Declines in Sexual Frequency Among American Adults, 1989–2014

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-017-0953-1

by rodionos • 9 years ago

47 80 9 years ago

link.springer.com

542458• 9 years ago

Sounds interesting. Anybody have a link to the full article?

return05• 9 years ago

http://sci-hub.cc/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%...

d--b4• 9 years ago

I'm curious about the correlation with alcohol consumption?

trhway2• 9 years ago

With age and time period controlled, those born in the 1930s (Silent generation) had sex the most often, whereas those born in the 1990s (Millennials and iGen) had sex the least often.

smartphones and social networks.

vkou• 9 years ago

Long commutes, economic uncertainty, mismatched job shifts, not having any free time or energy...

My partner's workday ends at 10:30-11:30 pm. I can't get any work done if I don't get up and head to work at ~6:00 am. She works Tuesday -> Sunday. I work Monday -> Friday.

But no, surely it's the fault of smartphones and smooth jazz music.

koolba2• 9 years ago

So the silent generation was less talk, more action?

d--b4• 9 years ago

that or THAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

chillacy8• 9 years ago

What's wrong with the explanation the researchers gave in the paper abstract? They posit that it's due to the increased number of single people (less social pressure to marry, vs girls getting married at 18), and the existing married couples getting older (the paper notes that couples in their 20s have sex ~80x a year, in their 60s ~20x).

andai2• 9 years ago

how u make that inverted b?

d--b4• 9 years ago

introducing the d as in dumb

flexie• 9 years ago

I would trust few self reported surveys and especially anything involving sexuality. And then across generations. But if there were a drop, I would suspect obesity to be the main cause. After all, it may reduce the obese's interest in sex and potential partners interest in sex with the obese. Double whammy (no pun intended).

hkon• 9 years ago

Internet...

webkike• 9 years ago

I'm glad statistics proved what I was already painfully aware of.

chillacy8• 9 years ago

The article only says that people have been having sex 9 fewer times per year in 2010 vs 1990. That's an awfully small change to notice.

seunosewa• 9 years ago

Well it's certainly a big change to those who used to have sex less than 9 times a year.

coldtea5• 9 years ago

An absolute number doesn't say anything about whether a change is "awfully small to notice".

If the average adult had sex 18 times per year in 1990 and does it "9 fewer times" in 2010, that's a 50% reduction for example.

coffeymug• 9 years ago

I would like to know the effect Tinder has had on sexual frequency.

chillacy8• 9 years ago

The authors mention Tinder in their paper, stating that it could increase the frequency, but it wasn't enough to make up for the other factors.

avenoir• 9 years ago

I know a lot of you guys/gals here are very successful and have your "shit" together. Do you ever ask yourself what a man or a woman of your interest has to offer to you when you seemingly have everything? I started doing this after a number of failed relationships started taking a significant toll on my well-being and the answer to this question has kept me single for a few years now (some of the happiest years too) because outside of consistent sex there is all too often nothing else. We don't even know how to "relationship" anymore. Ambitions and trying to one-up each other are taking precedence over everything else. It's really sad and reminds me of the society described in the book called "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.

BerislavLopac• 9 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...

pavel_lishin6• 9 years ago

We don't even know how to "relationship" anymore. Ambitions and trying to one-up each other are taking precedence over everything else.

I appreciate that you went through, and are currently going through a rough time relationship-wise - but don't ascribe this to everyone.

If you're consistently unhappy with the people you date, there's one common factor.

return05• 9 years ago

There's also a trend of men 'going their own way'. There doesn't seem to be a female equivalent yet. I wonder why this is not studied in more detail. And it seems the latest generations have a very pragmatic/utilitarian view of sexual relationships - to the point where it loses its magic. From a cost/benefit viewpoint, can't blame them.

sanswork3• 9 years ago

Wouldn't the female equivalent be cat ladies?

Having looked in on a few of the communities like gtow and incels and such they don't seem very pragmatic. They seem unsociable, rejected and angry and instead of trying to improve on interpersonal relationship abilities or personal value they are giving up. "incels" admit to giving up, gtow claim they don't need women then spend all day sitting around talking about how happy they are without them.

