Love, Intimacy and Sexuality in Residential Dementia Care: A Spousal Perspective

Abstract

The experiences and needs of spouses of residential care facility residents with dementia, regarding friendship, love, intimacy, and sexuality were explored. Understanding of how spouses make sense of their experiences was pursued. Semi-structured interviews were held with nine spouses of people with dementia, living in high intensive 24-hour care units within residential care facilities. The results show that friendship, love, intimacy, and sexuality were still embedded in the couples' marital lives, but all in their own way. Changing roles and a shift in purpose of the relationship recurred. Although intimacy was found to be still important in the lives of spouses, emotional, and practical residential care facility barriers were experienced by the spouses, of which the absence of communication were most important. Our findings on the experiences of spouses with regard to intimacy and sexuality can help residential care facility staff and policymakers to recognize the needs of couples and take these into account.

Exploring the impact of social network change: Experiences of older adults ageing in place

“…The four high-impact social network changes that were found in our study corroborate findings of other studies on the impact of the loss of loved ones (Carr, House, Wortman, Nesse, & Kessler, 2001;Donnelly & Hinterlong, 2010;Fry, 1998;Van Baarsen, Van Duijn, Smit, Snijders, & Knipscheer, 2002;Van Grootheest, Beekman, Broese van Groenou, & Deeg, 1999) and on developing relations between older adults and their informal and formal carers (Byrne, Goeree, Hiedemann, & Stern, 2009;Egdell, 2012;Wellman, Wong, Tindall, & Nazer, 1997). Also, we found experiences and perceptions that are in line with other studies, such as the loyalty of spouses, acceptance of oneself and the situation, feelings of loneliness (Reichstadt, Sengupta, Depp, Palinkas, & Jeste, 2010;Roelofs, Luijkx, & Embregts, 2017), and the importance of connectedness, participation and independence (Bruggencate, Luijkx, & Sturm, 2018). In addition, our study extends findings in the field, first, by reaching a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of older adults' experiences.…”

Love, Intimacy and Sexuality in Residential Dementia Care: A Client Perspective

“…This, however, was not the case in all couples and also seems to contradict with retaining the intimate and sexual life spouses and residents were used to. This contradiction was described previously from the perspective of the spouse alone (Mullin, Simpson, & Froggat, 2013;Roelofs, Luijkx, & Embregts, 2017a) and these mixed emotions can be considered to be personal dilemmas (Harris, 2009;Mahieu & Gastmans, 2012) However, the divers stories voiced in this study, from both the residents' and couples' perspective, prove that individual differences in the experience of this dilemma are great. This diversity emphasizes the importance of giving voice to both the residents and their partners in research and practice on this topic, as the dilemmas are strongly shaped by their own personal and relational histories.…”

‘When it faded in her … it faded in me’: a qualitative study exploring the impact of care-giving on the experience of spousal intimacy for older male care-givers

“…The present study sought to contribute to knowledge and to existing literature by exploring spousal intimacy from the perspective of older male care-givers. Whilst previous studies have explored the impact of chronic conditions such as dementia on spousal intimacy/sexuality (Davies et al, 2010(Davies et al, , 2012Harris et al, 2011;Merrick et al, 2016;Youell and Callaghan, 2016;Roelofs et al, 2017), none of them has taken account of the older male care-givers' perspective.…”