Imagine this scenario: It's your 55th birthday, and you're celebrating at a nice restaurant with your partner. You've ordered the good Champagne, and you're feeling contemplative.
The kids are gone, or nearly gone. Careers are winding down. The frantic logistics of raising a family are finally easing up. And suddenly, there's a lot more time for the two of you.
You look across the table at your partner, and it hits you: you may have another 30 years together. Thirty years!
You've spent decades building a life together. Raising children, pursuing careers, weathering storms, and becoming pretty terrific partners at managing all the things life throws at you.
But what about the next 30 years?
For some couples, the prospect of having so much more time together is exhilarating. For others, it might be a little unsettling.
After all, somewhere along the way, intimacy may have taken a backseat to everything else. You may have become very good at living together without spending quite as much time feeling together.
But here's what excites me.
What if this next phase isn't about trying to recapture the intimacy we had when we were younger? What if it's an opportunity to create something entirely new?
What kind of intimacy could we create at 60 that we didn't even know how to have at 30?
I was originally going to write about keeping our sex lives interesting as we age. But a thoughtful friend challenged me. Before we talk about great sex in our 60s and 70s, shouldn't we talk about intimacy itself?
She got me thinking.
What if intimacy isn't something we possess in a relationship, but something we continually create?
I don’t know how a psychologist would define intimacy. I deliberately didn’t check. But for me, intimacy is craving your partner's company, feeling free to be completely yourself with them; doing things both old and new; exploring passions, but also sharing challenges; being each other's safe space and also a partner in crime.
If we’ve let our relationship become an ‘efficient partnership’ rather than an intimate one, how can we get that back or amp it up?
I’m not going to focus on the science, but I did come across two pieces of research that I found helpful:
Self-expansion: Arthur Aron and colleagues have studied how sharing novel, exciting activities can help sustain relationship quality. This supports the idea that couples can keep discovering each other through new adventures together, rather than merely maintaining old routines.
Self-disclosure and vulnerability: Research on intimacy suggests that revealing personal feelings and receiving an understanding response can foster closeness. Importantly, vulnerability alone isn't sufficient; how the other person responds matters
I suspect all of this makes sense, but it still leaves us with the question: how do we build back intimacy when it has dwindled, or how do we amp up intimacy in our new life stage?
Not to sound like an advice columnist, but I have a few ideas—some a little more radical than others:
First, don't look intimacy in the eye. My guess is that if you're struggling a little with connecting intimately with your partner, a direct conversation about intimacy can sometimes be too loaded. It can put both people on the defensive. As my friend said, “Never call it a date night.”
Instead, try doing a few things that might foster intimacy without making intimacy itself the subject: look through an old pre-kid photo album; reminisce about past vacations; buy a pack of couples discussion questions and pull them out over a glass of wine (or two).
Of course, sometimes a direct conversation is exactly what's needed. But if the subject has become difficult, approaching it sideways might be a better place to start.
And if you already have a strong intimate connection, an abstract discussion about becoming more intimate may not be particularly inspiring either. Talk about things you could do together that would bring you joy and bring you closer.
Start with intimacy-light. If you're a couple who has lost some of that spark, don't try to go from zero to 60 overnight. But do something.
Break up the usual routine of supper at home, TV at night, and separate screens or activities all day. Book a couples massage. Try a sport you're both awful at (rock climbing or curling come to mind). Find something that gets you laughing together again.
The point isn't to manufacture a romantic moment. It's to create opportunities for connection without putting too much pressure on either of you.
Spend time together, with others. Take some pressure off yourselves and spend time with other couples, just hanging out or doing things together.
But here's my rule: don't immediately break off into the guys and the girls. Stay together as a foursome or group of six. Watch how other couples interact. See what makes them laugh, how they tease each other, how they show affection or navigate disagreements. And let other people remind you of the qualities in your own partner that you may have started taking for granted.
I think this is especially important as we get older. As careers wind down, we may lose some of the social interaction that work provided. Building a rich shared social life can create a whole new dimension of intimacy—not just between the two of you, but with the people around you.
Try to forget, at least for a while, what your past forms of intimacy looked like. Maybe you had a rocking sex life in your 30s. Maybe you jumped out of planes together or rocked it at music festivals following the Grateful Dead.
Wonderful. But you don't have to recreate those experiences.
Think about—and then talk about—what excites you now. What would you love to do together at this age? What interests have you never explored? What might you enjoy today that wouldn't even have occurred to you 20 years ago?
This applies equally to couples feeling a little distant and couples who are already wonderfully close. The point isn't to get back to who you were. It's to discover who you might become.
Share your dreams. It probably helps to have a pretty decent intimate connection going in, but I love evenings where we open up about adventures we want to have together, places we want to go, and experiences we want to have.
And perhaps some of those dreams are more personal. Something you've always wanted to learn. A fear you'd like to overcome. A different way of living. Something you've never quite found the courage to suggest.
It's a great way to co-plan our next phase—and perhaps discover something about your partner you didn't know.
A slightly more challenging one: role-play vulnerability with a close friend. If you're having a hard time being open and vulnerable with your partner, try practising a difficult conversation with a trusted friend.
Tell them what you're struggling to express. Ask them to help you find the words. Maybe even role-play the conversation you hope to have with your partner.
It may feel less fraught, and it might help you get comfortable being open and vulnerable again. The goal, of course, is to bring that openness back into your relationship.
And one more unconventional possibility: MDMA-assisted couples therapy. I considered leaving this out, and it warrants a much deeper discussion than I'm giving it here.
Early research has explored whether MDMA, used in carefully supervised therapeutic settings, might help some couples work through emotional barriers. The studies are small, the evidence is preliminary, and this isn't an established treatment for couples who simply want more intimacy. But I'm intrigued by the possibility, and curious about where the research might lead.
Of course, none of these ideas can create intimacy if only one person wants it. Sometimes rebuilding closeness requires much harder conversations, and perhaps professional help.
But whether we're trying to recover something we've lost or create something we've never experienced, I think there's an exciting opportunity here.
When I think about the next 30 years, one of the things that excites me most is the possibility that our closest relationships might become even richer.
Not because they're broken or need fixing. But because we're still changing, still discovering things about ourselves, and still capable of surprising each other.
Perhaps one of the great opportunities of this stage of life is that we don't have to settle for the intimacy we've already experienced. We can create something new.
As we enter this stage in life, can we make sure that the person we know most intimately is also someone we can be intimate with?
