Sex Column: Sex after 30 years of marriage

Rob and Nancy have been together since the mid-’80s. They have weathered illness, raising a family, poverty, abundance, career changes, family drama, drug and alcohol abuse, growing pains, and fads in human sexuality. What’s the secret to their longevity as a couple? To find out, I sat down with them at their home base in Beverly Hills, California.

When Rob met Nancy, he was an art director by day, and a drug dealer by night. “We met a few times before we got together,” he recalls. “She didn’t want nothin’ to do with me. She called me a ‘junkie’ (laughs).”

Not only was Rob a self-described “degenerate”, drug dealer and “junkie”, he was hanging out with prostitutes and mobsters. “Bad things were starting to happen. I was making terrible decisions. At one point I thought about becoming a ‘hitman’ for hire. I was outta control. I had to stop ‘cause I didn’t want to end up in jail.”

His untamed lifestyle was coming to an end around the time he met Nancy. “It’s been a rollercoaster ever since,” Nancy says.

At 60, she is still beautiful. With a look reminiscent of Jane Fonda in her Barbarella days, Nancy is thin with a tall frame, large breasts, long stylish, white blonde hair and the features of a fashion model. The couple have two adult daughters, who on occasion, still live at home.

“He was high on quaaludes the whole time,” Nancy recalls, looking at Rob. “714’s, right?”

He chimes in. “Thousands of quaaludes. We’d get a box of ‘em. Twelve bottles – a hundred in a bottle. My hooker girlfriend would go into the Furriers. If she walked around naked in a fur coat, the owner would front us 12 bottles a few times a week. Then we’d sell them all day long.”

His ex-girlfriend was a Hustler model.

“After she went to rehab, she cut off all her hair and gained a hundred pounds. She used to be a size zero. I think she went nuts,” said Rob.

PARTIES WITH OTHER PROSTITUTES

The girlfriend, who worked with Nancy in a late night eatery in Chicago, introduced her to Rob.

“We were waitressing together during the early morning shift. No one expected us to hit it off. Least of all his hooker girlfriend,” Nancy smiles. “I think we have a very healthy sex life, but I don’t know. When I was younger, I was walled off. I was protective. The guys in my neighborhood would have sex with my girlfriends and say awful things about them. Ew. I didn’t want them talking about me like that.”

“She’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Rob says. “For a long time, it was twice a day. That was perfect. When it went down to once a day, that was hard. That was semi-perfect. It’s just good old fashioned sex.”

What does that mean? I ask.

“Normal, crazy fuckin’.”

How would you define that?

“No toys, no porn, just fuckin’,” he adds.

Nancy finishes his sentence. “Stuck like a pig,” she says of herself, “baseball bat up a pig’s ass – and the pig is screaming.” She has the look of a wide-eyed Catholic school girl caught cussing. “I scream into my pillow. My five pillows.”

“Yeah,” says Rob.

There’s a moment’s silence. Then we all laugh.

“There are challenges as you age,” Nancy adds. “Tough phases. There was a lot of coke and tequila.”

When their second daughter was a toddler, Rob switched careers and became a fitness trainer. Nancy thought Rob was having affairs with clients.

“When he first started training,” Nancy says, “he had this client, a prostitute that worked for Heidi Fleiss. She invited him to pool parties with other prostitutes. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Getting a hold of him was hard. This was before cell phones. I didn’t know if it was my intuition, or if it was because I was pregnant. I was… hormonal.”

“Crazy,” Rob summarises.

How did you get through that?

“A lot of arguing, and talking, and questioning,” says Nancy.

ORAL SEX: “MY FAVOURITE THING”

They tell me a story about their friend Melvin, who begged his wife to “swing” outside the marriage with another couple. Eventually, Melvin’s wife obliged.

“He messed it up, they never recovered,” Nancy says.

“Yeah, he was digging it until he realised she was having a great fucking time with other guys,” Rob said.

“Then he didn’t like it anymore,” Nancy says.

“Yeah, he noticed that she was getting off giving some other guy a blow job. When he saw her have an orgasm, that freaked him out,” Rob says.

“We talked about it, but no,” Nancy whispers. “I had an insecure nature. I could see myself getting jealous. We’re kinda boring.” They both laugh.

A few years ago Nancy was diagnosed with a degenerative hip disease. The doctors put her on opiates to ease the pain.

“I couldn’t have orgasms for a year. Too many pain pills. Everything was dead down there. My clitoris? I felt nothing. He had all the fun, I had none. Pain pills – they’re a real problem,” she says.

Rob joins in.

“Too many opiates. The oral sex thing, that’s my favorite thing to do.” While waiting for her hip surgery, the entire family came down with the flu. Everyone recovered, except for Nancy.

“There’s a flu virus that can morph into a valve-eating bacteria,” Rob explains. “The bacteria destroys your heart valve. This happened to Nancy. We had to wait on the hip surgery for a year while dealing with her heart surgery.”

They continued to have sex while she was recovering from heart surgery, and double hip surgery.

“How,” I asked.“Very carefully,” they giggle.

It is tempting to believe that this is, indeed, why Nancy is looking so well today. Good on ‘em both…