Dry Spell? New Study Says Adults Are Having Less Sex

Have you been striking out lately? Maybe you’re lacking the sex drive you used to have.
Well, according to studies, you’re not by yourself. There has been a decline in sexual activity for a while now.
In 2016, a study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that younger millennials born in the 1990s were more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive in their early 20s as the previous generation was.
Even older millennials are more sexually active than this younger group is.

In 1991, 54.1 percent of high schoolers reported they had intercourse; by 2015, the number was 41.2 percent. And when 20- to 24-year-olds were surveyed, 15 percent had not had sex since turning 18. By contrast, that number was six percent in the early ‘90s.

Overall, the sexual partner count is down too — baby-boomers report an average of 11 sexual partners, Gen-Xers 10, and millennials eight.

Not to mention, the study found that, in general, people in the U.S. have become “less coupled.” While 66 percent of U.S. adults were living with a partner back in 1986, only 59 percent of them were doing so in 2014.

So what’s making us less sexually active? Depression has been associated with sexual dysfunction for a while now, so it could be a result of the overall climate.

“Are they less happy and thus having less sex or are they having less sex and therefore less happy? It’s probably some of both,” Dr. Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me, said about this generation and sex.

“We do know that sexual frequency is linked to marital satisfaction, so overall if you have fewer people having sex you could have people who are less happy and less satisfied with that relationship.”

A lot of times when we are sexually frustrated we’ll think we’re what’s wrong, when it could have been a bigger issue all along.