From a cost/benefit viewpoint

Trying to fit relationships into a cost/benefit viewpoint is why most of these people will always fail at relationships. You can't get the full benefit of a relationship until it is fully developed and you can't fully develop a relationship if you're in it for a positive ROI.

dakroot• 9 years ago

Female here! I "went my own way" about three years ago...and it's awesome! I'm not a cat lady either...can't stand the things.

I won't deny radical Libertarianism had a lot to do with this decision, but it's basically this: if you find someone you adore, spend time with them. Have sex with them if you feel like it. If you guys don't make each other happy at some point, do some solo traveling. Spend time contemplating alone. Hang out with different people. Then, come back together.

It's incredible how much new, interesting shit you'll have to talk about when you live this way. You may fall in love with each other all over again.

I don't know if it's true that we "don't know how to relationship" anymore, rather, we're relationship-ing in a way that doesn't serve modern society/reality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

Cheers!

hkmurakami2• 9 years ago

Companionship.

Especially when your current friends move onto a different life stage from you (married, married with children, etc).

Might be substitutable with a furry friend though.

Veratyr• 9 years ago

I'd say I'm in this situation. I can have any material thing I want/need and plenty to occupy me in my free time. My wife is still studying (and I'm paying for it) and is pursuing a career that I'm happy with but generally doesn't make much money.

She offers me quite a lot though. She's the only person I'm always happy to be around, I can trust her with any problems I have, we can make life plans together, she shows me things I'd otherwise not have seen as well as other ways to look at things I have seen, she thinks in a very different way to me so can come up with solutions I wouldn't have. The biggest thing is that she's someone I'm sharing my life with. Just like going to a movie, eating or playing a game is better with people around you, so is life.

This is what someone has to offer to someone who has "everything".

I'll add that we're both in our 20s and many of our friends seem to be similarly happy with their partners.

nojvek3• 9 years ago

I would second this. In my dating life I was with many partners. Sex even sometimes felt empty. Some guys like this, I found that I enjoy being monogamous a lot better.

My wife is awesome. I feel recharged spending time with her. She is an excellent cook. I prefer her food to restaurants. She works part time, doesn't make crazy money but we have enough to afford a house and car. I feel happy being married.

Don't think of women as sex partners. Think of them as close trusted friends with benefits.

Although sometimes we do have our rough patches and I do fantasize about other women occasionally. Never acted on it though.

pdog• 9 years ago

Age had a strong effect on sexual frequency: Americans in their 20s had sex an average of about 80 times per year...

This seems too low to be true. Only three times per fortnight?

trey-jones• 9 years ago

Are you basing this comment on personal experience? If so, congratulations! As for me, a married man who had my first child at 26, I would say 80 times a year during my late twenties is probably close to accurate. Maybe slightly low. As for the sexual activity of my peers, I have no idea! Do you?

There are probably also legions of 20-something Americans out there that simply have no prospects for sex on a regular basis.

Could this be more or less true in rural areas than urban? I have no idea. We just don't talk about it enough.

return05• 9 years ago

sex distributions are not uniform. some people have lots of sex others very little.

metaphorm• 9 years ago

why do you think this is too low? Not everyone is in a committed partner relationship, and not every single person is involved in "hookup culture".

irixusr• 9 years ago

Well there's only 40~45 weeks in a year (if menstruation is no-sexy time) so then that's twice a week.

Sounds about right.

mooseburger• 9 years ago

I haven't had sex in 28 years.

maus422• 9 years ago

1. Averages don't work that way. 2. Congratulations, you might not be as representative sample of the population as you thought!

This is one reason why advocate visualizing the whole distribution into a some kind of graph whenever possible.

I have institutional access, and unfortunately, the paper does not describe this distribution. Fortunately, GSS data is publicly available: http://www.gss.norc.org/

edit. Outside the year 2012, when the questionnaire logic was slightly different, the mode of the distribution of 6 available categories ranging from "not at all" to "more than 3 times a week", has been almost always been "not at all". (With second peak around "2 or 3 times a week".)

brilliantcode2• 9 years ago

what is driving lack of intimacy? My theory is pretty controversial but it's because women are working more as well as men. Less parent time, less attachment, less intimacy. For men without a strong male figure it's even more impactful.

p.s. crazy theory I came up with after reading http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Hoffman/Hoffman.html

taurath• 9 years ago

Gay men don't seem to have such a problem.

