Dear Doctor Braghieri, I am 82 years old, I have been the widow of my beloved Gian Vittorio for 16 years after 45 years of happy union. Allow me to respond to MC on the sexuality of women “over 50”. If the «most widespread – and false! – idea is that which connects sexuality to reproduction», equally widespread – and false (as well as misleading!) – is that of connecting the feeling of love to the merely sexual act. And here the same discussion that has been made in this column regarding young people recurs: if everything revolves around the mere sexual act, the foundations of a relationship are lost sight of: feelings. If you notice a 15 year old sees a relationship only from a sexual point of view to feel “already grown up” and an “over 60” wants to have sex only to feel “still young”. In both cases there is the dissatisfaction of knowing how to live one’s age. I can assure you that Gian Vittorio and I loved each other madly, intensely living the love that united us until the last day 24 hours a day and not just for those 3 minutes (… to excess) of ephemeral pleasure!
Veronica
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Dear Veronica, thank you for your fascinating letter and your irony. Remarkable is her happy union which lasted forty-five years and was kept alive and complete until the last second: an illumination and a hope. I had never thought about the fact that when you’re young you experience sexual intercourse to feel grown up and when you grow up you experience it to feel young, but I think you’re absolutely right and I fear that in fact you always miss the moment. And I think that the habit of missing the moment is also part of many other aspects of life. Perhaps because imagining the next step, the goal, the project is a sort of escape from the here and now. Except that we end up escaping from the here and now even when the circumstances would not necessarily require an escape. It is a mental habit that, for once, I do not believe is dictated by the tiring “modern times” but has always been inherent in us. Projecting ourselves into the after is an atavistic haste that actually prevents us from feeling the present and risks leaving us disappointed by the “after”.
«The Saturday of the village» tells it perfectly and Leopardi was certainly not disturbed by the psychedelic bombardments of Tik Tok… Returning to sex, it must be said that perhaps, despite the projections into adulthood or the regressions to youth, it is one of the few circumstances of life in which the greatness of the moment is felt.