Welcome to our new Sex at Our Age columnist, award-winning senior sexpert Joan Price! Every week during Senior Sex Month and then monthly, Joan will answer your questions about everything from loss of desire to solo sex and partner issues. Nothing is out of bounds!  (Read our Q&A with Joan here.)

I really do need your help. I have a husband who loves me and needs the intimacy we used to have. I seem to have lost the desire almost altogether, and my poor husband is suffering.

I was brought up in the 50s with parents who wouldn’t talk about sex. My husband was my first real lover, and although I had other experiences – the 70s and liberation and all that – I felt too guilty to enjoy them. One tempestuous affair back then took me by storm. By chance, I ran into that old lover on Facebook, and although we’ve both moved on, remembering our affair brings back those old sensations for me.

How can I use these feelings to help me reinvigorate my relationship with my husband, whom I love dearly? I really want to get my libido back.

 —GuiltyFeelings

Good for you wanting to use the feelings that your old lover stirred in you to stimulate your desire for your husband. Fantasy is a great way to ramp up a tired libido, especially in a long marriage that feels sexually stale.

Whatever you fantasize that gets you going can benefit your marriage if it helps you feel sexually open to your husband again. No need for guilt – it’s not “cheating” to imagine a scenario that turns you on, even if it does involve another person. Just aim those juicy new feelings toward your husband and enjoy.

New relationships are wildly sexy, but after you’ve been together for decades, as much as you love each other, sex can become predictable and dull. It’s important to change it up and surprise each other regularly. Here are a few ways:

1. Try new things: positions, environment, sex toys, sexy clothing, lubricants, erotica.
2. Rediscover each other: Pretend that you’re new lovers, just finding out what the other person likes sexually. Explore different ways of touching.
3. Start sensually: Before taking it to the next step, give him a massage or have him massage you; agree to kiss for 20 minutes; do a striptease for him – or have him do one for you!
4. Pick a public place to role play that you don’t know each other. Flirt. Pick each other up. Seduce each other.
5. Exchange memories about your early times together, when your love was new and exciting. Recapture those feelings by revisiting a place you used to go or doing something that was part of that time.
6. Exercise first to get your blood flow going. This will make arousal faster and easier.

The more you have sex, the more easily arousal and desire will kick in. Rather than waiting to have sex until you’re in the mood, just go with it – concentrate on relaxing, free your mind from distractions and let yourself feel the sensations. Opening yourself to your physiological arousal will trigger your desire.

—Joan

Would you like to see more questions and answers? See all of Joan’s advice in Sex At Our Age.

To send Joan your questions, email sexpert@seniorplanet.org.
Joan Price is the author of the award-winning self-help book “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex” and of “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty.” Visit Joan’s  blog, “Naked at Our Age.”