Covid romance: How lockdown changed Americans’ sex lives
As we near the end of the longest year of our lives, “we’re at the dawn of another sexual revolution,” said Elizabeth Kiefer in Esquire.com. Though it has been natural to assume that young singles who’ve been cooped up for 14 months would greet their first post-lockdown summer with “a bacchanalia of hookups,” a very different scenario now seems more likely. In a recent survey conducted by Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the Kinsey Institute, 64 percent of respondents said in the wake of Covid they’re less interested in having more than one partner at a time, and roughly the same number are prioritizing the hunt for a deep connection over a brief hookup. In fact, “we may be nearing—and we never thought we’d write this, but—the death of the one-night stand.” That doesn’t mean that Americans’ sex lives are about to become more boring, though. The same survey revealed that 46 percent of us are engaging in more sexual experimentation than we were a year ago.
The dating scene has already changed, but for a different reason, said Gavin Butler in Vice.com. Singles who use dating apps are currently gravitating toward one highly desirable trait: “a willingness to get jabbed.” Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid have all reported surges in the number of users who included the word “vaccine” or “vaccinated” in their profiles, and OkCupid spokesperson Michael Kaye says that users who claim to have been inoculated are being “liked” twice as often as those who say they aren’t interested in immunization. “Basically,” he said, “getting the vaccine is the hottest thing you could be doing on a dating app right now.” Adds behavioral scientist Ivo Vlaev, “Dating apps could help win the war on the virus. People will go, ‘If I want to date somebody, then I better be vaccinated.’”
Many couples are confronting a different challenge, said Katie Heaney in NYMag.com. From the start of the pandemic, there have been reports that sex drives have fallen for some partners who’ve been working, living, and sleeping in the same space for weeks and months at a time. They’re suffering a “deeply unsexy sameness in their everyday lives,” and if they’re on edge, that’s even worse, because “stress is a well-documented libido killer.” There are ways to rekindle the fire. Sex therapist Ori Nelsen suggests that spending time on the relationship outside the bedroom can help, and that simply making eye contact within 2 feet of each other promotes a chemical reaction. “The good news is that none of the experts I spoke to expect any real lasting or long-term damage to be done by this sexless year. Vaccination is imminent; spring is coming.”