’I feel like something’s broken in me,’ says Jayne, a solicitor in her mid-50s who’s used to solving other people’s problems. She nervously twists her wedding ring as she admits she hasn’t had an orgasm in years.
I’m running a women-only Zoom workshop about female sexuality and self-pleasure. As Jayne speaks, several other faces on my screen – including a GP in her 50s and a 48-year-old juggling teenage children and elderly parents – begin to nod.
Over the past 15 years, through my work writing about sex and desire and running workshops that explore sexual connection, I’ve shared frank conversations with hundreds of women about their relationships, their bodies and how intimacy changes over time. Yet moments like this still always feel profound.
Whenever one woman finally dares to articulate what so many others are thinking – that they dread their partner’s touch, their ability to orgasm has quietly disappeared and they often lie awake wondering what’s wrong with them – the chat so often snowballs into a flood of ‘me too’ confessions.
For most of these women, this is the first time they’ve said any of this out loud. They’ve been quietly carrying a weight of shame that comes with the wholly misguided belief that the ageing process has somehow permanently switched them off as sexual beings.
From here, I encourage them to take stock; to examine what it is about sex that no longer makes it a pleasurable and satisfying experience for them.
I ask them questions such as: What does sex actually look like for you? When does it happen? What do you enjoy – and what have you been putting up with just because your partner likes it?
This is often the moment a woman realises she isn’t broken at all – she’s just not having sex in a way that actually turns her on.
Lucy-Anne Holmes has heard stories from hundreds of women about their unsatisfying sex lives during her workshops
Taking time to reflect on what you actually want out of sex is the first step to improving things in the bedroom, says Lucy-Anne
Because here’s the thing: most of us have never really analysed this area of our lives in the way we scrutinise everything else.
We’ll do a financial audit, a health MoT or clear out our wardrobe. But the sex life we fell into years ago is often left to run on autopilot, even though our bodies and the structure of our lives has changed.
It’s hardly surprising then that desire can end up dwindling away.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Loss of libido is rarely just about hormones or life stage. More often, it’s the result of living almost entirely in our heads, rushing intimacy and losing touch with the depths of pleasure our bodies are actually capable of.
The good news is that none of this is fixed. In fact, for many women, midlife is the moment things finally start to improve.
From one-to-one conversations to group workshops, including the orgasm-focused sessions I run for women at every stage of life, I see the same pattern over and again. When women are finally given the space to re-evaluate what they want from sex, something shifts.
Because for years, women get unconsciously trained to experience sex through our partner’s gaze – we prioritise male pleasure and the importance of us being desirable to them.
Once you start paying attention to what actually works for you, desire has a way of returning. Sex becomes less like something to get through and more something you actually want, writes Lucy-Anne
We learn, often without realising it, to focus on how we look, how we’re being received, whether we’re ‘doing it right’ – all at the expense of what we’re actually feeling.
It means many women arrive in midlife having spent decades slightly outside of their own bodies. Present, but not fully connected, going through the motions of intimacy without ever really being at the centre of it.
But once they turn their attention back to themselves – to understand their own sexual cravings – everything changes. Suddenly, they stop having sex out of routine and quiet obligation and start asking: What’s in it for me?
Once you start paying attention to what actually works for you, desire has a way of returning. Sex becomes less like something to get through and more something you actually want.
So whether you’re in a long-term relationship or newly single, here are the eight things I encourage midlife women – and, in truth, women at any stage of their sexual journey – to try.
1. Start with a sex audit
Most women have never really paused to look at their sex lives in the same way they might review their finances, diet or career. A simple but honest sex audit can be transformative. Ask yourself:
- When does sex usually happen? Is it always at the very end of the day, when I’m shattered? After wine? Only at weekends?
- Do I ever initiate it? If not, why not?
- What do I actually enjoy? Which parts feel good and which bits am I secretly enduring?
- What am I thinking during sex? Am I trying to get penetration over with, worrying about my body, or running over a to-do list in my head?
