Boomergasms Are Booming

Eury Jones was 58 the first time she pegged a man. It was May of 2021. She was coming out of a long-term relationship and entering a new life chapter. “I did a bit of Googling about threesomes and chanced upon Feeld,” she says of the dating app for free-spirited relationship structures. But Jones, who lives in London and has a generous smile, wasn’t accustomed to the circus of online dating: maneuvering fake profiles, encountering people who only want to swap photos and never meet. Gradually, she says, “I knew not to entertain that nonsense.”

Then she met him—a cyclist in a Che Guevara T-shirt. The two were close in age and, from what she could tell, he seemed to check all her boxes. It also didn’t hurt that Jones found him attractive. So they started messaging back and forth. At some point in the conversation, “I told him that a strap-on had just arrived in the mail. And he said, ‘Oh great! Let’s meet tomorrow.’”

Jones, now 61, is considered a boomer (individuals aged 59 to 78). They are currently the fastest growing segment on many dating apps. On Feeld, members aged 60-plus have increased by 340 percent since 2022, according to the company. The same goes for Match.com, where the 50-plus crowd now accounts for 26 percent of the platform’s users. One in five singles in their fifties has used Tinder, a recent Pew Research Center study found, while OkCupid and Bumble have likewise become go-to destinations for older singles seeking some version of romance, be it a no-strings-attached hookup or real companionship.

That initial experience was eye-opening for Jones, she tells me when we chat by Zoom one Tuesday in April. (Her name has been changed for privacy and employment concerns.) “I went to his flat, and he had all sorts of things I’d never seen before: bed restraints, a hook on the wall, ball gags,” she says. But their meeting didn’t pan out exactly as she hoped. “I spent all afternoon using the strap-on on him. He barely touched me.” That’s when she had an epiphany. Even at her age there was still a lot to learn about navigating the sexual wilds. She realized that “this kink stuff takes more negotiation than I was used to. You learn to be resilient, to