Trojan and Canada recently teamed up to see how people aged 40-59 are faring in bed, and they found something surprising: Middle-aged people are having better sex than when they were younger! So if you are experiencing high-anxiety FOMO that the best sex years of your life are wasting away while you are busting your butt trying to live, then take a breath. Your lifetime sexual fulfillment is going to be OK.
The research, performed by Trojan and the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN), surveyed 2,400 Canadians between the ages of 40 and 59 and found that 63 percent of them reported having more adventurous sex than they were 10 years ago. Sixty-five percent reported their last sexual encounter as being "very pleasurable."
SIECCAN executive director Alex McKay suggested that this research was especially illuminating since folks currently between the ages of 40-59 are the first middle-aged generation to grow up entirely in the period of time following the sexual revolution. He chalks up the findings in part to their increased sex positivity, as well as their increased health and fitness in comparison to previous generations.
Another important finding of the survey showed that 70 percent of women who experienced at least six minutes of post-sex cuddling reported their sexual encounter to be "very pleasurable," while only 44 percent of women who experienced less than five minutes of post-sex cuddling would report their experience that way. It led researchers to conclude that six to 10 minutes of cuddling, pillow talk, etc. was the sweet spot for folks to feel satisfied with their encounter.
Unsurprisingly, the study found correlations between couples who were more communicative about their desires and couples who felt more satisfied in bed. But, impressively, this correlation even and especially carried over to married couples: The survey found that married men in this age group were more sexually satisfied than single men. It turns out that knowing your partner intimately and for many years enhances sexual satisfaction because you feel comfortable with each other, rather than decreases it because it's boring. While college-aged folks were technically having more sex, the 40-59 age group felt more satisfaction with the quality of sex they were having.
The only area of sexual expertise in which middle-aged folks floundered — and if you are a Millennial who has ever tried to have sex with a middle-aged person, you are probably intimately familiar with this struggle — was safer sex practices. Two-thirds of single men reported not using a condom the last time they had sex, and more than half of those men had more than two partners in the past year. Almost three-quarters of single women admitted to not using a condom the last time they had sex and a third of those had more than two partners in the past year.
Conversely, half the population of single university students had used condoms during their most recent sexual encounters. Said McKay of safer sex education, "We have a lot of work to do to bring single midlife Canadians up to speed."
Images: Andrew Zaeh for Bustle; Giphy
