Not tonight, darling: how the world lost its libido – and how it can get it back

Suddenly faced with spending a lot more time with his wife, Anthony, 44, thought one silver lining of lockdown might be that their sex life would get back on track.“Of course, that was really stupid,” he says now, with a small laugh.

What he had not factored in was the exhaustion of childcare and home schooling, anxiety about the health of their parents – and the small matter of existential dread. “You’d wake up and everything was significantly worse than the day before. And that is really not sexy.” Where once he would go to the gym or meet a friend for a pint after work to decompress, now all life was at home. “Before, you could come back to yourself a little bit. Lockdown took all that away – there are only so many times you can go for a walk on your own.”

If the couple’s sex life was struggling before – a situation many other parents of young children will recognise – then the pandemic amplified it. Before, it was more a case of being out of sync with his wife and failing to prioritise intimacy; with the advent of the pandemic, Anthony found his sex drive declining. “I never realised how much stress and the lack of personal time would affect my desire. Although it sounds obvious, it’s not something I thought about.”

It is a situation playing out in bedrooms all over the world. In research conducted by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University last year, nearly half of the respondents reported a decline in the frequency of sexual behaviour, including masturbation (although one in five people said they had tried something new in their sex life, such as different positions or sexting).

“It’s definitely affecting people,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual therapist and the host of the podcast The Sexual Wellness Sessions. “Generalised anxiety is at a higher level: there are threats to health, wellbeing, jobs, education or medical treatments. We’re not seeing friends or family. That increased anxiety can affect us inside the bedroom: people are reporting being more distracted, or that they find it harder to be in the moment, that they have more intrusive thoughts or more negative automatic thoughts.”

For some people, though, sex may have increased during this period, she says, as a form of stress relief. “It works for them in that way – and that also goes for masturbation habits. For people who find it more difficult to get in the right headspace when they’re stressed, or find it difficult to switch off – which we might do normally on our commute home, or when we go to the gym after work – there’s no escape. We’re parenting, working, relaxing and working out all in the same space.”

For David, 28, the pandemic hastened the end of his relationship, be