For today’s instalment of How I Do It, the series that gives you a sneak peek into the sex and love life of a new person each week, we hear from Scarlett Sometimes*.
Scarlett is a 51-year-old divorced mum and writer who says her ‘libido has fallen off the edge of a cliff’ since the menopause started.
But it wasn’t always this way for her – in fact, Scarlett describes herself as having ‘always been very sexual.’
She describes masturbating thinking of her crush while Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye played in her teenage bedroom, the Holly Hobbie wallpaper her dad put up in previous years now covered with posters of film and popstars.
‘There was a hole in my poster of Morten Harket where his mouth once was,’ she recalls, ‘from where I had kissed the poster so many times.’
But in the years following her marriage, Scarlett’s sexual appetite started to shrink.
Routine, exhaustion and plain boredom extinguished the sexual flame that had been burning for 20 years, she says.
But when they divorced, her sex drive ramped up again, and she started using dating sites.
Scarlett even fulfilled her ‘long-held ambition to have very quick anonymous sex with a stranger’, in a ‘hot and steamy’ session that saw her invite a marine into her house with strict instructions come upstairs, sit on a chair in the corner of a room, and blindfold himself while neither said a word to each other.
Now, however, she feels as if she’s ‘been hijacked by hormones’, and says there’s little she’d like to less than have sex these days.
‘All that writhing, grunting and getting hot and bothered,’ she says, ‘it all just seems so ridiculous now.’
Monday
I’ve lost count of the number of double entendre on my recording of Gardeners’ World. Monty is worse than Nigella with her ripe melons, glistening creamy mounds and spatchcocked poussin.
But unlike Nigella, who glances coquettishly at the camera while saying things like: ‘Let’s wait until it rises, and then we’ll see what it tastes like’, Monty just looks innocently and earnestly at the camera and delivers lines like: ‘We’ll use anything we can put these seeds in’, ‘These tubas get bigger as they get older’, and ‘You need to plant it good and deep’.
In the afternoon I took the children to the nursery to buy packets of seeds but all they had were plants which had sprouted. I remember the thrill of finding runner beans on the canes at my grandad’s allotment. Even more thrilling was lifting a marrow leaf to find a big fat marrow sitting there. My nan would fill a marrow with minced beef and serve stuffed marrow for dinner, after my grandad had got back from ‘the allotment’ (read: the betting shop).
Now that I have no libido whatsoever, seeing new shoots sprout from seeds we’ve planted is as close as it comes (pun intended) to an endorphin rush. No thoughts of a sexual nature today.
The only time I think about sex – albeit subconsciously – is when I’m asleep. My dreams are very often sexual – technicolour, exciting and vivid – so vivid that I ‘feel’ everything happening to me. In these dreams I am always desired and objectified.
Tuesday
Last night I dreamt I was setting up a trestle table at a jumble sale in the local civic hall. I was so busy arranging the jumble into a fetching display that I hadn’t noticed Robert Smith of The Cure (in his 1980s incarnation) standing there admiring one of my crocheted blankets as he sipped a mug of coffee.
As Robert Smith had been my crush since I was a teenager, and I have often lamented his marriage to Mary, I naturally wished to impress him with my sparkling wit and hilarious banter. But his unexpected presence had turned me into a gibbering idiot.
Rather than making him fall about laughing by telling him about the time I accidentally let rip on a vinyl chair in the doctors’ surgery waiting room and then had to try to disguise said rippage by pretending I had a squeaky shoe, I fawned and told him I was his biggest fan.
And he, instead of slamming me over the trestle table and ripping off my underwear, sauntered off to peruse carved owls on the next table.
No thoughts of a sexual nature today.
Wednesday
Something terrible happened today. My mum, who is living with me temporarily, had placed a pile of opened copies of a certain newspaper by the back door to act as a door mat.
Whenever my mum asks me to buy this filthy rag I try to do it incognito by folding the newspaper in half and hiding it under the baked beans. The only problem comes when the checkout operator picks it up and scans it with a flourish, exposing the front cover to everyone in the queue and blowing my cover.
Today, I went out the back door to feed the cats when suddenly a huge gust of wind circled and whipped up the pages of the newspaper, carrying them over the fence into next door’s back garden, and covered his patio with its pages spewing filthy bile re. women, the welfare state, comprehensive education, LGBT people, Muslims, the NHS, immigrants, and unions. Now he will think I’m a gammon.
Later that afternoon, as Gary the handyman was leaving our house, he was halfway down the path and turned around to me and said, ‘I’ll drop that weed off later in the week’, within earshot of the same neighbour who was sitting in his front garden behind his neatly-clipped hedge.
The weed in question was pondweed. Now my neighbour will think I’m a gammon and a pothead.
No naughty dreams last night, and no thoughts of a sexual nature today.
Thursday
Last night I dreamt I was going to be sentenced to death; for what, I don’t know. My barrister said: ‘Don’t worry about it’, which I interpreted as, ‘Don’t worry, you will not be sentenced to death’. I strode back to the dock, confident that I would not be meeting my end.
