Comments
- Married adults have markedly more sex than their unmarried peers, but the sex recession is also making inroads among married couples.
- When it comes to sexlessness (“no sex in the last year”) among young adults, the biggest change comes post-2010.
- Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours.
Source: Institute for Family Studies.
Honestly, financial and now political stress have been stifling. It’s hard to get in the mood when an authoritarian christo-fascist party is in charge of the government, constantly making headlines with their movements to destroying everything me and everyone I love cares about.
it would be super surprising if this didn’t corelate with cost of living
I know this is a weak excuse from me b/c ppl in other countries aren’t bothered but as a 30 y/o grown ass man, I just don’t find it appropriate trying to bring women over to my parents house. I don’t even think I qualify for tinder at this point tbh. lol
I didn’t read the articles or look at the numbers, just wanted to respond to the comment. 👌
Look at the bright side- the population decline will lead to normalization.
Yeah but for other countries that’s a cultural difference. If you’re in the US, it’s totally seen as like embarrassing at best, red flag at worst, to bring a date over to your parents’ house, even though it’s totally reasonable to live at home bc the cost of living is just too damn high
Maybe dad can shout some tips mid-session.
“Spank the arse son! Harder! Like I did with your mother last night!”
Yeah this about tracks. I bet a bunch of happiness and quality of life related stats all moved downward together over the past few decades.
But the sex and time with friends ones are great bottom lines to look at, because spending time with our people is good for us, and our society is not structured with individual personal well being as a priority.
And I say this as an extremely introverted person who loves being a recluse and especially lives having an empty house on the weekends. The effects of good positive relationships are undeniable, and lacking them can leave somebody in a negative feedback loop that really sucks.
I know other comments already went into the “if conservatives want the country to have more babies maybe they should make life conducive to raising a family instead of getting billionaires an 8% CAGR return rather than only 7%” thing, but i’ve got to acknowledge it here too. We have the whole damn country caught up in the rat race.
So capitalism is killing sex, got it
Must be those damn millenials
I guess broke people that juggle multiple jobs to afford rent don’t really have time for sex.
Married women are having more sex than married men? Wait, where is my wife right now?
Maybe some of the women are married to women?
But surely some of the men would also be married to other men and it would cancel out right?
Maybe married gay couples suffer from dead bedrooms more than married lesbian couples then?
My lesbian daughter had a crude but funny retort to this, she said “no way, they put it in each others’ butt, nobody can do that all the time.”. Somehow without considering that there are other kinds of sex.
I can’t quickly find any recent statistics on whether there are more f&f or more m&m marriages, only that there were more married female couples in 2013.
I did read your original comment to my husband and he laughed out loud!
I’ll send her home as soon as my wife gets back from her boyfriend’s house.
Nobodyalmost nobody has sex on a schedule. It’s probably more down to variability in self-reported frequency
The conservatives are really mad that Americans are having so few babies. Less sex = less babies. One of the BIG reasons people aren’t having kids/sex is because of the market being so shitty to start a family. But, the neo-cons don’t need to worry. I’m sure the sex will trickle down from the billionaires any second now.
Elon Musk is happy to impregnate a bunch of women 🤮
Universal healthcare, the ability to afford visiting third places, and making it possible to raise a family would help with this.
Nah man. Let’s just end abortions and lower the age of marriage.
-Republicans
You forgot making workplace hiring discrimination basically legal so that women are more dependent on men, making it harder for some to leave wife beaters. Rape still counts, right?
they forgot to raise the price of knives. oops!
I mean, if you get em knocked up before they can really develop any independence and your Christian theocracy demands shotgun weddings, that’s going to reduce the labor pool and increase wages due to scarcity. It also sounds like hell on earth, but it would be hell on earth with a somewhat higher median wage.
I’m sure the sex will trickle down from the billionaires any second now.
I used to have sex almost every day, but entertainment kept getting more entertaining… Sure sex is great, but have you tried deep diving into the history of typefaces? Or learning how to bind your own books from cereal boxes and thread??
I know I’m only speaking anecdotally, but I feel like sex is easier to like fall into when you have the capacity to be actually bored, and like have plenty of unstructured time.
Maybe I’m falling for the entertainment arm of the productivity gospel.
Also realise that some people don’t have access to anyone to suggest sex with, so that’s an additional barrier. If I lived alone, I don’t think I would even bother attempting—just so much else to do!
The largest uptick happens right after the 2008 crisis. Hmm I wonder if we can infer a relation between workload and leisure from this.
I wonder how much this is an actual reduction vs how much is people being more honest than they were before
Maybe it’s difficult to enjoy things like sex when our very way of life is being dismantled in front of our eyes while we stand by helpless
After reading this comment section I feel lucky for me and sad for many of you. My wife and I have been together close enough to a decade to not split hairs. We average 4 times a week. We aren’t just still attracted to each other, I would say attraction has intensified between us. And we know how to get each other off and both enjoy doing it.
We work well as a team, have defined goals for the future, blah blah blah, it sounds cliche as I type it, but it’s true. We like each other. That seems to be uncommon. My coworkers all complain about their spouses and SOs. They also removed about never getting laid.
Maybe our relationship is different because we were two people who knew themselves pretty well and were up front about who we were from the beginning. Maybe we were just lucky.
Thank you for this. It’ll be downvoted by unhappy people, but others need to know that a chaste Gilead relationship isn’t their only choice.