- How do I feel afterwards – connected and satisfied or just relieved it’s over?
Doing an ‘audit’ of your sex life can be a powerful tool for understanding your desires and how to realise them
Then ask the most radical question of all: ‘What do I desire?’ Not, am I desirable? – but what do I want from sex now, at this age and life stage? Write down one thing you no longer want to tolerate and one feeling you’d like more of.
For example, perhaps you’d like to feel more relaxed, playful, powerful or cherished.
That gap between how sex feels now and how you want it to feel is your roadmap. A tiny change – gently saying no to a touch you dislike, moving sex to a time you’re less exhausted, extending the part you actually enjoy – can become a catalyst for a whole new sexual era.
2. Use breath-work to make sex feel electric
Remember that first kiss with someone new – that jolt, that heady, full body wake-up? For many women in midlife, that feeling can seem like it belongs to a long-gone version of themselves. But you can relive it.
I often use breath-work with my husband before sex – ten to 15 minutes of simple breathing together that makes that first touch feel incredibly heightened. Try this:
- Set a timer for ten minutes. Lie down on your backs, close together.
- Breathe together. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Big inhales, relax on the exhales, no gaps between the breaths. After about 15 breaths let the breath go and float for a while, then take a big inhale and hold for ten seconds.
- Add sound and a little movement. Let the out breath be heard. Gently move your chest or pelvis with the breath. Breath is central to arousal; when you deepen it – and add sound and movement – you shift out of your busy, chattering head and back into your body. By the time you kiss or touch again, it often no longer feels routine or mechanical. It feels surprisingly new, which is what jolts desire back to life.
3. Make everyday moments sensual
If you’re rushing through your day on autopilot, chances are you’re bringing that same distracted energy into sex.
One of the simplest ways to change that is to start much earlier – in the most ordinary parts of your day.
Take something as mundane as washing up. Instead of doing it while thinking about the next ten things on your list, slow right down. Feel the warm water on your hands. Notice the smoothness of the plate, the glide of your fingers over it. Stay with the sensation. Let yourself actually feel it.
It sounds almost ridiculous, but it can be surprisingly powerful.
Because what you’re doing in that moment is training your body to come out of your head and into sensation – and that’s exactly where arousal lives.
4. Be an animal in bed
We have become so domesticated we forget that we are actually animals. Sex isn’t meant to be polite. At its best, it’s messy, noisy and a bit wild. But for a lot of women, the abandon they had in the early days has been quietly trained out of them.
Often it starts when children arrive. You begin to dial everything down – swallowing sounds in case you wake the baby, staying rigid so you don’t horrify a teenager in the next room.
Even after your nest empties, the habit of holding back tends to stick.
Meanwhile, you move more and more into your head. Women tell me they’re ‘doing’ sex but not really experiencing it – running through the to-do list, silently critiquing their bodies, willing things to speed up so they can go to sleep. Once you’re up there, in your head, your chances of orgasm are slim.
The quickest way back into your body is through breath, movement and sound – and when it comes to sex that means making it more animalistic.
Allow your hips to move, your back to arch, your breath to deepen. Noisily encourage what actually feels good instead of staying composed.
Making noise really ramps up arousal. I’m not talking about turning sex into a performance – just the natural sighs, groans and deeper exhales you’d make if no one was listening.
That’s when sex stops being something you have to work at focusing on and becomes something you actually feel.
5. Go ‘gourmet’ – and refuse bad sex
One of the most liberating things about midlife is this: sex is no longer about procreation.
As one woman I interviewed in her 50s put it: ‘The human race isn’t relying on me any more – so why would I bother with mediocre sex?’
After the children left home, she and her husband turned their garden shed into a sex temple – a space they go to deliberately, where sex is completely separate from everyday life.
Another woman decided that if she was still going to have sex, it had to be on her terms. She admitted that she likes being dominated – and that midlife was when she finally gave herself permission to explore that.
For her, going gourmet meant owning the sex she actually enjoys, not the sex she thought she was supposed to want.