The judge looked at me gravely, pointed to a scary door with metal rivets all over it and said in a Brian Blessed-esque voice: ‘To the electric chair!’ I was wrestled through the door by two extremely horny male security guards, which in turn sent an enormous jolt of lust through my body.
I shouted up to my barrister: ‘But you told me not to worry!’. She glanced up and mumbled, ‘Yeah, I know’, then went back to filing her nails. Amateur dream interpretation: if someone tells you not to worry you should in fact be very worried.
Later that day, my mum received good news about the house she’s purchasing. To celebrate I bought prosecco, and we polished it off in the back garden.
No thoughts of a sexual nature today.
Friday
Something strange happened today.
At the start of this completely un-horny day, I had made packed lunches for my children and had taken them to Go Ape in Delamere Forest. I was busy ensuring that the children were listening to the staff’s instructions when it happened.
If this had been a film it would have happened in slow motion – perhaps shot through a soft-focus lens. He emerged from the training area behind a tall redwood tree. Tall, dark, intense ice-blue eyes set deep within their sockets, a strong slightly wonky nose, cheekbones so sharp they could slice tomatoes, butt cheeks like two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief.
He was the instructor. I’ll call him ‘Ryan’.
His lean body was trussed up and shackled with harnesses and belts, and the carabiners dangling from his taut frame jangled as he walked towards us. His dark five o’clock shadow made my knicker elastic twang. I imagined him pressing me against the redwood tree and ripping off my summer dress while biting my neck lustily.
My bosom heaved as I imagined him sliding his hand up my thigh and toying with the edge of my underwear. I became acutely aware of the strong earthy pine smell in the forest. Smell had always played a part in my life where passion was concerned – a certain aftershave, a freshly-creosoted fence, a forest, petrol, the smell of the inside of a bicycle shop.
But I was suddenly brought back down to earth with a thud. I was in the denial stage of my life where sexual attraction is concerned. During my 20s, 30s and 40s I had enjoyed the attention of men much younger than myself. During my early 40s, I had toy boy lovers who had the stamina to keep up with me. However, since turning 50, I had become invisible.
The ‘denial’ aspect comes when I look in the mirror. I look at my reflection and see a slim looks-younger-than-she-is MILF. But in photos, I appear otherwise. Where there was once a chin (singular) there are now chins (plural), my boobs are starting to resemble bags of glue, and age has softened my outline.
Ryan’s outline was finely honed as if whittled from young oak. He was probably engaged to a girl called ‘Kayleigh’ who was young, firm and pregnant with their first child. They have probably just bought their first home and have a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ magnet on their fridge.
Why would he entertain a menopausal woman with a 40-a-day cackle? The fantasy faded, along with the dying embers of my libido. The thought that Ryan and Kayleigh’s bodies would inevitably surrender to parenthood, curries on the sofa and old age didn’t bring me any comfort.
As my dad used to say: ‘Age is a terrible thing’.
Saturday
I had the most horrible nightmare last night.
It wasn’t about the serial killer Richard Ramirez, even though I’d just watched a two-hour documentary about him. I dreamt I’d gone on holiday but had forgotten to pack my makeup bag.
It was sweltering last night and our puppy was panting like mad. She couldn’t get comfortable in any room, so I made up a makeshift bed outside on the patio. We both slept under the stars and fell asleep to the sound of other dogs barking in distant neighbourhoods.
The night had been rough as my sleep had been broken several times thanks to the church bells clanging every hour. The amount of unbroken sleep I get is a huge factor in determining whether I will be all sweetness and light or an insufferable cantankerous witch the following day.
Today, I am an insufferable cantankerous witch. No naughty dreams last night, and no thoughts of a sexual nature today.
Sunday
During the other heatwave a couple of weeks ago I read with incredulity an article about how hot weather can make couples randier. I hate this hot weather and I can’t think of anything worse than squelching my wobbly bits against someone else’s and getting even hotter.
I’d insist on separate beds or, even better, two separate iced compartments. Icy coffin-type beds without a lid. In a previous life, I think I was a frog because my ideal habitat is a damp cave or under a cool wet rock.
It’s 4pm, and it’s now Dante’s Inferno in our living room. Now that I’m menopausal it seems I carry humidity everywhere I go anyway. The hot flush starts in my face and spreads like wildfire through my body.
After it’s done its job my fringe is stuck to my forehead and I want to kill everyone.
If there is a God up there he’s leant back in his armchair, has cracked open a beer, saying: ‘Have a dose of this, motherf****r!’ Periods, the pain of childbirth, the pain of losing kids (flying the nest or parental alienation), hot flushes, menopause, and death – that’s some sense of humour he’s got.
Due to another night of broken sleep last night my cantankerous reading is off the scale. My sense of humour seems to have gone AWOL with all the f***s I had to give.
No naughty dreams last night, and no thoughts of a sexual nature today.
*’Scarlett Sometimes’ is a pseudonym
How I Do It
In Metro.co.uk’s How I Do It you get a sneak peek into a week of a person’s sex and love life – from vanilla love-making to fetishes, threesomes and polyamorous relationships, they reveal it all.
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