But by mapping the terrain and acknowledging the highs as well as the lows, we can at least make it a more pleasant journey. Nothing can help us reverse the process of ageing. In other words, some limitations may be self-imposed, rather than being an inevitable product of our body’s wear and tear. Some people report feeling younger than their years – a youthful outlook that can cause them to be more active, and live longer as a consequence. Psychologists are also realising that your mental attitude could play a bigger role than you’d think. It really is the closest we’ve got to an elixir of youth. People in good health also enjoy about five more years of sexual activity at the end of the life. Exercise, in particular, not only ensures longer physical fitness, and fights a range of age-related diseases like diabetes and cancer, but also strengthens a weakening memory too. The more heartening news is that some of the less welcome pitfalls are less inevitable than you might imagine. Perhaps more important is the general recognition that age brings its equal shares of ups and downs there is no, overall, prime of your life. So what are we to take away from these findings? Crudely speaking, you may conclude that you are at your sexual peak in your 20s, your physical peak in your 30s, your mental peak in your 40s and 50s and at your happiest in your 60s – but these are just averages, so your own trajectories may follow very different paths. This is something of a paradox, given the physical complaints that come with age, but it could be partly down to the fact that you have finally learnt to balance your emotions after the tumult of the previous decades. What’s more, the falling sex drive may have other compensations – just as your libido starts falling, your zest for life rises. Intercourse may not be quite as regular or vigorous as it once was, but according to that study, 30% of healthy people aged 65-74 still enjoy sex at least once a week. According to one paper examining “sexually active life expectancy”, men who are 55 today can expect another 15 or so years of relatively frequent sex women of that age can expect slightly more than a decade.
And even then the decline is far from precipitous. In fact, neither sexual desire, nor sexual activity, fall off very quickly until well into your 50s. If sitcoms and movies are to be believed, your 20s and 30s are something of an ongoing orgy.
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