Chat show legend Trisha Goddard on having great sex and finding Mr Right at 61
AFTER hitting 60, divorced for the third time and out of practice in the bedroom, single life was a daunting prospect for talk show legend Trisha Goddard.
But having turned away a few duds, she has finally found Mr Right – and learned how to love sex. In her own words, the mum of two, 61, reveals the lengths it took to revitalise her life and land the man of her dreams.
I NEVER imagined being single in my late fifties.
My long-distance marriage — me in the US, him in Australia — was crumbling, with no chance of us resurrecting it.
By the time I decided to call time on it, I was a total mess.
People who blather on about it being too easy to divorce don’t have a bloody clue what they are talking about.
How I got the courage to FaceTime my upset husband to tell him he would be served the divorce papers the next day, I will never know. I felt physically sick.
But when it was all over, I felt a sense of guilty relief. I was free.
Yet this feeling didn’t last long as it was overridden by the realisation that, at 59, I would be dating again. And the terrifying prospect of having sex with another man.
For most of my adult life I have been one of those women who never really “got” why people kept banging on about sex.
For me, it was something you just had to do in a relationship.
You might as well put it in the same category as cooking family meals or doing laundry. It was just another “thing” one knowingly or unknowingly signed up for.
On my talk show, I would often have couples talking about being in a sexless relationship.
They took my laid-back reaction as me being non-judgmental. Bless them.
Back then, it was a normal state of play for me.
My drought went on so long. Following my year of breast cancer treatment 11 years ago, I considered myself a born-again virgin, despite still being married.
A major reason behind my lack of interest in sex is that I have never considered myself to be sexy.
Growing up, I was always the tomboy who was referred to as “Goddard” by lots of my guy mates.
The very few relationships I have been involved in were born out of pre-existing friendships I had with men. But because I didn’t feel remotely sexy, these guys, my old pals, didn’t turn me on.
I didn’t even bother advising them what I was looking for in the bedroom, otherwise they would have been told: “Peace and quiet and a good night’s sleep please.”
That’s hardly Fifty Shades material. My view on sex may also be down to me being of that generation born in the Fifties who had it drummed into them that sex was grubby.
TV shows such as Benny Hill just reinforced that view — that it was a woman’s job to put up with whatever a man wanted to do to them.
So you can understand that when my marriage ended after 20 years, I pretty much thought that was it as far as the bed shenanigans were concerned.
Plus, I also had to contend with scarring from my two breast-cancer operations, as well as the impact of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and ten years on cancer drugs.
My already shattered confidence was beyond repair. How could I possibly find the courage to go on a date with another man, let alone make it to the bedroom?
The one glimmer of hope I had was being based in the US.
As much as I love the UK, British guys have a habit of approaching me with their problems as a chat-up line and wanting their very own Trisha Show with a side order of smooch.
Being based in America means potential suitors do not know my background and I felt I could be in with a chance. I still didn’t feel old and I’m reasonably fit, running at least four miles a day.
I weight-train three times a week, do gyrotonics, rollerblade and I have just started hip-hop dance classes.
I told my girlfriends, who were all incredibly eager to set me up with a rich divorcee, that I was not going to use a dating app.
They had signed me up before and it didn’t work.
Nobody looked like their profile pictures and the fact my phone pinged every time an eligible man roamed into my zone made me totally neurotic.
So I set up my own dating rules. First, no more younger men. In my experience, they get resentful when they age and start slowing down.
Secondly, I would only date guys who at least earned the same as I did. I have never had a relationship where I wasn’t the major bread- winner, housebuyer, holiday and school fees-payer.
Sure, that’s what men are used to doing but they have wives to do what I still had to do: Shopping, the lion’s share of the parenting, 90 per cent of the cooking and so on. This time, a guy was going to be buying me a meal.
Then there was my biggest concern, sex.
I decided I was going to be super-choosy before I let any man put even a paw on me. I would also have no time for wasters.
I’ve met quite a few, namely a Korean builder who told me I could stay in one of his luxury Manhattan apartments: “If I give him sex”.
There was a fireman who lunged in for a kiss hours after telling me how “smoking-hot in bed” South American women were.
A wealthy finance executive wooed me by sending me his financial services company’s latest profit reports, drawing my attention to page 87, outlining “the particularly brilliant efforts of my Singapore office”.
And who could forget the investment bank partner who grabbed the boob my cancer had been operated on in a bid to seduce me?
I enjoyed the dressing up and going out, but it never even crossed my mind to have sex with them.
I seriously thought since it was such a “meh” thing anyway, I would have to find a guy who was very, very special in order to go to the trouble of gritting my teeth and going through the motions.
But thankfully that man did arrive, a month before my 60th birthday. Now I get what sex is all about, 44 years after I lost my virginity in the fumbling, blink-and-it-was-over way.
I was experiencing actual love. When I was asked about my new man by Lorraine Kelly on her show, I started giggling like a teenager.
My head was telling me to get a grip, my heart was beating with the strength and beauty of my ancestors’ drums on Independence Day.
I won’t tell you his real name but I call him #Boo, and since meeting him I know what really makes a man sexy. It is not just looks.
Sexy is a man who doesn’t need me to make less of myself to make himself look “manly”. He looks straight into my eyes and loves that I work.
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He can laugh with me and laugh at himself, he looks after me and loves it when I look after him.
He is spiritual, educated and curious about the world. And he earns at least, if not more, than I do, so I’m finally not the one buying the meal.
I’m back in the game.
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