Fearful millennials are putting sex life on hold

MILLENNIALS are waiting longer to have sex, with one in eight still virgins at 26 years old, a study has found.

The sharp rise in the number of young people waiting longer to have sex might be because of a “fear of intimacy” and the pressure of social media, according to analysts.

The Next Steps project, the brainchild of the Department for Education which is now managed by University College London, has tracked 16,000 people born in 198990 since they were 14.

The interviews, conducted in 2016, discovered a rise in the number of millennials waiting longer to have sex compared with previous generations, where one in 20 reported still being virgins at around the same age.

Susanna Abse, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Balint Consultancy, told The Sunday Times: “Millennials have been brought up in a culture of hypersexuality which has bred a fear of intimacy.

“The women are always up for it with beautiful hard bodies and the men have permanent erections. That is daunting to young people.

“The fear for young men is of being humiliated that they can’t live up to that, plus the fear of exposure in your Facebook group.”

If those who refused to answer the question were also virgins, the figure rises to one in six, according to Steve Mckay, professor in social research at Lincoln University.

The research also found that as young people get older they are less likely to have sexual partners, with more than 90 per cent of those who had lost their virginity having done so before the age of 19.