could calculate the percentage of time a person spent asleep during the period where they were trying to sleep. We found that FM patients had lower percentages of time asleep during the night; yet, this measure of sleep was not related to cognitive performance. Also, self-reported fatigue was not related to cognitive performance.

Actually, the only symptom we found to be related to cognitive performance was pain, particularly the impact of pain on a patient. We hope to conduct further research to learn more about how pain and cognitive function are related in FM patients. For example, managing chronic pain may take some cognitive effort and this may interfere with performance on cognitive tasks. Alternatively, higher pain may be an indicator of more severe FM, but at this time we don’t know which of these is true.

Another area of our research is focused on subjective awareness of cognitive ability–memory in particular. For example, how well do you think you do at everyday memory tasks? How much do you know about the way that memory functions? Do you use strategies to help you remember things? Is it important for you to have a good memory? Do you worry about having a good memory? Has your memory ability changed in the last few years? Do you feel you have any control over how well you can remember something?

We measured people’s responses to a questionnaire designed to answer these questions. We found that FM patients felt they had less memory ability than age-matched controls; they felt they had experienced more decline in their memory; good memory was more important to FM patients; and they were more anxious about performing well on memory tests. FM patients knew just as much about how memory works and used more strategies to help them remember than non-FM research participants. We found that FM patients’ rating of their memory ability was related to their actual memory performance, showing that the patients’ assessment of memory problems was accurate. In contrast, the control groups did not show this same relationship.

In conclusion, our research has shown that patients’ complaints about their cognitive problems are accurate: there is cognitive dysfunction in FM patients and this is not due solely to psychiatric disorders such as depression, or to other symptoms of FM such as sleep disturbance, anxiety or fatigue. On the other hand, cognitive dysfunction in FM is related to pain. Our future research will focus on the relationship of pain and cognitive function, as well as on some other types of cognitive tasks. Since many patients complain of difficulty focusing on one task, we plan to study attention in FM. Finally, we are planning some neuroimaging studies where we can see which parts of the brain are active during a cognitive task. We hope to find differences between the FM patients and healthy controls that will give us more information about this disorder.

My favorite quote from Roosevelt

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

It happens to be the one thing women find hard to give.

February 17, 2017 by Jed Diamond Ph.D 293 Comments

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How many times have we heard the phrase, “All men want is sex?” When I was 17 years old I was sure it was true. When I was 37 years old, I suspected it might not be true. And now that I’m 73 years old, I know it’s not true. Now don’t get me wrong, sex can be wonderful at any age, but there’s something that is more important than sex, but it’s something that men have difficulty admitting and women have difficulty giving.

This understanding has dawned on me slowly and became most evident to me in my men’s group. I’ve been meeting regularly with six other guys for thirty-eight years and sex has been a topic that has run through our discussions over the years. Like all guys we are somewhat competitive and we all want to be seen as successful, but we also have learned to be honest with each other. We not only talk about our sexual successes, but also our failures, fears, and confusions.

Getting taken into her body gives us a sense of peace and homecoming that goes way beyond simple sexual pleasure.

From the time I was a young I learned that wanting sex was synonymous with being a man. In high school I remember overhearing a girl I liked talking about a guy we both knew. She wasn’t complaining that he was preoccupied with sex, but that he “didn’t come on to me like other guys do.” She went on to tell her girlfriend, “He’s not being very manly.” The message was clear, “real men” want sex and if you don’t “come on” to a girl, you’re not a real man.

This early lesson was validated through the years: Always wanting sex is the mark of manliness for many. It’s better to be turned down again and again and be seen as a jerk who is totally preoccupied with sex than to want something more than sex and be seen as “less than a man.”

So, what do men want more than sex? We’ve all heard that women need to feel loved to have sex, but men need to have sex to feel loved. Let’s look more deeply at what it is exactly that men are getting when they get sex. Sure, there is the physical pleasure, but there is a deeper need that is being satisfied. I call it the need for a safe harbor.

The world of men is a world of competition. On the most basic level, males compete with other males for access to the most desirable females. Males make the advances and females decide which males they will accept. Sure, in modern times these roles are less rigid than they once were, but for the most part, whether we’re peacocks or people, we strut our stuff and hope it’s good enough to get us chosen by the woman we go after.

