“It looks like there is a tendency of older people to be more interested in sex, and there is probably a tendency of more engagement in sex,” says Natalia Gavrilova, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging. In a recent study, she and coauthor Stacy Tessler Lindau found that nearly 40 percent of men and 17 percent of women between ages 75 and 85 were sexually active. Among that cohort, 71 percent of men and 51 percent of women had quality sex lives.

According to a recent AARP report, 40 percent of people older than 45 have sex at least once a month, and in another recent study, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, suggest that any decline in sex among older women might be primarily due to health, not lack of desire…

In certain aspects, sex after 60 might even be better, at least for women. “Let’s pause—shall we?—and consider the possibility of spontaneous sex without the paralyzing fear of an unplanned pregnancy. Who wants that, right? I mean, besides every heterosexual woman I know,” writes Connie Schultz in her latest Cleveland Plain Dealer column, about menopause.