Dear Sugars,

Three years ago, I broke up with my lover of 10 years after he largely ignored my existence and stopped sleeping with me. By then I’d figured out that he had acute dyslexia and Asperger’s, and I’d accepted that he wouldn’t eat with me or go out to movies with me, but great sex had kept us together. Without it, there wasn’t much left, so when he continued to show no sexual interest in me for several months, we broke up.

I’m now 70; he’s 62. Since our split, we’ve at last become good friends. He never uses the offensive tone he sometimes used when we were lovers. He brings me flowers and gifts, and we have long phone conversations several times a week. He wants sex now, of course, but I’ve held firm to my boundaries. I also suffer chronic UTIs, which have pretty much killed my sex drive.

But I really miss that part of myself. To my surprise, sex had gotten better with every decade of my life until I reached 70. I loved sex with my ex-lover. A night together was sometimes right up there with a trip to Paris. Now that we’re no longer lovers, we’re more companionable than when we were — as if we can’t be both at the same time. I feel like I’m killing off an important part of myself, as if I locked the bedroom of my internal castle and now sleep on the couch. I feel sidelined by my ex and my UTIs (and yes, I’ve consulted a urologist). I’m without hope for a companionable and sexual relationship while I’m still healthy and young enough. I still look pretty good, though a size overweight. I walk every day, and I still work. What now?

Still Buzzing

Steve Almond: There are two questions in your letter, Still Buzzing. The first is whether you should allow this ex back into your bed. As we know from our friend Esther Perel, the psychotherapist, greater emotional intimacy can, ironically, lead to a waning of sexual desire. Why? Because desire is often predicated on distance, transgression and mystery. It sounds like you and this man used to need sex to reach each other. Maybe you no longer do. The more important question in your letter is whether you’ll be able to resurrect your erotic self. By your own account, sex has always been an integral part of your life, a source of growing pleasure over the years. How and why, then, did you “kill” this part of yourself? How much of your inhibition around sexuality has to do with anxieties regarding your aging body? How much is rooted in emotional issues? An ecstatic coupling that transports you to Paris sounds wonderful, but the real question here is what makes you feel alive sexually? Expand your sense of the erotic. Do you have sexual fantasies? Do you masturbate? What can you do to reconnect to the pleasures of your own body?