Betrayal after 60: the data of a growing phenomenon

Already. This is the plot: Silvia, full professor of Economics, falls in love with Dodo Ducci, his personal trainer. While Lele, an artist, falls head over heels for Lorettaprofessional, irrepressible physique, who inexplicably prefers the older Lele, penniless and with erectile difficulty, to her rich and handsome forty-year-old husband.

I’m still too young

Silvia and Lele have distant children, zero desire to grow old and an 18-year marriage. «Spending a lot of time together is like riding a roller coaster. Once you’re down, another time up and you have to know how to hold on tight. Which, in the long run, is not easy. The betrayal remains a traumatic event in the life of any couple but there is the venial and the mortal» adds the ghost-writer.

“When the two first contacted me, I was dumbfounded. I’ve always known them as one of those rare temptation-proof couples. Then I said to myself, come on, whoever is without sin cast the first stone. What amazed me, however, was their request to help them make a book. And in fact, reading their diaries between comic plots and hot situations, I thought that in fact a story similar to this age is even more exciting than a novel» he continues.

Cheating after 20 years of marriage

It all started by chance: after the discovery of the betrayal, Silvia began to write. A therapy but also a way to communicate with Lele who, in turn, wrote her version. A stone’s throw from the porcelain wedding, twenty years of marriage, the marital rift was manifest. «Through the story they have found complicity and are back together but to keep a love alive, there are many other less cruel options than a betrayal. I think of “brain sex”, that is, the one in which the imagination counts above all by resorting to sexting or dirty talking, since there is nothing more aphrodisiac than words. The whole novel is full of tips for escaping the boredom of routine. Sex was, especially for the seventy-year-olds, a conquest of freedom as young people. As for the boomers, they don’t want to know how to get old and they certainly won’t put sex aside », she concludes.

A crisis can help you rediscover yourself

Cheating when you’re financially healthy and you’ve arranged many things in life (children, work, etc.) is perhaps easier but it’s still dangerous. Literary outcomes are often ironic even if we are inclined to believe that, outside of the novel, irony has often been overcome by the family drama which does not spare them first of all, the children. Chiara, for example, discovered at the age of twenty the secret that her mother had kept hidden from everyone.

“It was his mother who came to me, she wanted to do an individual journey during which the sense of guilt emerged for having cheated on her husband in the past and the doubt that one of the children had not been conceived in marriage” she says Vidheya Del Vicario, vice president of Ispsi in Milan (Scientific Institute of Integrated Psycho-Sexology).

«The need to clarify led her to talk about it with her husband and for him the shock was double because the confirmation of the doubt arrived. She was not his daughter. They also decided to go on a journey as a couple and despite the initial intentions of separation and moments of great crisis they came to a more authentic communication and to rediscover each other. They remained together and the affection that the husband felt for that “daughter” remained unchanged».

Adolescent children discover the deception first

Chiara, a young woman, over time has been made aware of and has integrated that part of her own personal as well as family history. Of course, she doesn’t always work that way. «I have followed both couples where the betrayal had been discovered or revealed, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of revenge against the other partner, even the children. Moreover, sometimes it is precisely the children who become aware of the betrayals, especially adolescents due to adults’ access to cell phones. Generally the child experiences the parent as his propertyat most shared with the other parent, and he does not think of them as sexed. Instead, the discovery of a betrayal leads immediately to awareness.

Cheating over 65

In any case, that of cheating in couples over 65 is a phenomenon that we hear more and more about, better known to men, but today more easily accepted even in the case of a woman. It’s fair to say that the most widespread male betrayal is also due to the use of drugs used for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. In fact, their consumption goes far beyond the mere therapeutic intent and is quite often used even in much younger age groups as “psychological” self-therapy, or rather to manage performance anxiety» adds Del Vicario.

The importance of feeling the object of desire

But does sexuality really have this power in a couple or is it overrated? «It depends on the age of the spouses, their personalities, interests and respective differences. For some, sexuality makes the difference between being a couple or just friends, it is important as a confirmation of one’s desirability, or of still being the object of desire and a source of fulfillment for the other.

It is the emotions and subjective feelings in sexuality that make it important. Sexuality is a dimension of one’s experience with sometimes complex psychological implications: I would say that it is a dimension of the person and of the couple, certainly not the only oneothers are important and constitute as many levers to try again, to choose again.

Sexuality, both in its presence and absence, is still present» concludes Del Vicario. In the meantime Betrayals, the film by David Jones based on the homonymous drama by Harold Pinter, is about to turn forty. Ten years later it was out Indecent Proposal. And thirty years later Nymphomaniac.

In short, encroaching on other territories – whether it is in the fiction of a cinema or a book, or in surprising reality – everyone finds himself in betrayal. And every two decades the concept is updated.

iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED