In addition, important questions remain about how married straight and lesbian women similarly or differently experience and interpret sex in connection to midlife events, defined in this article to include changes and processes that commonly unfold in midlife in relation to health, caregiving, and aging. Likewise, lesbians’ and straight women’s experiences and interpretations of menopausal symptoms and sex after menopause may vary ( Winterich, 2003), but whether and how marital contexts drive women’s understandings of how aging processes shape sex remains unclear.

I felt comfortable immediately and hit it off with a woman, H, who was easy to talk to, attractive, and witty. I was at a party in my mid-20s where the host’s roommate was in a women’s rugby league, and the whole team came. Broadly, however, we know little about whether and how midlife events shape women’s experiences of sex in marital relationships in general and in lesbian marriages in particular. Gendered cultural ideals related to sex and sexuality inform how women make sense of midlife events that challenge sex and sexuality as well as the work women invest in their sexual relationships.For example, when asked about whether sex had changed over time, Colleen (lesbian) said, “Well, we’re definitely an older married couple. But for extra comfort, here are LGBTQ+ women and explaining what it was like the first time they went down on another woman or person with a vagina. Most participants were college educated and many had postgraduate degrees; 74% of straight women, 88% of men, and 89% of lesbian women had at least a college degree. We had sex several times, luxuriating in each other’s bodies, and it was the most intimate experience I’d ever had up until that point.

For example, Lodge and Umberson (2013) found that both gay and straight men define their embodied experiences of aging differently from women, but only gay men experienced negative body image as a key source of distress amid diminishing sex and sexuality in their romantic relationships.

Straight women, too, were distressed when they fell out of alignment with sexual norms specific to their relational contexts: when their drive was greater than their husbands’ or when their husbands experienced embodied sexual challenges (such as erectile dysfunction). Likewise, lesbians decentered sexuality as a primary measure of marital quality; simultaneously, however, they described same-gender relationship contexts as advantageous. Eventually, I got the hang of it, but I still [didn't] know what I [was] doing, so I [couldn't] tell if she came or not. I saw Clemence again a few times, but she wasn’t looking to commit, especially not to someone ten years younger and still exploring her sexuality. I close my thighs to keep her hand exactly there, wanting her to go deeper into me while my tongue finds new ways to explore the woman she is.