From learning how to use a sewing machine to sexual exploration, I have taken up several new hobbies in midlife. You could argue that sex isn’t a hobby, but rather an intimate interaction between a loving couple, but we’ll come onto that later. As for sewing machines, unlike sex, I’ve always been rather terrified of them, but last week, I somehow managed to sew two small pieces of fabric together to produce a sort of off-kilter mismatched handkerchief. Should anyone happen to need one, do get in touch before Liberty places an order.
Since last November, I’ve been meeting weekly with an art mentor whom I first encountered in 2018 when I enrolled for a painting course at City Lit, an adult education college in central London. City Lit is a college for everyone – including those with additional needs and learning difficulties, plus neurodivergent people like me (I have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). You can study anything and everything there, from poetry to politics, belly dancing for beginners to freehand machine embroidery (might sign up for that). I ended up taking several drawing and painting classes with Tony Hull, a well-established practising artist himself.
The teaching at the college was first rate, but what I loved most was never knowing who I might strike up conversation with at the café during breaktime. With two young children and things not so great at home, I looked forward to my all-day fine art class each Friday. Tony’s light-filled second-floor painting studio was the only place that my mind emptied of worry. But when in 2019 I was offered a well-paid full-time corporate job, which I would have been a fool not to go for, I had no choice but to give up my painting courses at City Lit.
Last summer, having jacked in the corporate life to focus on my children, I bumped into Tony at a friend’s gallery opening on the Embankment. There with an ex-student, Tony bent down (he is very tall) to tell me about her: a young woman who, prior to attending one of his Thursday evening night classes, worked full-time in an uninspiring job. She was now a full-time artist and, from my understanding, it had been attending a night class at City Lit that changed the course of her life.
As Tony continued, I could feel tears pinch at the back of my eyes. “That’s what you did for me,” I said, red-faced with emotion. “Your studio was the only place I felt truly happy because of stuff happening at home.” I became so upset, I had to leave the gallery and head around the corner for a stiff negroni.
That’s when I realised that this “art” thing I had bottled up inside me – a deep need to be creative that had lain dormant since I dropped out of art school aged 19 – had to be attended to. I now know that if I don’t make something with my hands, I’m only half a person. Producing art, I realise, is a physical need.
Recently life has thrown up many unexpected things – divorce, an ADHD diagnosis, a persistent low-level depression, a need for HRT – but it is the physical and emotional need for sexual satisfaction that has been the most surprising junction on the midlife motorway. I don’t recall ever feeling this way about sex before. Sex in my 20s was all mangled up with societal expectation, rather than my own desire. I lost my virginity on a family holiday in Spain aged 17 and ended up in a relationship with the guy for two years. Our sex life was all about his pleasure, never my own.
Growing up, sex was only ever openly discussed in the context of negativity. Girls and young women who enjoyed sex with multiple partners were “bikes” and “no one wants to marry a bike”, said one family member. Female pleasure was never discussed, which may explain why, at the grand old age of 25, when a friend, frustrated on my behalf, bought me a “rabbit” vibrator – as was fashionable in the 1990s – I experienced my first orgasm. My mind was well and truly blown; it wasn’t just my partners who had ranked my pleasure below their own; I had too.
If I could have a conversation with the much younger me, she would probably die on the spot hearing me tell her that I’m now having the best sex of my life in midlife. I’m not sure whether it is the HRT, or a renewed sense of confidence thanks to therapy, or because I am now dating men on my terms, but my sex drive has never been higher. The idea that menopausal women skulk off to a world of dry vaginas and excuse themselves from the sex party on account of them no longer being considered attractive or able to produce babies, is a myth. OK, so the dryness is not a myth, which is why oestrogen pessaries were invented, but leave the sex party? Why would I do that when it’s only just getting started?
The thing is, much like my new hobbies (which are about to include gardening, since discovering I have zero patience for ceramics), sex on my terms is very satisfying – sex on my own is also very satisfying. A sexual relationship with strict boundaries – always outside my home, never with a full monogamous commitment, always “safe” – is, I realise, what works for me. You could argue that by pursuing non-committal sexual exploration I am missing out on a committed relationship, but for now that is exactly the point. What I really need is to feel creatively fulfilled, sexually satisfied and emotionally connected – so between art, lovers, friends and family, that’s pretty much life as I want it right now sorted.
After reading a recent post by a friend on Instagram discussing the increase in sex-drive that happens to some women around my age and above, I re-posted it to my Instagram feed. Fifty per cent of the women who replied wrote something along the lines of, “Uh no, no way; I don’t feel anything downstairs, the shop is shut”, while the remaining 50 per cent described themselves as “sexually active as bunnies” and said that they were feeling “more rampant than ever”. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of the two groups were recently divorced and which were in long-term marriages.
As for hobbies: Alan Titchmarsh, you have nothing to fear – plants die when I look at them. However, I may take up belly dancing for beginners, and one day I do genuinely hope to become a full-time practising artist. Perhaps I’ll leave the embroidery lessons for now though.
As for the one night class that you definitely won’t find on the City Lit website, I will always prefer sex to sewing machines.