Getting taken into her body gives us a sense of peace and homecoming that goes way beyond simple sexual pleasure. Of course, I’m talking about heterosexual men here. There’s a similar dynamic in the gay world, but here I’ll focus on men and women.

“Always wanting sex” is part of the male persona we wear to show we’re manly.

Many of us remember the early school dances we attended. If you wanted to hold a girl in your arms, you had to make the long walk across the room with everyone watching and ask the girl to dance. If she accepted, you were in heaven. If she refused you were in hell. The key here is that you must make yourself vulnerable to rejection to hold and be held by a girl.

By the time we become adults, we’ve already been battered and bruised by the world of competition and rejection. We long for that safe harbor where we don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not in order to be chosen. We long for someone who sees us for who we are and wants us anyway, who can hold us and touch, not just our body, but our hearts and souls.

“Always wanting sex” is part of the male persona we wear to show we’re manly. What we really want is a safe harbor where we can take refuge, relax, and be cared for. In other words, we want the feeling of being nurtured that most of us didn’t get enough of when we were children. But admitting these needs makes us feel like little boys, not big strong men. Better to be manly with our sexual desire and then once we’re inside her body, we can relax, be ourselves, and be infused with love. That’s the hidden desire we have when we have sex.

One of the things I love getting from my wife, Carlin, is to lay in her lap and have my scalp rubbed. This is one, wonderful, safe harbor. I don’t need to have sex in order to have this need satisfied. I just have to ask for it. Here, I’m being touched deeply, accepted completely. I don’t have to perform or prove myself. I just must be willing to be deeply vulnerable.

◊♦◊

Just as it’s difficult for men to ask to be held, nurtured, and touched; it’s often difficult for women to give that kind of intimacy. There are three main reasons, which are often subconscious:

• First, women have their own conditioning about men being men. If he doesn’t want sex, they worry that they may not be attractive enough.

• Second, a man wanting to be held and nurtured, triggers feelings that they are dealing with a boy, not a man. I can’t tell you how many clients I have who say things like “It’s like I’ve got three children in the house. There’s our two sons, and then there’s my husband.” Women want a man, but worry they have another little boy.

• Third, women fear men who don’t feel manly. They know that the most violent men are men who feel weak and powerless. They’ve often had experiences of men allowing themselves to be gentle and vulnerable, only to have them respond with anger and rage later.

It takes a lot of time and maturity for men to admit to themselves that they need a safe harbor where they can be nurtured and embraced by a woman. It takes a lot of courage to let his woman know he may want sex, but more important is his need for security, love, and nurture. It requires a level of wisdom to know that allowing ourselves to be as vulnerable as a child may be the manliest thing a man can do.

For a woman, she must also go beyond her own conditioning and be open to a man who is making himself vulnerable in new ways. She must have a great deal of self-love and self-confidence to accept being a safe harbor. She must also have the strength to protect herself, when his shame at being vulnerable turns to anxiety, anger, or depression. It isn’t easy for men and women to take these kinds of risks, but the payoff is a life-time of deepening love and intimacy.

Van Morrison - "Days Like This"

Well, its a gray day here in NC ... my favorite kind of day for production at home.  In every way it is moderate. But I am on fire, for some reason, and loving it!!  I am posting this song because ... well, just because it fits!!

Also just cruising through with Rihanna, David Gray, Adele, and Ray LaMontagne........what a combo of sounds!

25 Ways to Wear a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes!

If you LOVE scarves as much as I do, this is a great video!!!!

"Why successful people with ADHD refuse to take their medicine"- Richard Orange

They sat on the media panel at the Maudsley Hospital — a journalist and historian, a BBC producer and a distinguished psychiatrist — thrashing out ways to make newspapers and television in Britain take adult ADHD seriously. It was the first conference the London psychiatric hospital had hosted on adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — the downsides of which include inattention, disorganisation, and impulsiveness. Plans were hatched to letter-bomb journalists who suggest (as they do all too often) that it does not exist, or that it is an condition invented to justify drugging up naughty schoolchildren.

Philip Asherson, professor in molecular psychiatry at King’s College London, argued that what was really needed to remove the stigma about treating adults with drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall was for one of the famous people who have outed themselves as sufferers — people like Olympic gymnast Louis Smith, judo gold medallist Ashley McKenzie or Will.i.am, the -singer and coach on the BBC talent show The Voice, to talk about how medication had helped them. The problem (although the professor didn’t say it outright) is that none of them seem to take any.

