What Could It Mean to Age Sexually 'Unsuccessfully'?

RATIONALE To encourage and facilitate research on positive sexual aging, a novel theoretical concept – successful sexual aging (SSA) – was recently proposed (Štulhofer, 2025). Drawing on the metaphor of successful aging (Rowe & Kahn, 1987) and the way selective optimization with compensation (SOC) theory (Paul B. Baltes & Baltes, 1990) expounded it as an adaptive process (ref), the SSA model argues that positive sexual aging rests on three psychosocial processes. The first is acceptance of unavoidable changes in physical appearance and sexual function over time. The second process is adaptation, understood as accommodating to age-related changes and finding new ways to counteract declines in sexual function and maintain attractiveness. While acceptance and adaptation are primarily internal or psychological processes, while the third process – opportunities for sexual expression– is primarily external, referring to the (changing) perception of barriers to personal sexual expression shaped by life circumstances, socioeconomic status, and the availability and affordability of (sexual) health services. This developmental SSA model has been operationalized as a three-dimensional latent measure, the Successful Sexual Aging Scale (SSAS), whose facets represent the three constituent SSA processes, each indicated by three manifest variables (items). The scale has been validated in two European countries and used to examine gender and partnership-related differences in SSA (Štulhofer et al., 2025). So far, research on SSA has focused on cultural differences, gender differences, and differences related to partnership status, as well as on age-related decline of SSA and the influence of sexual ageism. To the best of our knowledge, questions about ‘unsuccessful’ sexual aging – what it would represent and what it could mean – have not been raised, either conceptually or empirically. Using the SSA framework, the current study aims to explore characteristics of ‘unsuccessful’ sexual aging in a purely exploratory fashion. Our intention is to shed some light on the phenomenon by describing what ‘unsuccessful’ may mean in terms of overall levels of the three SSA processes (acceptance, adaptation, and opportunities), the structure of SSA items, and a group profile (i.e., predictors and correlates of aging sexually ‘unsuccessfully’).