All of this may sound like a catalog of unmitigated mortal decline, but it doesn't have to be. After all, as a man's sexual responses begin to throttle down with age, he finds it easier to last longer before ejaculation and therefore easier to satisfy his lover. At the same time, his mate is inclined to require more foreplay before she's sufficiently lubricated for entry.

The dalliance of age can make for sex that's all the sweeter for being slower.
Says M.D., former editor of the newsletter Sex after Forty: "You may not be able to have sex three times in an hour, but you'll be better equipped to do it once and make it last an hour. So much for the myth of sexual decline!"

It was once thought that the physiological changes wrought by age were entirely inevitable; as you got older, you started falling apart, and that was that. But it's now known that many ofthose creaks, rattles and groans are the result not of mere age but of ill health or inactivity. And the same principle applies to a person's sexual life.

In one survey of 225 older men, chronic illness and poor health turned out to be practically as significant a cause of sexual decline as aging itself. In fact, the middle-aged men in this study who considered themselves "in poor health" compared with other men their age were 6 times as likely as healthy men to be having some kind of sexual difficulty. Among men over 75, the connection was even more dramatic: Poor health made them 40 times more likely to be having sexual problems.