A Lonely Heart Can Make You Sick

Newly divorced middle aged women are more vulnerable to contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, according to Christopher Coleman, PhD, MPH, RN, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, because they tend to let their guard down with new sexual partners and avoid using protection since they are unafraid of getting pregnant.

Additionally, as aging occurs, physiological changes due to menopause such as the thinning of vaginal walls make it more susceptible for a woman to contract a virus. Medications that would be used to treat an STD or HIV become hard for a woman to tolerate because an aging body metabolizes medications differently.

"There is a knowlege gap with women knowing what the physiological changes associated with menopause are," said Dr. Coleman. "There is very little research on this subject and society and the government don't talk about it, but these high risk sexual behaviors need to be addressed because the rate of HIV positive middle aged women is inscreasing."

The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is one of the premier research institutions in nursing, producing new knowledge in geriatrics, pediatrics, oncology, quality-of-life choices, and other areas. Penn Nursing researchers consistently receive more research funding from the National Institutes of Health than any other private nursing school, and many master’s programs are ranked first in the country. This year, faculty, students, alumni, and staff celebrate 125 years of nursing at Penn.

Sex and divorce are two of the most emotionally potent subjects of our time. When combined, they create a psychological cocktail with all the portents of both ecstasy and hang-over, of pleasure and pain, of risk and failure. And, as with any strong elixir, the subliminal message reads: handle with care.

Unless you left your ex for someone else, break-up usually means being single again. And being single again means that you're going to face, in one way or another, the potential of new relationships and their inherent sexuality. And sexuality, for all the self-help manuals that have proliferated in North America over the last few decades, still remains a mystery to some extent. Sex is the private poetry that flows between two individuals - even if only for the moment - carrying with it a unique signature of communication at its most intimate. It's a physical and emotional union where our most primal expressions of self are laid bare to another being.

Divorce, on the other hand, no matter how common it has become in our society, is still a painful psychological process of denial and acceptance, grief and growth, death and rebirth. How is one to manage both the pain of divorce and the uncertainty of new sexual encounters when dealing with one comes so close upon the heels of the other? Coping with divorce and the prospect of intimate sexual relationships thereafter is like having each foot in a different camp: which deserves the most attention?