Everybody thinks that everyone else is having much more sex than they are. I just read a survey proving that people in Britain are, in fact, having less sex than they were a decade ago. On average, people aged 16-44 are having sex just under five times a month, compared with 6.2 for men and 6.3 for women at the time of the previous survey in 2000.
Researchers try to link the findings to the recession, the buzzword they know will propel every study to mainstream media attention, but the point is that romance is dead. You always think your generation are the big, bad clever one – until you realise that your grandparents, whose bedrooms probably didn’t have central heating and laptops in them, and who were married at your age, were having a lot more sex than you are now. They inhabited their bodies, not their notifications tab. Your grandparents got more love than you do.
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My friend E told me about her grandparents recently. Her grandmother was a young Belgian woman, whose Catholic family hid as many Jewish friends as they could fit in their attic during the war. She spoke nine languages. One day, after peace had arrived, a British soldier knocked on the door. She looked at him. She thought, there you are. She told him about all their friends still living there inside her parents’ house, still hidden in the roof. He said he could help. He looked at her. He thought, there you are.
There was a wedding. He wanted them to start a new life in the new world, but she couldn’t go without taking all of her family with her. So he went ahead to Montreal to start their new life for them. After nine years he had 400 staff working underneath him – he’d had a good hunch about these new telephone guys, and got in working for a company called Bell – so he was finally able to send for her and her entire extended family. They came. He had also learned all of the nine languages that she spoke, so he could take her on holiday anywhere she wanted to go.
Then my friend L told a story about her grandparents. The grandfather was Tunisian, had fled to France at some point, the grandmother was Polish I think, and they fell in love, had a family, got through some very rough times. Decades later, even when they were in the care home and both of them with dementia, and they couldn’t even remember the words for food – couldn’t even remember how to chew it – they could only remember each other. They would dance with each other, waltzing round the room, having lost their grip on anything else. The dance of each other was all they had left, in the end, and it was enough.
My own grandparents met on a ship. I think she was going to South Africa and him on to somewhere else with the army. I forget. It took months. I don’t forget that grandmother told me she felt a warm presence out on the deck, and it wasn’t the sun, it was him, sitting down beside her for the first time. There was a glow. This wonderful, kind man. They wrote to each other every day for five years before he could come home from the war. Surely it must have been so awkward, having built up this image of somebody who you didn’t really know, then you’re there in the flesh, meeting them again, what do you do? No, she said. It was just wonderful. It was like we hadn’t been a day apart.
How did all these people know to keep going?
Clearly, one of two things is going on here. The first option is that our grandparents just had so many years available to take the bad bits out of their stories that they polished and polished them until they became a great big shining lie. Due to a lack of options, they had to make do with that one farce of a love affair, and so they retrospectively turned it into a movie because what else was there to do?
The second option is that all those recent wars meant they lived with the spectre of death, so they were truly grateful for somebody who wasn’t going anywhere, and for the chance to create life, and they got on with it. They were used to it taking hours for their hair to dry, months to save up for a new dress, years and years and years to rebuild a community that would always have craters in it. Our grandparents didn’t sleep with phones or radiators keeping them warm, so they needed a human being instead.
It’s the dithering that gets me the most. Everyone I know is dithering about whether they want to be with someone or not; whether they should ask them, wait to be asked. Or should they send a series of messages that suggest an interest so casua11111l it could be mistaken for disdain. Alright, that was a typo ‘cos someone just bashed into my keyboard but it looks about right. Casua111111l. Whether they should wait and hedge their bets on this other person even though he said he wasn’t sure he could handle a relationship at this time because he’s a bit messed up and all, but maybe they could, you know, like, just hook up and shit, it’s cool, don’t stress me out, don’t ever appear needy. Or there’s Tinder. Grindr. Drinking a lot and seeing what comes of it. It’s a laugh. You’re so lonely. You’re not lonely. You keep yourself warm at night.
Our grandparents knew how to love because they were there in the water, doing the work of loving. We’re all flapping about like fish out of water, upstream, downstream, because we’re not actually anywhere near the water at all. All the magazine articles about which products will make your skin glow when this little something called sex before breakfast with someone who loves you is probably the best blusher that I can think of. Pregnancy is also really, really good for that. But the products are easier. Sure.
My friend M wrote on Twitter: “sat next to the horniest elderly couple of my flight back from amsterdam. i love them. they make me hopeful for the wet, decrepit future.”
It’s not that I wonder what stories we will tell our grandchildren. It’s that I wonder how the hell we are going to have any.
Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood
Previously: Why I’ll Be Wearing a Poppy This Remembrance Day
