“‘Friends with benefits’ are uniquely suited to two groups of people — the young, who want to delay starting their life, and older people, who don’t want to complicate it,” said Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who serves on the sexual health advisory council of Church & Dwight, which manufactures Trojan condoms and financed the sex survey. “People in the middle are building families and building a life — they need more than a friend, they need lifetime partners.”
For older people who are casually having sex, “it’s warm, it’s nice, they care about each other, but no one is under the illusion this is a grand love,” Dr. Schwartz said.
For middle-aged heterosexual women, limited expectations of a sexual relationship may be a function of demographics: Since women outlive men, there are simply fewer older men around, said Debby Herbenick, one of the study’s authors and associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion.
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