It has been nearly ten years since a study first drew attention by showing that infidelity was more common among people in their sixties than among the young. The finding was shocking at the time, because the widely held assumption was that young people were spirited, carefree, and loose in their morals, while older people were defined by bitter conservatism, complaints about society, and the habit of terrorizing everyone else with constant moralizing.
The first explanations therefore assumed that those sixty-year-olds belonged to the exceptional hippie generation, and that they would be followed by a generation undergoing a mental return to the 1950s. Nothing of the sort was confirmed. In reality, the apparent mystery has a natural biological and psychological explanation, and not a new one.
It is entirely natural that young people are more dogmatic in their views, whether conservatively or liberally so—both tendencies restrict sexual activity—yet at the same time they possess young bodies charged with hormones. As people age, they better understand that life is complicated, formulas are inadequate, and reconciliation and tolerance generally increase. We knew this from the archetypal figure of the kindly grandmother who cheers on the young as they do things they plainly ought not to do.
But thanks to scientific and technological progress, we age more slowly than before, and a generation has arrived that possesses not only growing understanding but bodies still capable of committing infidelity well into advanced age. Today that archetypal grandmother might not be encouraging the young—she would be doing those things herself. We are therefore encountering phenomena such as sexual tourism among women in their seventies.
After all, a few weeks ago I attended a performance by the world’s finest stripper, with an utterly flawless body. She is fifty-three years old—yes, truly 53—which is an age at which she could easily have grandchildren. The average woman does not look like Dita von Teese, yet it is sufficient testimony to how the world is changing.
Alongside that, it also matters that the younger generation faces difficult lives in many respects unlike anything previous generations knew. Fatigue, exhaustion, stress—those are not exactly conditions that encourage a lively social life.
Is it still strange?