My partners and I have sex at least once a day, and in general are physical and affectionate throughout each day. We had each been in relationships before with lower libido individuals and learned how difficult that can become over time so that part of compatibility was important to us before we found each other.
It really makes a world of difference to find compatibility there. Most of life becomes easier. Healthy perspectives are easier to achieve. Physical health and fitness improves. Just knowing you can easily bring joy to someone you care about by helping them orgasm makes a lot of troubles feel insignificant.
And it’s just something fun and intimate that people can do together. There are many ways to express love in a relationship, like so many dances in our repertoire, but the most universal among them is sex.
Yeah, we have been together a dozen years and have sex every day. I don’t understand complaining about your spouse, and my husband says the same. But we are old, I think it’s easier, you make better choices.
I will say I feel really lucky though, sex -wise, and don’t think it’s usual.
Sorry for the following sweeping generalization but: Mostly guys seem to say they want everyday or more until they find someone who does, then get upset if they aren’t the one with the higher sex drive. There’s a very strange subconscious assumption that it’s unfeminine or something. They feel better if they are the ones who want more than they are getting.
I’m happy for you bro :) sounds like you were made for each other, shes very lucky.
I assure you I am the lucky one
Well, that’s a whole lot of depressing graphs. Speaking of… I wonder if antidepressant use, or just depression rates in general, might have something to do with the married couples data.
When everything is super bleak, it’s more difficult to get into the mood. That is my experience.
Or we are just too fucking busy. Having 2 working parents means there is no time for relaxing of any kind. And the time you do scrounge together to relax, its usually because youre alone.
or “humans can’t reproduce in captivity”
Why fuck when you can doomscroll?
I get kicked off the train.
My girlfriend was on antidepressants for a minute and her already not very high sex drive plummeted.
Depression, sure. Medication - when taken regularly as prescribed - helps make it easier to choose to move on from depressive thoughts (without the meds it’s much harder to escape the “death spiral” of worsening thoughts & feelings), but it doesn’t stop them - you still have to choose to move on from them. As such, I don’t think they’re contributing to a problem that’d be there regardless.
Depression over how impossible to get ahead life has become, how the power-hungry control freaks are squeezing everybody in every way possible - and then replacing them with machines, how the future of the world we live on becomes even more bleak by the day, how there’s so many things demanding our attention that we have very little time left for ourselves, let alone to socialize in person, etc. Seems perfectly predictable that increasing the number of people with little to no hope left for their lives would react in such a manner.
I didn’t mean anything negative toward antidepressants other than that lowered sex drive is often a side effect of many of the most commonly prescribed medications. And yes, there are many real reasons we see a consistent plague of depression in modern society.
I would argue though that we are in one of the most food secure times in all of history. And are actually positively positioned for meeting our energy and resource needs.
Our problem has more to do with management and greed than with actual reality of our situation as a species. If we were making better choices collectively we could reduce a tremendous amount of the harm we associate with population sizes and lifestyle. But many old systems would have to die, we have to let go of a lot of what we just assume to be ‘facts of life’ and start evaluating the intrinsic value of things differently. Meaning measuring success with a new set of rules.
But it’s very hard to even consider when most of us are just trying to get from one day to the next. We feel trapped in someone else’s fabricated cage. Hence, the depression and hopelessness that’s universally felt. But all in all, I think we’re going to make it to be honest. We have to, or we will indeed fail as a species. The cage looks small but it’s not real. That’s what I remind myself anyway.
The medication often affects libido.
I’m not saying that to diminish everything else you’re saying. Just adding a little info.
probably multifactorial, we got things like social media, having faux relationships online(excluding AI). depression, income, societal things like your race, income and “attractiveness”. also Low-T in younger individuals that isnt normally tested anyways.
I was on antidepressants briefly and they made me enjoy sex somewhat less, but I did last longer
When i first took any antidepressants years ago they absolutely sapped my sex drive. It took me forever to finish. I’m grown and married and neither my partner nor I wanted it to take an hour every time and it made the depression that much worse.
I’ve changed meds since then and can finish in a relatively normal time frame again but those meds can definitely affect your physiology.
Im happily married to the love of my wife. We work opposite shifts, of 10+ hours, and we barely make ends meet. When are we supposed to do this?
Poly or typo?
The wife loves herself
Lmfao
She’s part of the 2%
Shift change!
According to Source Watch, The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) is
a conservative “think tank” which, according to its website, has the expressed mission “to strengthen marriage and natural family and advancing the well-being of children through research and public education.”[1] Research from IFS and its employees are frequently cited and published in both conservative outlets such as National Review [2] and more mainstream ones, like the Washington Post.[3]. “IFS is a successor to the Ridge Foundation, through which Bradley and others used to support Wilcox’s National Marriage Project.”[1] The Institute for Family Studies says that its “commitment is rooted in the social-science fact that children are most likely to thrive when they are raised by their own married biological parents. The underlying premise of its work is that families and communities, freedom and prosperity, and the political order itself – both at home and abroad – are all critically dependent upon the existence of a strong healthy, pervasive marriage culture among the citizenry.”[4]
I don’t entirely understand how this fits their agenda (I would expect a “married heterosexuals are having more sex” narrative), and am not surprised by the results, but also don’t really trust the source.
If they are earnest in their goals, I would hope for honest reporting for others to campaign around, plan for, or invest in. People interested in doing projects that I disagree with can still produce good data (though I agree we should look for missing data, for eg).
Surface level, this looks like a standardized survey they’ve used for decades? Could someone confirm the questions haven’t changed much and the data collection is sane?
