Sex File: I'm more confident in my body and sexuality but he won't accept the new me 

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When I entered my fifties I started going on various health retreats that have helped to build my confidence in my body and sexuality. I'm more aware of what I want and happy to ask for it. I thought my husband of 20 years would be delighted, so why is he taking it as a slight on him and our old sex life instead?

To be completely honest I found your question a little bit tricky. My immediate response was to wonder how you would feel if your husband had gone away on a retreat and come back with a suitcase full of ideas about how you should meet his sexual needs. In fact, I think you might respond in the same way: feeling threatened and interpreting it as a criticism of you and of the sex life that you used to have together.

And yet I can understand why these retreats have had such a positive impact on you. Fifty is an important transition. For women, it's when the menopause, career pressure, kids doing exams or leaving for college and ageing parents can all collide. After so many years of thinking about other people's needs, reaching 50 makes many women begin to question what they want for themselves and what matters to them in the second half of life. You chose to invest in yourself, to learn how to love your body and your sexuality, and that's a great thing.

In any relationship, when one partner changes and the other doesn't it can cause conflict, but that is particularly true when the change happens in midlife. In 2008 the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald published a paper titled 'Is Wellbeing U-shaped Over the Life Cycle?'. Using data from two million people from 80 nations, they found that for most people life satisfaction is at its absolute lowest at about 47. That's the bad news. The good news is that the U has an upside, literally and metaphorically. If your existence is otherwise stable, life gets better as you get older. Your values change and you feel grateful for what you have rather than focusing on what you don't.

You are clearly through the U and on your way up that second vertical, and you've done something that most people don't have the courage to do. You have identified something that was making you unhappy and instead of wallowing in it you have gone away, learnt to appreciate who you are and finally feel sexually empowered. Of course, you want your husband to share your joy, but if he is back down there at the bottom of the U he probably cannot respond with any enthusiasm to the thing that lights you up. Telling him how great you feel may only make him feel worse.

Your husband needs to hear that you did all that work because you were dissatisfied with yourself, your body and the way you experience sex, not because you were dissatisfied with him. If you frame your narrative like this, the message will land in a very different way because it is a story that includes rather than excludes him.

Ultimately, sexual confidence is about feeling comfortable in your body and being able to articulate what you enjoy, but it is also about being able to understand how to meld that with what your partner needs. If you can bear that in mind and try to meet him where he is, rather than expecting him to know how to meet you where you are now, things will soon get better.

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