A new start after 60: I got divorced – and became a sex therapist
As part of her training to be a counsellor, Jill Le Jeune gave a presentation about sex. Her group had worked with people who had experienced trauma, low mood, suicidal ideation. “And everyone was very comfortable around these difficult subjects,” she says. But talking about sex made them squirm. “I thought: actually, I’d rather talk about sex than suicide.” She decided to specialise in the subject and, at the age of 60, started to practise as a sex therapist.
But why? “There was a curiosity,” she says, sitting in her office in Clapham, south-west London.
A decade earlier, Le Jeune’s marriage had ended. “We had a very contented marriage. Great kids, lovely house, great holidays. We had an active sex life … When he left, I thought: what? I need to understand that.”
As a psychosexual and relationship therapist, one of the first things Le Jeune asks clients is: “How did you learn about the birds and the bees?” Some say from watching Sex and the City. Le Jeune herself learned from educational videos at school, near Exeter in Devon. “It was about putting you off, basically. How not to get pregnant, not to get STIs.”
All around her, teenage friends were getting pregnant. “I thought: I can’t do that.” Although she had been streamed to sit CSEs in secondary school, instead of the more academic GCEs, she went on to take A-levels and, at 19, started a degree in psychology and women’s studies at Lancaster University.
I’m almost grateful for what happened to me. I’m so much more because of that marriage ending
She was the first member of her family to go to university – but sometimes she still thinks of herself as “CSE Jill”. She recalls, to the word, the first question of her CSE maths exam. But, looking back, the satisfaction she felt at how easy she found it is tinged with displeasure – “that that’s the level you’ve been put at”. Le Jeune turns 62 this year, but still believes she has “some really big gaps” in her knowledge: “I look up and I don’t know the names of any stars … I don’t know any chemical compounds.”
Throughout her 20s, 30s and 40s, she worked in local government, sales and marketing, as a primary school teacher and then in compliance, while co-parenting four children. “In my 40s, I was half-asleep,” she says. “I did wonder, embarking on a postgrad at 57, could I do it?” But she says: “I think I am in the best place now.”
She loves to hear the traffic outside her therapy room, the bustle of shoppers, “because I feel I’ve made it”. She has the same sense of breaking out into the world as she had after graduating at 22.
“I’m almost grateful for what happened to me. I’m so much more because of that marriage ending.”
She spent the first year after her divorce in shock. “I didn’t think so at the time. I just thought: get the tea on the table, keep everything going.” She took refuge in gardening – “very soothing” – and busied herself while the children did their homework.
“I had to go through therapy and then go on this journey,” she says. Now, she is able to “nurture the ability to focus on the here and now”.
In many ways, Le Jeune was her own first client.
“I operate as a feminist. I recognise and I regret that I didn’t keep my career up more. And I didn’t advocate for myself sexually, either,” she says. “When I was reading all this stuff about female arousal, I thought: why didn’t I insist on my own needs being met more?”
She has supported her partner of five years through prostate cancer and navigated the impact of his illness on their intimate life, something she says “the NHS gives minimal support for. We worked it all out for ourselves. I had the knowledge.
“I love my life,” Le Jeune says. “I’m amused by CSE Jill. I know how much I have grown and developed. I sit here and people think I can make a really significant impact on their lives. And what greater thing than that?”
• Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?
