Chip’s Note: I highly recommend you read Parts 1 and 2 before reading today’s guest post.
“You look seventeen, what are you doing?!,” my close friend Katherine said the first time I visited her after I started seeing Michael.
I said, “I hired a M.E.O.W. – Male Escort for Older Women.”
“Are you bullshitting me?” Katherine asked.
“No!” I said. Katherine proceeded to ask me very detailed questions. We talked about positions, oral sex and two bodies intertwining for pleasure.
I could not stop smiling. Sharing at such a significant level of truth is refreshing. I told her about my desire to help other women see that they can have this if they wish to. I know it is not for every woman. However, for me, it is my life energy. Having incredible sex after seventeen years feeds me in all the very best ways.
Not that “looking younger” is necessarily the goal—I don’t want to play into society’s ageist beauty standards here—but feeling younger certainly is a good goal! I felt like a bunch of stagnant energy that had been stuck in me for years was circulating again. I had so much more energy and zest for life, as if I was back in my forties—or even twenties!
But I have so much more self-esteem and self-acceptance now than when I was in my twenties (when I was wracked by self-consciousness about my body and sexuality, as many young women are). I’m combining the vitality of my twenties, with the self-confidence of my late midlife. My sessions with Michael have turned me into a sex goddess at age sixty-nine!
How Stella Got Her Groove Back is the quintessential movie about a woman getting her “groove” back in the arms of a younger man (in the movie, a twenty-year old man). It came out in 1998, and back then, forty (the age of the character Stella) was considered “old.” Now in 2024, sixty is the new forty—which means seventy, which I’ll be later this year, is the new fifty!
Finding regular, passionate sex with a “younger” man (he’s 47!) has definitely helped me get my groove back. Michael gave me a fun exercise, to go to a make-up counter at a department store and tell the saleslady, “I have a new younger lover, and I’d like a pink lipstick to add some extra zing to my lips.”
The saleslady’s eyes flashed…”Well let’s take care of that then” she said, with a knowing smile.
Michael gave me the exercise to say a similar thing in a clothes department: “I want an outfit that will help me be arm candy on my new younger lover’s arm.” That same day, I had new lipstick and a new outfit I wouldn’t have worn since I was way younger—which was aided by the ten pounds I lost in the first month I started seeing him. (I think the weight loss came from stress relief—which is known to help weight loss—and an increased vitality I bring to my workouts now that I’m getting fucked regularly.)
I think Michael was more interested in me gaining the confidence to show-off my newfound eroticism to a stranger, than he was in the lipstick and the clothes—seeing as the lipstick gets smeared and the clothes fly off within minutes of us seeing each other.
We see each other for weekly afternoon appointments in an apartment he has access to. I have long weeks involving serious medical and emotional care for multiple people with illnesses in my family. Most of my week is caretaking other people. My weekly afternoons with Michael are caretaking myself. I can completely let go of always having to have my shit together, and be wild. As Michael says, “You get to let your guard down and be unrestrained in our sessions.”
I get that some people might raise an eyebrow at paying for sex. But this is a mutually beneficial arrangement, one that Michael consents to fully and enthusiastically. As he points out to me, the money is what allows him to spend afternoons with me in the middle of the week, rather than doing freelance copywriting (which is what he used to do—he says he’d trade this work for his old copywriting career any day).
What would I do instead of paying for it? Go on Tinder? Find a guy my age to date, as a married woman, with all the emotional complications that go with dating? I don’t want emotional complications. I have plenty of those in my marriage.
What I want is regular, hot sex. I want and need to get fucked well once a week. It’s like a wellness appointment. I have my therapy, my yoga, my workouts, my art lessons, and my weekly appointment for hot sex. It keeps the blood circulating and the vitality flowing. It’s brought my glow back—and brought me back to perky.
As Michael and I talk about, paying for it is what keeps it fun, simple, predictable, and emotionally “untangled.” Michael talks about what he calls “untangled love”—it’s a form of love that can arise between two people when they agree to simply be present with each other in each encounter, celebrating each other’s humanity and need for physical intimacy, and seeing each other for the beautiful humans we are in the moment—without putting emotional hooks in each other or creating romantic narratives about some future life together. I already have a life story with my husband. What I didn’t have is the sex I craved. Now I do. Problem solved.
Having my sexual needs met once a week has, interestingly, deepened my relationship with my adult daughter. It was already great, but I have so much more energy and vitality, we are able to have way more fun, like when I was a younger mom. She knows about what I’m doing, and totally supports it. “Way to go, Mom!” she says. My time with Michael has also given me the energy to care for my husband more attentively. Instead of being depleted and resentful in my myriad care duties, I come to these with a renewed sense of the joy of life.
But ultimately, I don’t need to “justify” my sessions in terms of how they make me a better mother or wife. They make me a better version of me—and for that, I’ll always be grateful.
My message to other women who may be reading this, and who haven’t found a solution to being chronically under-sexed: there are solutions out there. All it takes is a recognition that you deserve to have incredible sex regularly, that you can have this, and that this is a worthwhile investment in your health, happiness, and vitality. As a lifelong investor, I can say, this investment in myself has had the highest payback I’ve ever experienced.
When you’re flowing sexually, everything is better. I felt like I was walking, and now I’m gliding. I was there but not completely alive. To have my body wake up in such an intense way is life changing. It gives me this incredible sense of being here in the now and functioning highly, and that makes the rest of whatever comes seem a whole lot easier and better.
-Madelyn
(Note: I’ve been keeping a diary of my experiences with Michael, and gave him permission to post entries from this diary on his own blog. You can read my diary entries here.)