Professor Asherson, who has worked as a consultant for the company that makes Concerta, the first-line treatment for UK adults with ADHD, knows this better than anyone. In 2013 he scanned Smith’s brain for a Channel 5 documentary. Louis Smith: Living with ADHD was a breakthrough in his decade-long push to hammer through to the public that a condition still wrongly believed by many to affect only children more often than not continues into adulthood. But when Smith was asked about Ritalin (like Concerta, a preparation of the stimulant drug methylphenidate) he said he had hated it and refused to take it from the age of 13.

‘It wasn’t a nice tablet,’ he wrote in his auto-biography. ‘It made me feel a bit like a zombie… anything that makes you feel “zombified” surely can’t be good for you.’

It is striking that, while methylphenidate has been recommended by Nice guidelines as the first-line treatment for adult ADHD since 2008, just about every high-profile person who has gone public with a diagnosis seems hostile to it. ‘It reduced my energy and made me tired all the time,’ judo medallist Ashley McKenzie told the Daily Mirror. ‘It wasn’t a long-term solution.’ Will.i.am told the same paper: ‘Music is my therapy,’ ‘Music keeps me sane and keeps my mind on something.’ David Neeleman, a US airline founder who credits his own ADHD for his success, told specialist website Additude: ‘I’m afraid of taking drugs once, blowing a circuit, and then being like the rest of you.’

Even the pop star Justin Bieber, who told GQ in February that he had been on Adderall ‘for about a year’, didn’t seem happy about it. ‘I think I’m about to get off of it because I feel like it’s giving me anxiety,’ he said.

There is little doubt that the very real stigma attached to ADHD holds famous people back from revealing their diagnoses. Comedian Rory Bremner —who has tirelessly campaigned to raise awareness since realising that he has it — described at the Maudsley conference how he had raised the link between ADHD and celebrity with his agent, who also represents comics such as Eddie Izzard, Rowan Atkinson, Noel Fielding and Mark Gatiss.

‘I said, “How many of your clients do you think have ADHD?” She said, “Do you know what? I think… all of them.” ’ This doesn’t mean any of them actually have been or would be diagnosed with ADHD, but it may suggest that comedy is one of those fields where people with the condition can thrive.

The brains of people with ADHD appear, among other things, to have lower levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, so an experience needs to be more stimulating for it to draw and hold their attention. This makes for tough school years — one UK businessman remembers a teacher sellotaping him to his chair — and more chance of ending up in prison or being addicted to drugs. But if someone with ADHD has talent and gets the right breaks, their impulsiveness, out-of-the-box thinking and compulsion to seek out the surprising, dramatic and unconventional can power them to success. For Dr Ellen Littman, a US clinical psychologist who is soon to publish a book on gifted people with ADHD, it is not surprising that those who do make it largely forgo drugs. ‘Medication inhibits impulses, so it can make one less spontaneous,’ she explains. ‘I’ve had artists and athletes tell me that it’s not a worthwhile trade-off.’

The same, largely, goes for entrepreneurs: people with ADHD are six times more -likely to start their own business. Littman interviewed Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who, she says, has ‘terrible ADD’ (as it used to be known). He told her that instead of using medication, he hires people. ‘He has a fleet of people who follow him around, and no matter how he treats them, they write down things that he says, they pick up things that he drops, they dress him while he’s walking, they turn his body if he’s supposed to go in a different direction.’

Turner is not at all unusual in this. Cameron Herold, a Canadian business coach who has ADHD, says none of his ‘entrepreneurial type’ business clients uses medication. ‘Of the 16 entrepreneurs that I coach, I can pretty safely say that 15 of 16 are ADD and zero use meds,’ he says. ‘I’m not a fan of medication. The entrepreneur is not supposed to be focused. Is medication trying to make us better or is it trying to make us just like everybody else? We don’t need more people like everybody else.’ Incidentally, not one of three high-profile psychiatrists in the US who say they have ADHD (Ned Hallowell, John Ratey, and Dale Archer) take medication, although the first two recommend it for their patients.

