I’ve Tried Everything from Swinging to Polyamory. But at 76, I’m Still Horny as Hell.

Most men assume that age will quiet their desire. That somewhere past 70, lust will give way to comfort. But for Benjamin, a retired behavioral researcher and Vietnam veteran, the opposite has been true. His body slowed, but his libido never did.

Benjamin, at 76, still loves his wife deeply but doesn’t sexually desire women his age.

In this edition of the Secret Lives of Men, he describes decades of marriage, swinging, and polyamory, in which he thought he understood sex, honesty, and human need. Then he fell for a woman who turned out to be a crypto scammer, and learned that desire doesn’t fade with age—it just gets more complicated.

(Names and identifying details of the subjects have been changed to protect anonymity.)

It’s embarrassing to say, but I might as well lead with the truth: I’m 76 and still horny as hell.

I’m tall, with the kind of posture that used to turn heads but now just reminds me to stretch. My hair’s gone white, my skin’s mapped with wrinkles, and even with hearing aids, I miss half of what people say. But desire—desire’s still loud.

At my age, people expect you to mellow out, to trade sex for crossword puzzles and nostalgia. But my sex drive never got the memo. It’s as stubborn as I am.

The people who turn me on aren’t the people who want me. My wife is also in her 70s, and when I met her, she was gorgeous: thick hair, sharp wit, a body that could make me forget my own name. She’s softer now, slower, still my best friend, but not my fantasy anymore.

Sex, when it happens, feels like theater. I take a pill, we start slow, and I close my eyes to picture us 30 years ago. I feel guilty admitting that, because we’re told to “love the wrinkles,” that age is beautiful. Maybe it is. But I can’t get hard for philosophy.

I used to think honesty was enough. That if you were open about your desires, you could outsmart jealousy and outgrow hypocrisy. I’ve tried everything: monogamy, swinging, polyamory. I once thought love was ownership. Then I thought love was freedom. Now I think love is endurance—the ability to stay in the same room when your partner has seen you at your most human.

At a time the world was busy reinventing sex, I was busy trying to stay alive.

In 1970, I was 19 and stationed at a river outpost in Vietnam—supposedly “safer” because I’d joined the Navy instead of the Army. We were meant to fix radios. Instead, I spent nights watching tracer fire rip through the trees. Once, a bullet hit the steel bulkhead a foot above my head. After that, every loud sound felt like a test of whether I still wanted to live.

When I came home, America was unrecognizable. Woodstock had come and gone. The Beatles had broken up. The word love had become elastic—stretched to cover everything from protest to porn. But I didn’t feel free. I felt numb.

The only thing that could cut through it was sex. It made me feel alive in the way combat once did: high-stakes, unpredictable, proof that I was still here.

I married a woman from rural Vermont who accepted me when no one else would. We had 12 mostly good years, until she left me for a woman. That heartbreak rewired me. She didn’t leave for someone richer or younger, just someone who fit better. It made me question what “enough” even meant. I realized desire can’t be reasoned with. It’s instinctive, unfair, and often humiliating.

After the divorce, I tried to intellectualize it. I went back to school, earned a doctorate, and studied human behavior. But knowledge doesn’t inoculate you from longing.

Around that time, a professor mentioned Robert H. Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment, a 1966 cult novel about a fictional college where students live in co-ed housing, swap partners, and learn that love and sex don’t have to be bound by monogamy. It was part manifesto, part fantasy, and it sold millions of copies. Rimmer told me that sexual freedom was the next great civil rights frontier. It sounded radical, almost utopian.

Decades later, I found that freedom wasn’t the hard part—honesty was. Everyone likes the idea of openness. Living it without breaking something was another story.

After the war, I wanted to feel something. After the divorce, I wanted control. Then I met my current wife at a church brunch. I saw her from behind first—her posture, her confidence. She looked like a woman who knew herself. We were both in our 40s, lonely, a little battered, but still full of desire. Within months, we were living together. I thought I’d been given a second chance.

But libido doesn’t care about domestic bliss.

Fantasies lingered—seeing her with someone else, testing what we could survive. I told myself it was curiosity, an experiment in openness, not jealousy in reverse. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was chasing the ideas Rimmer had written about. The notion that love could be honest, generous, unpossessive. We eased into swinging, slowly, and for a while it felt like discovery. I loved watching her pleasure, loved the danger of it. She said she did it for me, not for herself. I told her that was fine.

I didn’t realize how much that would cost us both.

By 50, we were “ethically non-monogamous” before anyone used the term. We were living what Rimmer had imagined decades earlier. And yet, it wasn’t liberation—it was maintenance.

In my 60s, I met a woman from Portugal at a summer seminar. We had a nine-year affair that nearly ended my marriage. She left her husband and asked me to do the same. When I wouldn’t, she called me a coward. She wasn’t wrong. I wanted everything: the thrill, the safety, the illusion that I could still be desired without consequence.

Eventually, I chose my wife. But the choice didn’t resolve anything. As I got older, the possibilities narrowed. Swing clubs, parties, even chance encounters—they all become harder when you’re the oldest man in the room. The internet started to look like salvation.

Last year, I explored sex-positive dating apps. I told myself it was innocent curiosity. The women were younger: 40s, 30s, sometimes 20s. They told me they liked older men, that I had “wise eyes,” that I “seemed genuine.” Some said I reminded them of their father, which should’ve been a red flag, but somehow wasn’t. It made me feel useful again—safe, even. I knew they were flattering me, but I wanted to believe them.

Then came the woman I’ll call Maris, an aid worker who said she was helping rebuild communities after a major storm. She sent long messages about the people she’d helped, about exhaustion and homesickness, about how she missed being touched. She told me I made her feel seen.

We talked for months. She said she wanted to visit but couldn’t afford the flight. I offered to pay half. She never showed. Then she apologized, said she’d make it up to me.

The next time, she insisted we use the crypto exchange Robinhood. She said she’d been scammed before, and that it was safer for “verifying transactions.” She guided me through the app and instructed me to change my security settings “to make the platform more secure.” I followed along as she sent me “verification codes” and told me when to enter them. It felt complicated, almost intimate, like we were solving a puzzle together, like trust was being built through the steps.

When I checked my bank balance, $41,000 were gone.

When I saw the withdrawals, I felt something I hadn’t felt since Vietnam: a rush of panic that made my hands shake. The bank eventually reversed it, but the shame lingered. I wasn’t just conned out of money. I was conned out of the illusion that I was still the kind of man women wanted.

I tried to laugh about it. Told my wife I’d been “catfished by capitalism.” She didn’t find it funny. She just shook her head and said, “You’re too smart for that.”

I told her, “Apparently not.”

So what now? Do I submit to transactional dates? Become a sugar daddy just to stay in the game?

I don’t want to pay for intimacy. Not because I think it’s wrong, but because it would confirm what I already fear: that the kind of desire I want has aged out of reach. I don’t want companionship by the hourly rate or affection that ends with a Venmo request. I want to believe someone could still want me for the way I listen, the stories I tell, the care I offer. It’s foolish, I know. But that’s the last kind of freedom I have left, which is to pretend romance and vanity are the same thing.

I started to realize how uneven the trade feels. Men my age still want softness and heat. Most women my age want steadiness and care. Each is craving something the other can’t quite give. Maybe that’s the real cost of free love. That sooner or later, you run out of currency.

I’ve deleted all the apps, Feeld, Tinder, whatever’s left. I tell myself I’m content with hikes and coffee dates. But some nights, when my wife’s asleep beside me, I think about the aid worker, the 20-something dancer, the woman from Portugal. It was never really about them. It was about being the man who could still make someone look twice.