The Seven Ages of Love

Love: The old, old story

Should we welcome or rage against the cooling of desire? Thomas Sutcliffe reflects on love and time
From Love and Sex - a free glossy magazine with the print edition

Inside The Seven Ages of Love

Love: The old, old story

Friday, 26 September 2008

Should we welcome or rage against the cooling of desire? Thomas Sutcliffe reflects on love and time
From Love and Sex - a free glossy magazine with the print edition

The facts of life: love and age

Friday, 26 September 2008

A comprehensive study by Swedish researchers, published this summer, found that 68 per cent of married men in their seventies and 56 per cent of married women in their seventies were having sex, with almost a third of those surveyed (31 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women) having it once a week.

The seven ages of love: 30s

Friday, 26 September 2008

It's a Saturday afternoon and I've been cleaning the kitchen listening to Bonnie Tyler's "Holding out for a Hero". "Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods? Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?" My lodger comes in and purses his lips, Mrs Danvers style. He's getting a little fed up of playing the gay best friend. I turn off the music with suitable shame. "You don't need a hero, Joy. You need a nice boy who wears Converse boots and listens to music," says my lodger. "Is it really that difficult?"

The seven ages of love: 40s

Friday, 26 September 2008

"Spring is in the air

The seven ages of love: 20s

Friday, 26 September 2008

Rob Sharp, 28, gives his take on love and sex at his stage in life

The seven ages of love: 60s

Friday, 26 September 2008

Love: 60. The concept is as improbable in life as it would be in a tennis score. The two go together like my cat and the Large Hedron Collider. Or so I thought four decades ago when I was 22 and a review copy of a book on "Sex for the over-sixties" was sent in to the magazine where I worked. The features editor, as a diversion from his own shameful secret that he was over 30, had much fun in thinking of elderly, female literary agents to whom he might forward it anonymously. In the Sixties, nobody could possibly be in their sixties. Even my parents weren't that antique. Like The Beatles, I took "When I'm 64" to mean "When pigs fly over the Abbey Road studios".

The seven ages of love: 70s

Friday, 26 September 2008

When you're in your seventies, love has a long memory; I grew up at a time when sex was secret, lives were private and your parents didn't approve. Sex before marriage was either fast and furtive, or romantically dangerous. There was no pill but no Aids either. As a young woman I knew little about my own body but plenty about my troubled emotions. As a child during the war I saw the pain of separation and loss. I grew up to the strains of "We'll Meet Again", "Some Day I'll Find You" and Snow White's "Some Day My Prince Will Come". I saw it as a search for an ideal: Mr Right. Mr Darcy. Big mistake.

Questionnaire: What is your 'love age'?

Friday, 26 September 2008

Are you young at heart or ancient in the ways of love? Shakespeare's seven ages of man infant, child, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon and mere oblivion were derived from the seven "planets" of medieval cosmology, each of which governed its own sphere of influence. This influence extended to affairs of the heart, so there could arguably have been seven ages of love to go alongside Shakespeare's version. Find out where you fall in the Independent Almanac of Amorousness with this simple quiz.

Love doctor: What's sex got to do with it?

Friday, 26 September 2008

Are love and sex inextricably linked? My dad was a love-and-sex man. At least I think he was. He certainly wasn't the kind of guy to say "phwooar!" (if that's how it's spelt). And he was never unfaithful to his partners. My mother, on the other hand, was a sex-without-love person. When they divorced, my father, on talking to the head of the Royal College of Art, where she worked, was asked by the principal how he could have stood all her affairs. "Oh, it wasn't affairs, it was only flirting," said my father. "Flirting?" replied the principal, his eyes bulging. "My dear man, your wife went to bed with everyone in the college, myself included!"