Jane Juska died this week. She was 84. I must admit I knew nothing about her before I saw a post on Facebook. Thank you Marie Coleman, journalist, feminist, social activist and Facebook friend, for alerting me to this story and this wonderful woman. Just the feisty kind of woman, one suspects, that we both would have been friends with. Thank you.
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Juska was born and raised in small-town Ohio, she went on to university, married and had a son. She taught English in schools, colleges and prisons. In 1970, when she was 37, she divorced.
In 1999, aged 66, she placed an ad in the New York Review of Books. It read: "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."
She received 63 replies and spent the next year following them up, because she didn't want to think "what if I never had sex with a man again?".
In 2003 she published A Round-Heeled Woman: My late-life adventures in sex and romance, a humorous memoir of her escapades.
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading about Juska and her ad, about her life. She went on to write Unaccompanied Women, which dealt with the loneliness that preceded the ad. I've ordered a copy of both books for the summer holidays, where I plan to laze about poolside with my new Marilyn Monroe-esque swimmers (and body), looking exotic, looking like I might be up for escapades.
But there was one thing that stood out for me, among all the mentions of sex in the articles I've since been reading, research, not surfing, is that for Juska, and perhaps for all us other mid-life single ladies, there was something else missing.
She writes about how incredibly busy she was, with work, her son, volunteering, hiking, singing in a choir. But, she writes, she was home by 7pm each night, alone.
"Yes I was busy, but there's nobody touching you," she said. "People don't pay attention to that part."
They don't.
If I had to name the five things I've found the hardest in the past couple of years one of them would be dealing with the lack of touch, and it seems I'm not alone.
Single friends tell me how they miss just snuggling on the lounge, watching a movie. How they miss just holding hands. A friend said his wife used to reach out and place a hand on the back of his neck while he was driving. Another friend said she knew her marriage was over when she saw her then husband place his hand gently on the small of the back of a woman he worked with. "He hadn't touched me like that for years," she said.
And none of this has anything to do with sex. It's about physical intimacy. About connection. About feeling comfortable enough to touch, to be touched.
These same single friends, as they scramble with new relationships, with the idea of allowing someone in again, talk about how intimate it can seem when knees meet under a restaurant table, how bushwalks are charged when a hand is offered for leverage up a steep incline, how, says one, she loves it when she's cooking her new beau (I just love that word) a meal and he comes up behind her and kisses her neck before getting something out of the fridge.
I think for me too the problem's been exacerbated by the fact the kids are at the point in their lives too when they don't need a mother's touch as much. They were snuggly little babies. I miss that time when they would fall asleep on your shoulder. When they were content to spend rainy Sunday afternoons napping in your lap. When they would come and crawl into bed with you and beg you to read stories, or tickle them, or just hold their pudgy little hands while you crossed the road. Now, they are so big and grown up, we've had to swap arm positions when we hug standing up. How times have changed.
When speaking with friends about how they're all dealing with their yearning for touch, the answers have been varied. One friend has booked in for regular massages. Another has taken up salsa dancing. One is getting her nails done for the first time ever.
The health benefits of touch are well documented. Those of us old enough to remember these stories about the children in the Romanian institutions of Nicolae Ceausescu know the extremes.
But, as my children would say, right about now, mum, you're getting carried away again … probably true, life is nowhere near that dire. I know that. But if I reach out and place my hand on your arm at some point, don't think me strange.
And here's to Jane Juska, what a lady.
