Smartphones blamed for decline in sex lives
LONDON — It has brought continents together and transformed the way we shop and keep abreast of world events and the weather. However, according to researchers, one presumably unintended consequence of the digital revolution could be a marked deterioration in the average couple’s sex life.
Figures published by David Spiegelhalter, a professor and statistician at Cambridge University, point to a sharp but unexplained decline in the frequency with which couples have sexual intercourse in the years since the birth of the World Wide Web.
According to research conducted for Spiegelhalter’s new book, Sex By Numbers, a typical heterosexual U.K. couple now has sex just three times a month on average.
That compares with four times a month according to similar research conducted in 2000, while in 1990 the figure stood at five times a month.
Spiegelhalter said it was clear the figures suggested a downward trend. He said that while it was difficult to ascribe a clear reason for the apparent passion drought, one possibility for the lack of intimacy is the increasing encroachment of work into private life made possible by the mobile revolution.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour: “We used to have a very big separation between our public lives and our private lives — now they are so mixed up and integrated. People are checking their emails all the time, you do not have this same sort of quiet empty time that there used to be.”
Two years ago, researchers at the Cologne Institute for Economic Research argued that mobile devices had become a virtual “extension of the body” that people take with them everywhere, invading time with family and friends.
Aric Sigman, a psychologist and expert on family dynamics, has also argued that parents who constantly check their cellphones or iPads at home are guilty of a form of “neglect” and could be engendering a lifelong dependency on screens in their children.
Spiegelhalter’s book also examines the disparity between the average number of sexual partners men claim to have — 14 — and those women admit to have had — just seven.
He said this was clearly mathematically impossible but that the explanation could be more to do with poor math than deliberate exaggeration.
He also suggested that “women may, when thinking about their history, not want to count some relationships — they just would rather forget it.”