There is a tired little story women over 50 keep getting handed about sex after menopause, and most of us absorb it without even noticing. The story goes something like this: your sex life had its run, it was lovely, and now it’s gracefully retiring to a shelf somewhere next to your old jeans and your dancing shoes. Menopause arrives, things get drier and more complicated, your husband gets a little less reliable in that department, and the message everywhere is to make peace with it.
I sat down with Susan Bratton this week for the podcast, and let me tell you, that woman is a one-person resistance movement. Susan is the CEO of Better Lover, Personal Life Media, and The20, the author of 44 books, and an intimacy expert who reaches over 300,000 readers through her newsletters. She is also 65 years old and having, in her own words, the best sex of her life. She did not say that to brag. She said it because she wants every woman listening to know that what we have been told about aging and intimacy is mostly nonsense.
The Body Did Not Forget How to Do This
Here is what really happens to us in midlife, and it is more hopeful than you have probably been led to believe. Estrogen drops, blood flow slows, tissue thins, and lubrication takes a hit. That part is real. But every single one of those things is reversible or at the very least improvable, and Susan walked me through the whole landscape of how.
She talks about it as a budget, mid-range, and luxury approach. On the simple end, you have things like a nitric oxide booster to get blood flowing again, topical estrogen for the vagina and vulva, and at-home red light therapy devices. In the middle, there are in-office acoustic wave treatments. At the higher end, there are PRP injections, exosomes, and laser therapies. I have personally done laser, PRP, and stem cell work for my face and hair over the years, and what struck me listening to Susan is how many of those same regenerative therapies translate beautifully to the parts of us that nobody talks about taking care of.
The thing that really changed my thinking was when she explained the anatomy. Most of us were never taught that the entire vulvo-vaginal area is wrapped in spongy erectile tissue, the same kind of tissue that fills a man’s penis with blood. We have a banana’s worth of it. When that tissue gets fed with blood, oxygen, and the right hormones, it plumps up, sensitivity returns, and pleasure does too. The body has not forgotten how to do this. It just needs the right conditions.
Sex After Menopause Is Real Anti-Aging
I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about light, fasting, hormones, mitochondria, and how to keep your skin and brain young. What I do not talk about as often, because culture has trained us not to, is what orgasms really do for the aging body. They are not a luxury or a frivolity. They are medicine.
A regular orgasmic life pushes blood out to the edges of your body, including your skin. It floods your system with oxytocin, which calms the nervous system and lowers stress hormones. It oxygenates the brain and lights up your sensory cortex in different ways depending on what kind of orgasm you are having, and yes, there is more than one kind. It builds vascular health. It co-regulates your nervous system with your partner’s. It improves cognitive function, flexibility, and stamina. Susan put it perfectly when she said that when you feel good, you look good. There is no anti-aging serum that can replicate what a happy, well-circulated, well-pleasured body does for itself.
And we are living in some of the most stressful times in human history, with our nervous systems frayed from doom-scrolling and constant noise. Pleasure is one of the few things that pulls us out of that loop. It is grounding, it is connecting, and it is yours. Nobody else profits from it. That alone makes it worth protecting.
The Pressure Is the Real Problem
One of my favorite things Susan said in our conversation was that her sex life is awesome in big part because there is no pressure. She and her husband make actual dates, put them on the calendar, and then lie down together with no fixed agenda. Some nights it is sex. Some nights it is a yoni massage, a back rub, or just talking. One night recently, she pulled a muscle from chest presses at the gym and her husband ended up giving her a long massage around her sternum, and that was the date. They still connected with each other, and nobody felt cheated.
That kind of low-pressure, high-curiosity approach is what most long-term relationships are missing, and it is also what menopausal women need most. The anxiety to perform, the worry that something is wrong with us because we are not walking around feeling spontaneously horny at 55 the way we did at 25, is itself a libido killer. What most women do not realize is that menopause libido is not gone, it is just responsive rather than spontaneous. Most women, Susan reminded me, have responsive desire rather than spontaneous desire. We do not start hungry. We get hungry once we are at the table.
That is freeing information. It means you do not have to wait to feel like it. You just have to be willing to lie down, see what your body is up for, and let pleasure unfold from there. It also means a partner who is patient and curious will get a far better lover out of you than one who is in a hurry.
What I Want You to Take From This
I want you to take Susan’s underlying message, which is that intimacy after 50 is not closing down. It is opening into something different and, with a little knowledge and a little willingness to try new things, often something better. Women in their 60s and 70s are having the deepest, most connected, most satisfying intimate lives of their entire existence, and they got there by refusing to accept the old script.
You do not need every device and every treatment Susan walked through, although the show and tell on the podcast was genuinely entertaining and I recommend watching the full episode just for that. What you do need is permission. Permission to keep your sex life alive, to ask your health practitioner about hormone support without apologizing for it, to put a date on the calendar with your partner and see what happens, and to learn things you were never taught in the first place.
You can find the full conversation with Susan on the Aging Games podcast on YouTube. She also keeps a running list of everything she discussed at drivedesire.com if you want to go deeper.
And if you walk away from this with one thing, let it be this: lying down and living longer might be the most underrated longevity practice of our generation.
