It’s for their own good…

Are the frisky 50s putting their sexual health at risk?

When 44-year-old Diane Newson cuddled up in bed with her new boyfriend Nick – ten years her junior – the last thing on her mind was the subject of sexually transmitted diseases.

"When I was growing up, the only thing we worried about was getting pregnant," says Diane, an attractive blonde divorcee with two daughters in their 20s and her own PR company in South London.

At least, having witnessed the outbreak of AIDS, my generation of gay men, those of us who survived anyway, know better.  Seems like a lot of middle aged heterosexuals don’t.

Then, there’s the fact that by this time in our lives, the shelf has been pretty well picked clean…

But then Diane’s 19-year marriage came to an end and she found herself back on the singles scene – a very different scene to that when she was first dating in her teens.

"Firstly, I found that all the men my age had let themselves go or were really controlling," she says. "Or if they had kept themselves in shape, were chasing women half my age."

No kidding.  But it’s not just middle aged men who are chasing after people half their age.  And it’s not all about lusting after young bodies either.  There’s a mindset you have when you’re younger that, if you’re still actively engaged in life by the time you’re in your middle ages, you really begin to appreciate.  It’s that sense that everything is new. 

The knowledge you accumulate as you grow older, and the life experience you acquire, give you power.  Sometimes when you get to a certain level of accomplishment, it can be positively intoxicating.  But as time goes on, and you accumulate more and more responsibilities, there is a lot of pressure to stick to what you know.  And so the power you’ve acquired in life, also becomes a ball and chain.  You stop learning.  You stop growing.  You stick to the familiar paths.  You go with what you know.  Let’s face it…nobody likes falling flat on their face all the time, like you did when you were a kid.  All that uncertainty, all that awkwardness.  By the time you’re in your thirties or so, you’re really glad to be past all that.  But it was a necessary part of growing up. 

And the reality is you can spend a lifetime learning new things and still not scratch the surface of what is, let alone of what could be.  So really, in a sense, everything still Is new, or most everything anyway; even when you’re in your fifties like I am.  You don’t really know crap about anything when you think about it.  All you have, all you know, is just your little portion of what is.  There’s a quote of Issac Newton’s that I particularly like:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Yes.  Just so.  One thing I’ve learned in 54 years of life on this good earth is that there is no such thing as "growing up".  There is only growing.  And if you aren’t growing, you’re dying.  And life is too goddamned short to start dying just when you’ve reached your middle ages.

I’ve heard most of my adult life from people that I don’t really act my age.  But I think I do in all the important respects.  I am responsible, I pay my bills, I keep my promises, I do my share of the work, I pick up after myself.  And I try to apply what I’ve learned from experience.  I am not the person I was when I was a teenager.  But I have very deliberately tried over the years, to keep alive the sense that I am still in school.  Because if you’re really living your life, instead of just sleepwalking through it, then in some manner or form you Are still in school.  I think what people mean when they say I don’t act my age, is that I’m not acting like most of my peers in the class of ’72, who’ve stopped growing.  I am still growing up.  I intend to keep on growing up until the moment I die.

To find that in a guy my own age is rare.  And when you do find one, it’s a near certainty that he’s taken already.  So sometimes when I find myself drawn to a younger guy it’s because, despite the wildly different worlds we live in, I feel like we share something in common deep down inside.  We’re both still growing up.  Sometimes when I share a smile with a younger guy, it’s like that.