According to a new study published this Tuesday in the journal Archives for Sexual Behavior, Americans have considerably less sexual encounters than they once did. 25 years ago, the sexual relationship rates were much higher, with married couples presenting the most significant decay.
According to the survey, all population groups are having less sex than they once did, no matter gender, race, region, education level or work status. The researchers said that one of the reasons that could explain these rates is the fact that the number of people with a stable love partner has diminished considerably in the last years.
Another of the important explanations granted by the researchers is that now the “marriage advantage” seems to have lost its effect. Surveys conducted in the last decades showed how married couples had considerably more sex than single people. The sex rates of those people living with their love partners were the ones that decreased the most, according to the study.
What happened to married people?
Information between 1984 and 2014 gathered by the General Social Survey showed that Americans now have 8 fewer sex encounters per year when compared with numbers from the 1990’s. In that time, Americans had about 61 sex encounters per year, while in the 2000’s, they have not much more than 53 on average.
In the case of married people, the average number of times that married Americans had sex was 73 times per year. However, the study showed how that number decreased to 55 times per year -which means a drop of more than 25 percent. This figure dropped so much that is now lower than the registers of the average sex frequency of never-married people, which is of 59 times a year.
The study also found that Americans are not desiring being in a loving relationship as much as they did before. According to data from the General Social Survey, about 66 percent of Americans were living with a loving partner in 1986.
However, in 2014, only 59 percent of American adults were living with a partner. The study also showed how people who do not have a couple tend to have sex half of the times than coupled people do.
“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,” said Jean M. Twenge, the study’s lead author, who teaches psychology at San Diego State University. “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.”
Even when the study did not list the specific causes that could explain these rates, researchers did express which factors could be affecting in this issue.
They explained how extreme access to social media entertainment, more depression rates (associated with antidepressant consumption and erectile dysfunction) and an overall diminishment of happiness among people age 30 and over could reverberate in the rates presented in the study.
They explained how extreme access to social media entertainment, more depression rates (associated with antidepressant consumption and erectile dysfunction) and an overall diminishment of happiness among people age 30 and over could reverberate in the rates presented in the study.
Source: The Washington Post