Being an adult wasn’t something that came as a surprise. A lot of time has passed, a lot of things have happened and, in my twenties I’d developed a thing for experienced women anyway. So when I reached 40 I was glad. There is nothing better than an experienced woman who is not confused by feelings of guilt or shame. Women in their late 30s and early 40s couldn’t suit me better from that perspective, at least on the face of it.

Of course eventually you realize that a percentage of experienced women have problems, like anyone. Their desires turn around some issue or other. A sensitive person eventually recognises, for example, that it can be about provoking desire more than achieving consumation at times. Sexual desire has transmuted into a taking away, a punishing of an absent figure or a controlling abuser that still hold sway deep in the psyche. And yeah, there is nothing you can do to help those folks.

But the spark of an innocent sexual desire remains. Pornography echoes this fantasy over and over again, resonating in the brain. It tells us ‘She enjoys this, she wants this uncluttered innocent release; She does experience orgasm, believe that she has internalised completely this fantasy just like you have’.

But Depite the cynicism of aging I approach all of these situations with the same hope for a mutually gratifying, tactile experience. Only now, now that I’ve been around the world, now that I have had so many intimate experiences, now that I have grown to crave deeper and more complete connection experiences, however fleeting, now I see through facades so quickly to the anxieties beneath. And I can see then that many people are just pretending. How is it that we can agree to pretend without any pretense of deception? And without any expectation for an ongoing connection? We can provide for each other a spark, a space for fleeting pleasures, and then nothing more is required. No projections, no manipulation, no preconceptions.