Sex bottom of the list for ‘anxious’ millennials
We are in the midst of a “sex recession”, according to the viral cover story of this month’s Atlantic magazine – a phrase coined by journalist Kate Julian to describe the dwindling levels of congress being had between Americans. Particularly, millennials. According to the General Social Survey, of almost 27,000 people in the US, twentysomethings are 2½ times as likely to be abstinent as Gen-Xers were at that age.
The statistics would suggest that the same thing is happening in other wealthy Western countries as well.
In May, a University of California study of more than 16,000 millennials found that one in eight were still virgins at the age of 26, while a very recent Mumsnet survey, in collaboration with Relate, found that 25% of couples in their 30s have a “sexless relationship”.
I am 33, and my friends and I all have our struggles – some temporary, some permanent.
Unless they are trying to get pregnant, many sigh anxiously over how long it has been, before telling me how busy and tired they are.
As Emma Waring, a psychosexual nurse and author of Seasons of Sex and Intimacy tells me, for the young couples she increasingly works with, “sex is at the bottom of the to-do list, they never quite get there”.
In my network of close friends, a few are still single.
For the one travelling the globe, sex is as liberating and exciting as the salsa lessons across Colombia.
For the rest, sex is just not a priority.
Received wisdom would have it that the internet has made casual sexual encounters as easy to come by as a coffee shop on a high street, but even in our taboo-free, app-heavy culture, finding sex when you are single can be harder than some might imagine.
“Most of my single friends are largely celibate, maybe one partner every year,” says Rachel, 24.
Meeting anyone in real life is seen as increasingly impossible
“That’s why I find it so baffling in Friends, when they’re like: ’Oh, you haven’t had sex in a month?’
“Loads of my single friends have not had sex in eight months!”
Michael, also 24, tells me: “The last relationship I was in, we had sex regularly – a lot.
“But I had this idea that when I became single I would start having sex with lots of different people.”
This has not been the case. Hook-ups are “demanding of time and effort” and he does not like using apps: “The idea that I would have to meet up with loads of [the women behind] these text conversations to find if any of them were genuine ‘connections’ seemed like a big job.” This is what Julian terms the “Tinder Mirage”.
Essentially: “Unless you are especially good-looking, the thing online dating may be best at, is sucking up large amounts of time,” she writes.
“As of 2014, when Tinder last released such data, the average user logged in 11 times, for a total of about an hour and a half a day. Yet they did not get much in return.
“Today, the company says it logs 1.6-billion swipes a day, and just 26-million matches.”
I can testify to this – when I was using dating app Happn, I had to take it off my phone and instal it on an old iPad that never left my flat, in an effort to streamline use.
I was wasting so much time on a sea of indeterminable faces – unproductive and wildly depressing.
It did not want to make me run out and have sex with the closest one I could find.
This in part, leads to a paradox of choice: “so haunted” are young people by this endless sea of faces, Julian says, that they “don’t make it off the couch”.
And there is another paradox – as much as most of us hate using dating apps, meeting anyone in real life is perceived to be increasingly impossible.
Arielle, 23, tells me she recently threw a house party where nobody went home with anyone, even though they had been chatting to people they later revealed they liked.
“We’re a more overthinking and anxious generation and it’s much safer to do this online.”
Anna, 24, agrees: “Thirty years ago you had no choice, but it’s much easier behind the security of a screen.”
The other big internet-driven issue that may be preventing young people from having sex is porn.
In addition, living with family or in shared housing with friends for longer could mean they are getting greater support from peers than partners, compared with previous generations.
“It might be that young people are finding they can have intimate attachments without sex,” she suggests.
So it is not necessarily all doom and gloom.
Perhaps if young people are finding a healthier relationship than sex, one that works for them and reflects the moment we are in, “recession” is not really the right word. –