Development of Sexual Behavior

Stages of Development: Old Age

Erotic Behavior 1

Older women and men who live alone face the challenge of having to find physical closeness and tenderness elsewhere. Unfortunately, our modern culture offers no script except marriage for finding sexual fulfillment in old age. Elderly persons who are single or widowed find no socially approved model for erotic relationships and thus are forced to come up with their own solutions. For example, some older couples live separately, but visit each other frequently or take regular vacations together. Some also establish a common household, but stay unmarried in order to keep their full pensions. Still others find some form of communal living arrangement with other women and men in the same situation. Lately, many “senior residences” and nursing homes have also begun to tolerate and even encourage sexual relationships among their residents.
Nevertheless, these and similar experiments are still taking place in a moral “gray area”  and lack full social recognition. All too many of the elderly are left without any physical closeness and sexual tenderness in their old age. It remains a major task for our society to create cultural scripts that accommodate the erotic needs of the old. The number of “singles” who were never married is increasing in the developed world, and so is the number of formerly married women and men who live alone. At the same time, people generally live longer, and thus the problem is likely to become even more urgent in the future. The following chart illustrates the development in the USA from 1970 -1994, but the overall trend continues and can be observed in many other countries.

Percent of Adults Living Alone by Age and Sex (left: female; right: male) 1970 and 1994 Source:  U.S. Census Bureau