I'd take facebook, unlimited ultra-specific porn, distraction devices in everyone's pockets, long commutes, and lack of 1-1 time over women working. It takes many many leaps of logic through many fields of study to believe that because children don't have a stay at home mother they're less intimate.

VLM4• 9 years ago

I'm old enough that I dated about 6 coworkers and married one for about 20 years so far. Work is intimate and that leads to relationships. If you can date there, you're obviously going to get more action. I get the feeling I met my future wife right about on the border where earlier, like in the 80s, when management found out I was dating a hot coworker I sort of got frat boy high fives and maybe a comment about how lucky I was and I wish I was still your age and at most maybe a "be sure to behave yourself at work, but have fun" comments, but after my wife and I got married, it appears trying to date in the workforce as portrayed in the media would result in summary execution by firing squad at dawn by HR at absolute best possible case. At least per written policy.

Then again I read stories about workplace harassment of women in Silicon Valley and the public stories of sexual harassment in tech show its way over the top than anything I saw or heard of from decades ago. This might be one of those corporate "what they say has nothing to do with what they do" things, kinda like diversity training.

My advice WRT dating coworkers is if either of you tend toward high school drama, its going to end absolutely horrifically, but if you're both adults then working with an ex is not really all that bad. Oh and if "never trash talk an ex" is good life advice, "never trash talk an ex who's also a coworker" is good advice times a million.

xutopia• 9 years ago

That's a huge leap. Maybe women working has an impact. It might be that they're too tired when they get home.

cgriswald3• 9 years ago

I think the divorce rate of previous generations has a lot to do with it. My parents divorced when I was young. It took me a long time to be able to even develop the emotional maturity to have an intimate relationship, and longer still to develop any real skill at it. I had no real role models, and the survival lesson I learn was "never be vulnerable." But vulnerability is key to intimacy. It was not until I went through a divorce of my own that I really even "got it".

And now... I'm having trouble finding a partner capable of that level of intimacy. My most recent ex-girlfriend was a brick wall; no vulnerability, no expression of deeper emotion. Just a willingness to fight and a quickness to get angry. She's convinced she's not worth loving, and so, of course, she pushed me away, questioned everything, and didn't trust me when I said, "I know you think I feel Y, but I actually feel X." She, too, is the product of divorced parents.

hkmurakami2• 9 years ago

"I know you think I feel Y, but I actually feel X."

That really is an emotionally mature and aware thing to be able to say. Kudos for working hard to get there. If any written material helped you develop it, I'm eager to learn of them.

brilliantcode2• 9 years ago

This really hits home. I pondered whether I should write the following string of text because they are deeply personal but I've worked up the courage to put them in writing because it's been driving me nuts and I'm sick of having to protect my parent's failures.

The earliest memory I have of my father is raging and suffocating my mother with a blanket. The whole movie is spotty. It's like my mind was trying to protect my 7 year old brain by "deleting" traumatic moments. This is the tip of the iceberg. All I can say is I've never felt safe. My biggest fear at the end of school was walking home in fear every single day that my dad might try to kill my mom.

My lifelong desire was to provide financially for my mom and younger sister so she wouldn't have to depend on my father. I've failed here but I'm still in this software game, hoping that I can finally provide the life my mom and sister is owed-my father being the world's poorest and financially irresponsible dentist.

Even as I'm writing this I'm starting to get uneasy and it's hard for me to continue. Everytime I revisit these scenes, it starts to trigger anxiety and panic.

While I think divorce is traumatic, the aftermath of toxic adults who have deep hatred for each other is even more harmful to a child.

I really wish my parents had divorced earlier. I wish I hadn't seen, experienced early childhood, teens to adulthood.

I am utterly broken. I'm 100% certain that I will remain the way I am. Unable to marry, unable to have meaningful intimate relationships. I'm 30 but I do not feel like my emotional maturity is remotely close.