While many successful people have ADHD, the reverse is not at all true. Many with the trait struggle to hold down any job or get any qualifications. They don’t have the luxury of a personal assistant or a stimulating profession. For them, Herold concedes, medication may help. And Dr Tony Lloyd, acting CEO of the ADHD Foundation, the UK’s leading advocacy group, points out while entrepreneurs may choose not to take the medication, the same doesn’t go for barristers, a surprisingly large number of whom appear to have ADHD. ‘I know a few, incredibly successful people in their fields, who couldn’t get by without medication,’ he says. Unlike comedians, pop stars, or maverick entrepreneurs, lawyers need to appear professional.

This also applies to the only two well-known British people brave enough to admit taking the meds — Louise Mensch, the novelist, journalist and former Tory MP, and Trudie Styler, the actress, film producer and wife of rock star Sting. Both have demanding executive roles. Mensch has said on Twitter that her medication makes ADHD ‘eminently manageable’, while Styler says she uses the stimulant Adderall (but only when she has mounds of scripts to read). Dr Lloyd suspects that many more celebrities use ADHD medication than admit to it, and is working with Rory Bremner, now the ADHD Foundation’s patron, to coax more of them into coming forward.

Many of those cited as having the condition on internet lists — including businessmen, celebrity chefs, comedians and even the US presidential hopeful Donald Trump — have never come forward themselves.

Lloyd and Bremner are also working on a documentary for the BBC in which the comedian will take ADHD medication for the first time. Indeed, part of the reason he has not taken anything until now is because he wants to record the experience on film. Could Bremner himself end up being the poster-boy for medication Professor Asherson is looking for?

"The Seven Sexual Ages of Men" ~ Delvin/Webber

Dr David Delvin and Christine Webber

Sex and Relationships: the seven sexual ages of men

Yes, it’s a story of long, slow decline. But it’s ever so gradual and most 70-year-olds are still potent

In As You Like It, Shakespeare suggested that there were seven ages of man. Sadly, he himself didn’t experience all of them; he shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of only 52, precisely 400 years ago.

You could also say that the human male has seven sexual ages, marked by a gradual decline in activity. But can we stress that word ‘gradual?’ The fall-off over several decades really is very slow.

Even some doctors don’t appreciate this. Only recently one of us acted as an expert witness in support of a man who had wrongly been told by a surgeon that ‘males can’t expect erections after the age of 40’.

So let us look at these seven sexual ages. The future may be brighter than you think…

1. TEENAGE YEARS

Under-20 males are usually chock full of testosterone. Research from Alfred Kinsey onwards has shown that, on average, they have about three orgasms per week — but in some cases many more. In 2002 Germaine Greer somewhat daringly said of very young men: ‘Their semen runs like tap water’ — which is only a slight exaggeration. She also pointed out that ‘their recharge time is remarkably short’, suggesting this was something mature women might appreciate.

2. THE TWENTIES

The twentysomething male has only slightly less testosterone than his teenage self. According to Kinsey, he is still likely to have around three orgasms a week — though this may be affected by factors such as whether he is in a regular relationship or not. In general, he is less explosively-triggered than before, and can delay orgasm for quite a time. A chap in his twenties usually lasts a good deal longer than he did in his teens, so sexual congress doesn’t often terminate in an embarrassing and involuntary orgasm.

3. THE THIRTIES

The next decade brings another small fall in male hormone levels. According to the Mayo Clinic, from 30 onwards testosterone levels decline about 1 per cent a year. The average man in his thirties is likely to have just under three orgasms a week. And he usually has much better control. Some thirtysomethings can cheerfully pleasure their partners for half an hour before ejaculation.

4. THE FORTIES

A small part of the pharmaceutical industry is currently trying to convince the public that there is such a thing as a ‘male menopause’ and therefore the fortysomething bloke is likely to need either testosterone supplements or Viagra-type drugs. But there is there is no male equivalent of the sudden collapse in sex hormones when a woman hits the menopause, and most men in this age group are still experiencing about two orgasms a week without any medical help. Many are extremely well-controlled in bed, and as a result they are better lovers than they have ever been in their lives.

5. THE FIFTIES

The mean ‘score’ for men in their fifties is 1.75 climaxes a week. Only about 7 per cent of males are impotent at this stage and most are well able to satisfy their partners.

6. THE SIXTIES

In this older group, much depends on whether a man is still fit and healthy. Most estimates put the mean number of orgasms as just under one per week, but some fellows just decide to give up altogether. Kinsey, said about 20 per cent of sexuagenarians have erectile dysfunction. On the other hand, a lusty few take pride in having sex twice a day, or occasionally more.

