The secret to having good sex at 77

Psychologist and writer Jaume Funes and Mari Carmen have been together their entire lives. They met when they were 17 and 21 and married when they were 21 and 26, in 1973, "the same week Carrero Blanco was blown up," Jaume recalls. They were married by Juan Garcia Nieto, "a Jesuit priest and worker who was a leading figure in the social struggle in Cornellà," with whom both Jaume and Mari Carmen had collaborated in more or less clandestine activities since they were teenagers, and through whom they met. "Back then, we didn't have adolescence; we studied and worked. We were children of working-class families, and we both inherited the desire to know more and learn more," explains the psychologist.

Knowledge and social commitment, he says, are two pillars that have kept them together for more than fifty years. "Our entire lives have had a permanent element of solidarity that has been consolidated in the idea that we could not live without being useful to other lives, and that we are also what other lives have made of us." "We are also united by a certain poetic and creative vision of life. She is an avid reader, and when I get desperate from talking so much, I dedicate myself to painting."

For Jaume, a happy love is one in which "you derive mutual pleasure from the life you share." For the couple, social commitment aside, this also means "knowing that the children and grandchildren are well, going to look at the sea or hiking in the mountains, and making love in peace and tranquility." The psychologist and writer has no problem explaining what sexuality is like at 77 years old. "Sexuality isn't a question of age, but of learning. When you reach a certain age, I think there's a tendency too easily to think that sexuality is something unnecessary. Many women who have lived with an unsatisfactory sexuality and haven't been able to have a history of learning the happiness of sexuality experience it as a liberation. When you reach a certain age, you don't feel like you have to give up a source of happiness and pleasure," she reflects. At 77, however, everything slows down. "You have to accept that you're getting older and that you must continue learning what makes you both happy now."

Jaume celebrates that the wrinkles that have appeared on both of them are, ultimately, "the memory of all the emotions, experiences, and pleasures" they have lived together all these years.