But all that I can bear. As long as there's a single breath of life in me, it will go towards creating products that will solve challenging problems and get paid for it so I can find peace for my family and myself.

Happy Wednesday, dear reader.

return05• 9 years ago

if you re talking about partnered people, they note that the decline is smaller for them.

jimmyswimmy• 9 years ago

From the article: "The results suggest that Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors: An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners."

In other words:

- Americans without partners are having sex less frequently because they increasingly have no partner to have sex with.

- Americans with partners are having sex less frequently because they are having sex less frequently.

Not a very enlightening conclusion.

return05• 9 years ago

americans without partners by definition cant have sex. what they say is that there are more americans without partners i suppose.

chillacy8• 9 years ago

Not enlightening, but also safe and soundly supported by evidence. The unsupported theories popping up in the comments section here would make any clickbait science journalism site happy.

pavel_lishin6• 9 years ago

There's also a trend of men 'going their own way'.

Are those idiots a statistically significant percentage of the population?

VLM4• 9 years ago

Well, there's people self-identifying, and there's people living the lifestyle, and the groups don't necessarily have to match up, like in the closet I guess.

With respect to living the lifestyle, Time has an interesting article on the percentage of college grads living at home after graduation, aka failure to launch. We'll assume 50:50 male:female although of course not all degree fields are 50:50, and we'll assume that living in moms basement means the sex life is essentially zilch.

http://time.com/4106297/college-degrees-parents-house/

So half of English lit grads, 40% of CS/IT grads, 30% of engineers, more than half of history majors.

You could argue that the extrapolated trend around 30 is more relevant than just out of school and trying to find a new career, in which case its merely in the 10% to 20% range depending on major.

Far too many college grads are produced than there are jobs for them, by integer multiples too many. Its the opposite for skilled trades, you'll make a lot more money and demand is intense for electricians so I'd imagine "failure to launch" for journeyman electricians is exclusively limited to, like, in home hospice care of ill parents and similar, so figure that rounds down to about zero although I don't have figures.

Maybe unemployed college grads living at home make it work, I never had to do it, but I imagine it would be awkward having uni roommate conversations with your parents and little sister to get them out of the house when you're having someone come over, or I guess they could stay home and listen, or just ewww.

Personally I came home from the Army while going to school in the day and I couldn't take the parenting for more than a couple weeks while I was doing the school GI bill thing, of course that's all the time I needed to get an apartment and car and start school and stuff. Where are you going who you gonna hang out with how late will you be out remember tonight is a school night do I know their parents oh can I meet this girl she sounds nice, is kinda cute or tolerable around thirteen but not a 20-something adult. My score while living at home was definitely zero, although I was too busy setting up apartment, car, school, all that stuff to go out anyway.

So in summary, mid level double digit percentages. Not a rounding error.

pavel_lishin6• 9 years ago

But people living at home after graduation isn't the same thing as "Men Going Their Own Way". Even underemployment doesn't place people in that category. I'm kind of wondering if you replied to the correct comment...

dang• 9 years ago

Would you please not comment like this here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823356 and marked it off-topic.

pavel_lishin6• 9 years ago

Sorry; I shouldn't have let my personal opinions color my comments like that.

maus422• 9 years ago

While the article is interesting, I think some of the more curious part of HN crowd might find it also worthwhile to look at the actual dataset available here: http://www.gss.norc.org/ . Looking at the codebook, some of the relevant variables for analysis of this kind would be PARTNERS, SEXFREQ, NUMWOMEN, NUMMEN, PARTNRS5 (starting at p.2586).

The codebook includes nice summary tables that might alone answer some the questions you are thinking about (like here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823544 ; I myself didn't download the data yet but could write that comment).

xiphias• 9 years ago

I don't know how much it's true in America, but here in Europe I see men moving to high paying jobs in already expensive cities (and making the cities even more expensive for women to move to) and women moving to cheaper cities (where they are able to get job for themselves) as the biggest factor in not having sex.

Internet also helped the explosion of long-distance relationships where people are having sex for a weekend in a month even if they are in monogam relationships.

Declines in Sexual Frequency Among American Adults, 1989–2014

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