7. SEVENTY-PLUS

Reliable data is hard to find for this group of men. An increasing number have poor health, which often diminishes their sexual performance. But about 70 per cent of 70-year-old males are still potent without the help of medication. In practice, Viagra-type drugs have greatly increased the amount of sexual activity in this ‘seventh age’ and beyond. The oldest sexually active male patient we have ever seen was still having regular intercourse with his wife at 85, thanks to a combination of Viagra and mutual determination.

So Shakespeare would perhaps have been surprised to learn that four centuries after his death, there are many septuagenarians and octogenarians who regularly make what Iago called ‘the beast with two backs’.

AND WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?

Truth to tell, sexual development is very different in females. In their teens and twenties, orgasm is a skill they often have to learn, particularly when they are with a partner. And young females are much less concerned with how often they ‘do it’ than they are about whether boys actually like them, and how they’re going to avoid pregnancy.

Like Germaine Greer, many mid-life women appreciate in retrospect the performance of teenage boys but regret that they weren’t ready to enjoy it when young. This sense of having missed out is one reason for the increase in divorce among the over-50s — the only group where the rate of marital breakdown is rising. Many women, whose focus has been on child-rearing and career, come up for air and find themselves more confident and orgasmic at the very time their partners are winding down.

This trend may also have fuelled a growing acceptance of marriages in which the woman is much older. The wondrous Joan Collins, for example, has been wed to Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior, for 13 years.

But the majority stick with what they know. Indeed, for many couples, a shared sense of humour, home and history far outweigh the desire for orgasmic gymnastics.

Above all, older women are often able to look at their partners with familiar affection and agree with one of Shakespeare’s memorable quotations on love: ‘I would not wish any companion in the world but you.’

"Interconnection"

These days, you'd have to be asleep or dead not to notice the chaos in this world.  It affects every level, every group, every place in the world. As a retired therapist, I was trained to observe anything/anyone acutely. And, since I came from a medical family (attorney, nurses, doctor, just to name a couple) I grew up with that model of acute observation.  Sometimes, it is actually nerve-racking and intense. But, it also leads to loving people.

How? Well, the man on the train who seems really cranky to others? Observation teaches me another lesson.  I notice that he has  several large vicious and visible scars on his face and neck, and shoes where one toe is cut out to reveal he has none inside. just stubs.

I see a toddler girl gazing up at him for a long time with no judgement....just interest.....observation. I wonder what she is thinking as her peaceful little face takes him in. He gazes back at her and smiles at her kindly. It seemed to me to be a powerful moment of humanity. All of a sudden her mother jerked her around and said somewhat harshly, "Don't look at him. Stop. He's dirty." The little girl looked up at her in a really puzzled way, and her little eyebrows tightly furrowed. I would be projecting if I filled in the blanks of what I thought, or what I thought she was thinking.

But something happened that I have never forgotten ...not ever. I noticed there were some tears on the little girl's cheeks, as she gazed quietly at her shoes. I wndered if in her mind's eye she was thinking of the comparison between her shiny T-straps and his, cut with something that hurt. "Mom, I think he's sad we won't look at him."  My own eyes filled with tears, for a number of other reasons connected with these human beings. As I looked at the man, his face was slightly turned away, but not so far that I could not see tears on his own leathered cheeks. But she, too, had seen that in a quick furtive glance back. She then glanced up at me. with a mixed expression....mixed with "did you see him?' Mixed with "can you do something?" Mixed with "wish I could ask him some questions". And then her shoulders slumped down in childhood acquiescence to her mom's order.

I was thinking of how he got those brutal scars ... delivered by another person?  A car accident? By a relative? By a fall? Looks like he had had a lot of pain....

Being in a train, on that very morning, and in that very place, we three almost silently commingled.......silently.....connected.....as human beings. I was so grateful that I had been in that place. Teens today use the term, 'my brain exploded'. And mine did indeed do that.  So much humanity and human caring in that ...one ...little ... minute.

That small happening took place decades ago, and I can see it as acutely as if it was happening this minute. I have hundreds of vignettes penetrating ... piercing.  Yet all make me wonder about the occasions when people assert, "Well, maybe this is heaven...."When that is said, all giggle a bit, as if to say, "No way!"

For me, it wasn't so silly .... I wondered....... and wondered...... and wondered.