Senior Dating

Senior Intimacy Issues: When Your Mate Hasn’t Hit Menopause

April Braswell

Written by: April Braswell

April Braswell

April Braswell is a senior dating expert, dating coach and professional dating profile writer. She leads dating, relationship and communication skills workshops throughout California. You can sign up for her ezine at www.AprilBraswell.com and get a free gift ecourse when you do.

See full bio »

Edited by: Lillian Castro

Lillian Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to ensure DatingAdvice articles have been edited for overall clarity, accuracy, and reader engagement. She has worked at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Gwinnett Daily News, and The Gainesville Sun covering lifestyle topics.

See full bio »
Discuss This! Discuss This!
Advertiser Disclosure

As a baby boomer couple, you might have read magazine and newspaper articles depicting the majority of women over the age of 50 have started menopause.

But what if your senior mate is over 50 and still hasn’t reached menopause?

It’s nothing to fret about, but her being premenopausal does have an impact on your relationship, especially in the bedroom. If you’re a boomer guy, you may even have avoided reading any of the health articles touching on menopause because it didn’t directly pertain to you.

Well, now it does.

You were probably expecting the two of you wouldn’t have to discuss birth control. You just figured avoiding pregnancy as a romantic couple in your 50s would be a moot point.

It’s perfectly normal to anticipate the freedom from concern for unplanned pregnancy, but not every woman stops menstruating at age 50.

She’s likely perimenopausal and is watching her cycle like a Peregrine falcon ready to swoop in on any slight variation in her cycle as a sign “the change” has started.

The average age for true menopause for women in the U.S. is 51 (according to National Institute on Aging). Quite a number of women haven’t reached full menopause even by the time they are 53, 54 or 55 years old.

Even though she hasn’t hit menopause, your lady is still fertile. However, she is fairly unlikely to conceive.  She might be menstruating, but her egg production diminishes over the course of a lifetime of fertility.

What’s worse is if she conceives after 50, her pregnancy brings significant health complications for her, which the two of you will then need to contend with.

“Make your getting intimate conversations

practical and a little bit naughty!”

What to discuss:

You want to avoid any such complexities in your mature relationship, which means as part of your pre-consummation conversations, you two need to discuss birth control.

Additionally, far too many sexually active senior couples don’t discuss condom use and the need to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Those boomer couples where the woman is in menopause often presume they don’t need to protect themselves. AIDS is not the only STD to consider.

Before you and your senior partner enter the bedroom, it’s time to discuss all of this.

Don’t be too prim in how you broach the topic of sexual safety, but you also don’t want to bring it up while you’re entangled on the sofa with the bedroom door open.

Make your getting intimate conversations practical, fun and just a little bit naughty!

Advertiser Disclosure

DatingAdvice.com is a free online resource that offers valuable content and comparison services to users. To keep this resource 100% free, we receive compensation from many of the offers listed on the site. Along with key review factors, this compensation may impact how and where products appear across the site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). DatingAdvice.com does not include the entire universe of available offers. Editorial opinions expressed on the site are strictly our own and are not provided, endorsed, or approved by advertisers.

Our Editorial Review Policy

Our site is committed to publishing independent, accurate content guided by strict editorial guidelines. Before articles and reviews are published on our site, they undergo a thorough review process performed by a team of independent editors and subject-matter experts to ensure the content’s accuracy, timeliness, and impartiality. Our editorial team is separate and independent of our site’s advertisers, and the opinions they express on our site are their own. To read more about our team members and their editorial backgrounds, please visit our site’s About page.