Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality After Losing Your Beloved

Sex is complicated enough when it's easy--but when we're in grief, it's especially mysterious and confusing. How do we nurture ourselves as sexual beings when we're grieving the death of a partner? Why does taking care of ourselves sexually even matter at a time when we'd rather hide under the covers and wail? What do we do with those sexual feelings that arise despite our misery? How do we know when it's time to open ourselves to a new sexual relationship, whether it's a friend with benefits or a new love connection? And how do we do it?

There are many books about grief, but they almost never mention sex, and if they do, it's cursory. Sex after Grief is the first book to address sex and grief together and treat sex as a normal, positive, life-affirming part of emerging from grief.

In Sex after Grief, the top expert on senior sex, Joan Price, will draw on her own experiences as a widow since 2008, when she lost the love of her life to cancer. She shares her own raw grief journey, her sexual reawakening (and the many stumbles along the way), and attempts to dip back into the dating pool, along with excellent advice on how to handle each step.

Joan Price's revelatory approach to intimacy and love after loss includes excerpts from other people's personal stories. These narratives from folks of all genders and orientations who have grieved have much in common, yet also much that's different. Some jumped into sex quickly. Some took years. Some withdrew from sexual possibility. Some shared their bodies but not their hearts. As these people open their private lives and thoughts, readers will come away realizing that no one is wrong, and no choice is defective or shameful. They'll learn many options, and, thanks to the self-help take-aways at the end of each chapter, they will feel better ready to choose for themselves.

As Price says, there's no right or wrong method or timeline for bringing our sexuality back to into our lives, whether it's with our own hands, a hook-up, a new companion, or any combination. With inimitable warmth and wisdom, Price goes where other sexperts fear to tread. This is a much-needed book, written by the best writer on the subject.

Sex after Grief will present readers with these benefits:

• Descriptions of how different people bring sex back into their lives after loss of their spouse or partner.
• Understanding that there is no one right way or timeline.
• Guidelines for dating again and getting sexual with a new person.
• Exposure to non-traditional sexual relationships, such as the "Pilot Light Lover" and friends with benefits.
• Reasons that solo sex is healthy and sex toys can be the path to feeling sexual again.
• Advice from therapists, grief counselors, and sex coaches.
• Self-help take-aways for readers to create their own action plan.
  

Joan Price calls herself an advocate for ageless sexuality. She has been called other things by the media: "senior sexpert," "the beautiful face of senior sex," and--her favorite--"wrinkly sex kitten."