For you, that might mean a longer build-up and using what your body needs – lubrication, different positions – for arousal to develop. You might want to broaden what counts as sex so penetration is optional, not compulsory.
The real shift happens when you quietly decide: ‘I’m not available for bad sex anymore.’ When you stop tolerating the bits you don’t like and start asking for what you actually want – whether that’s slow, tender or more daring – desire has a chance to come back, because your body finally trusts that saying yes will be worth it.
6. Try the three-minute game
If you’ve been having sex the same way for years, it can feel almost impossible to change it. You slip into the old routine before you’ve even thought about what you actually want.
The ‘three-minute game’, invented by life coach Harry Faddis and pioneered by relationship and intimacy guru Dr Betty Martin, is one of the simplest – and most effective – ways I know to break that pattern. Sex therapists use versions of it to help couples get better at asking, receiving and noticing what feels good. Here’s how to do it:
1. Set a timer for three minutes.
2. One of you asks: ‘How would you like to be touched for the next three minutes?’
3. The other answers as specifically as they can – for example, ‘stroke my back lightly with your fingertips’ or ‘massage my feet firmly’.
4. You then do exactly what they’ve asked for, for three minutes. No improvising, no trying to make it better, no turning it into sex.
Then you switch roles and repeat the question.
After that comes the second, trickier round:
1. Set the timer again.
2. This time the question is: ‘How would you like to touch me for your pleasure?’
3. You choose how you want to touch them so that it feels good for you – and again, you stick to that for three minutes.
Most people find this second question the hardest, because it forces you to stop guessing and actually tune into your own desire. But that’s the point. In ten to 15 minutes, you’ve practised asking, receiving, paying attention and staying with sensation – all the skills we were never really taught.
The beauty of the three-minute game is that it shifts the focus away from orgasm and back on to curiosity, communication and connection.
7. Make self-pleasure your secret superpower
We outsource so much now – dinner ideas to apps, decisions to group chats, even thinking to AI. For many women, self-pleasure has gone the same way: handed over to a rechargeable toy and perhaps something on a screen, rather than starting with their own bodies.
There’s nothing wrong with vibrators or porn but if that’s all you use, masturbation can become perfunctory. Once this week, try a self-pleasure reboot:
- Go offline, putting toys and screens out of reach.
- Listen to your body. Lie down, take some big inhales and audible exhales. Pay attention to what happens when you move your pelvis, change your position, or lightly stroke different parts of your body.
- Build, pause, build again. Let arousal rise, ease off, then build it again. Pay attention to what kind of touch makes you feel more present.
Regular, mindful self-pleasure can boost mood, sleep, body image and sexual satisfaction – and even help with some menopause symptoms. Think of it as basic maintenance, not a guilty secret.
8. Get creative with what turns you on
We’re very good at feeding our minds with things we think we should be interested in – cookery books, memoirs, self-help etc. But if you want to wake up your sexual self, try feeding that part of you instead.
Start reading about sex. That might be a memoir by a woman who’s explored her sexuality in ways you haven’t. It might be a practical book that actually teaches you something new. It might be erotic fiction that simply sparks your imagination and gets you thinking in a more sensual way.
It doesn’t have to be worthy or serious – in fact, the lighter and more enjoyable it feels, the better. Even a few pages a day can start to shift something as you let new ideas in.
And if you want to go deeper, write your own erotica.
I often suggest this to women. You’re not writing for anyone else – there’s no audience, no judgment. It could be a fantasy, a scene you’d like to experience or a feeling you’d love to have in bed.
The act of putting that into words forces you to ask: what actually turns me on? That question alone can be a revelation.
Some women keep what they write completely private. Others share a piece of it with a partner – a way of opening a conversation that might feel impossible out loud.
Either way, the point is the same: bringing creativity back into your sex life. After all, sex isn’t meant to be another dutiful, tick-box area of life. It’s meant to be the place where you truly get to play.
As told to Rachel Halliwell
Your Sexual Self by Lucy-Anne Holmes (£18.99, Quercus) is out now.
