If sitcoms and movies are to be believed, your 20s and 30s are something of an ongoing orgy. In fact, neither sexual desire, nor sexual activity, fall off very quickly until well into your 50s. And even then the decline is far from precipitous. 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. 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.

What’s more, the falling sex drive may have other compensations – just as your libido starts falling, your zest for life rises. 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.

Elixir of youth?

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. 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.