Sex in Midlife: Women's Sexual Experiences in Lesbian and Straight Marriages

Abstract

Objective This study examines how married straight and lesbian women understand sexual changes in midlife. Background Sexual satisfaction is key to marital quality, yet marital sex typically diminishes in midlife. Little is known, however, about how married straight and lesbian women make sense of midlife sexuality. Comparing the narratives of lesbian and straight women can reveal how midlife events, relational contexts, and gender norms drive women's experiences of and responses to diminishing sex. Method Inductive and deductive analyses were performed on interviews with a convenience sample of 16 straight and 16 lesbian mostly high‐status married couples in Massachusetts. Results Lesbian and straight women suggest that sexual activity and desire diminish over time due to health, aging, and caregiving events, yet lesbian women additionally emphasize the importance of weight gain, caregiving for adult parents, and shared experiences of menopause. Women further describe distress when their sex lives diverge from norms specific to marriage and their sexual identities. Moreover, women report relationship work designed to maintain or reignite sex; when compared with straight women, lesbians describe more work and a stronger sense of duty to keep sex alive and uniquely describe medical providers as unhelpful in addressing sexual challenges. Conclusion The results suggest that relational contexts and cultural discourses shape straight and lesbian women's experiences of distress and comfort about diminishing sex in marriage.

The relationship work of sexual intimacy in long-term heterosexual and LGBTQ partnerships

“…Both women agree that this does not make her undemonstrative, but her means of emotional expression take different forms, such as loving gestures and tokens of affection rather than physical affection. Such findings corroborate extant research which suggests that women are more inclined than men to engage in relationship work that will ameliorate incongruence in sexual desire and any concomitant distress that may ensue from this, and lesbians more so than heterosexual women (Paine et al, 2019).…”

“…study demonstrate some of the ways that couples are working at their relationships to sustain positive lifelong intimacy in the context of these external pressures and internal (embodied) changes. There are indications that as couples grow older together, openness to the other person may increase and this can facilitate reflexive learning in all partnerships (Lodge and Umberson, 2013; Paine et al, 2019) and in these circumstances mutually rewarding sexual intimacy is more likely to be accomplished.…”

Sexual‐ and Gender‐Minority Families: A 2010 to 2020 Decade in Review

“…Although recent family scholarship points to the importance of sex and sexual intimacy as a dimension of intimate relationship quality, few studies examine sexual quality in SGM couples. Paine, Umberson, and Reczek () used in‐depth interview data with lesbian and heterosexual women and showed that women reported a decline in sexual activity and desire over time, but lesbian women uniquely suggested weight gain, caregiving for a parent, and menopause as reasons for this decline. Lesbian women in this study also reported more work in promoting their sex lives than heterosexual women.…”

A função do relacionamento sexual para casais em diferentes etapas do ciclo de vida familiar

“…Uma busca em bases de dados de artigos indexados revela que existem poucas referências em português, na área da Psicologia, que trazem o sexo como enfoque no estudo das relações conjugais (Oliveira e Pocahy, 2015;Vilar e Rabinovich, 2014). Por outro lado, esse tema é bastante explorado em pesquisas publicadas em inglês, mas a maioria dos estudos é de caráter quantitativo (Ammar e Widmer, 2013;Cao, et al, 2018;Hernandez-Kane e Mahoney, 2018;Liu, 2018;Paine, et al,2018). Dessa forma, pesquisas em português que abordem qualitativamente o tema podem contribuir positivamente para terapeutas familiares ou mesmo em terapias individuais, já que criam subsídios para o manejo e a compreensão do assunto.…”