Declines in Sexual Frequency Among American Adults, 1989–2014
link.springer.com
link.springer.com
She offers me quite a lot though. She's the only person I'm always happy to be around, I can trust her with any problems I have, we can make life plans together, she shows me things I'd otherwise not have seen as well as other ways to look at things I have seen, she thinks in a very different way to me so can come up with solutions I wouldn't have. The biggest thing is that she's someone I'm sharing my life with. Just like going to a movie, eating or playing a game is better with people around you, so is life.
This is what someone has to offer to someone who has "everything".
I'll add that we're both in our 20s and many of our friends seem to be similarly happy with their partners.
My wife is awesome. I feel recharged spending time with her. She is an excellent cook. I prefer her food to restaurants. She works part time, doesn't make crazy money but we have enough to afford a house and car. I feel happy being married.
Don't think of women as sex partners. Think of them as close trusted friends with benefits.
Although sometimes we do have our rough patches and I do fantasize about other women occasionally. Never acted on it though.
I appreciate that you went through, and are currently going through a rough time relationship-wise - but don't ascribe this to everyone.
If you're consistently unhappy with the people you date, there's one common factor.
I won't deny radical Libertarianism had a lot to do with this decision, but it's basically this: if you find someone you adore, spend time with them. Have sex with them if you feel like it. If you guys don't make each other happy at some point, do some solo traveling. Spend time contemplating alone. Hang out with different people. Then, come back together.
It's incredible how much new, interesting shit you'll have to talk about when you live this way. You may fall in love with each other all over again.
I don't know if it's true that we "don't know how to relationship" anymore, rather, we're relationship-ing in a way that doesn't serve modern society/reality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Cheers!
My grandmother and her great grand daughter are both alive.
When humans live that long, having the liberty to change partners is refreshing. Like having another sub-life.
Having looked in on a few of the communities like gtow and incels and such they don't seem very pragmatic. They seem unsociable, rejected and angry and instead of trying to improve on interpersonal relationship abilities or personal value they are giving up. "incels" admit to giving up, gtow claim they don't need women then spend all day sitting around talking about how happy they are without them.
>From a cost/benefit viewpoint
Trying to fit relationships into a cost/benefit viewpoint is why most of these people will always fail at relationships. You can't get the full benefit of a relationship until it is fully developed and you can't fully develop a relationship if you're in it for a positive ROI.
Especially when your current friends move onto a different life stage from you (married, married with children, etc).
Might be substitutable with a furry friend though.
If the average adult had sex 18 times per year in 1990 and does it "9 fewer times" in 2010, that's a 50% reduction for example.
9 is the average decrease, not one that just applies to the 80x population.
Besides the original comment just gave the number "9 less" without any other number from the paper as context so that we can evaluate the importance of the change.
In other words:
- Americans without partners are having sex less frequently because they increasingly have no partner to have sex with.
- Americans with partners are having sex less frequently because they are having sex less frequently.
Not a very enlightening conclusion.
The codebook includes nice summary tables that might alone answer some the questions you are thinking about (like here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823544 ; I myself didn't download the data yet but could write that comment).
This seems too low to be true. Only three times per fortnight?
There are probably also legions of 20-something Americans out there that simply have no prospects for sex on a regular basis.
Could this be more or less true in rural areas than urban? I have no idea. We just don't talk about it enough.
This is one reason why advocate visualizing the whole distribution into a some kind of graph whenever possible.
I have institutional access, and unfortunately, the paper does not describe this distribution. Fortunately, GSS data is publicly available: http://www.gss.norc.org/
edit. Outside the year 2012, when the questionnaire logic was slightly different, the mode of the distribution of 6 available categories ranging from "not at all" to "more than 3 times a week", has been almost always been "not at all". (With second peak around "2 or 3 times a week".)
Sounds about right.
smartphones and social networks.
My partner's workday ends at 10:30-11:30 pm. I can't get any work done if I don't get up and head to work at ~6:00 am. She works Tuesday -> Sunday. I work Monday -> Friday.
But no, surely it's the fault of smartphones and smooth jazz music.
Something I find fascinating about the pr0n genre is heavily fictionalized fun time is almost any time other than right before or after sleep. But from what I gather of gossip about non-fictional fun time, most "settled down" couples stick exclusively to immediately before or after sleep, which is kinda weird. I can assure you all the parts work fine if you meet up at lunch time or pretty much whatever you're physically together, you don't need permission from a wall clock to have a good time.
And while job uncertainty is a give (compared to previous decades) "mismatched job shifts" are not necessarily more...
they grew up having less distractions to spend their time/energy on, even TV wasn't part of daily routine. So once all the talking is done and there is still time to kill... I remember reading about 20 years ago about India plans to produce cheap national TV sets to help combat high population growth, i.e. to give people something to kill time with other than the activity which naturally results in new children.
That "more single people" is basically a restatement of the phenomenon of less sex, and not an explanation.
Instead, this thread is full of speculation akin to the most click-baity of science journalism: relatively boring paper goes in, crazy theories come out.
p.s. crazy theory I came up with after reading http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Hoffman/Hoffman.html
And now... I'm having trouble finding a partner capable of that level of intimacy. My most recent ex-girlfriend was a brick wall; no vulnerability, no expression of deeper emotion. Just a willingness to fight and a quickness to get angry. She's convinced she's not worth loving, and so, of course, she pushed me away, questioned everything, and didn't trust me when I said, "I know you think I feel Y, but I actually feel X." She, too, is the product of divorced parents.
The earliest memory I have of my father is raging and suffocating my mother with a blanket. The whole movie is spotty. It's like my mind was trying to protect my 7 year old brain by "deleting" traumatic moments. This is the tip of the iceberg. All I can say is I've never felt safe. My biggest fear at the end of school was walking home in fear every single day that my dad might try to kill my mom.
My lifelong desire was to provide financially for my mom and younger sister so she wouldn't have to depend on my father. I've failed here but I'm still in this software game, hoping that I can finally provide the life my mom and sister is owed-my father being the world's poorest and financially irresponsible dentist.
Even as I'm writing this I'm starting to get uneasy and it's hard for me to continue. Everytime I revisit these scenes, it starts to trigger anxiety and panic.
While I think divorce is traumatic, the aftermath of toxic adults who have deep hatred for each other is even more harmful to a child.
I really wish my parents had divorced earlier. I wish I hadn't seen, experienced early childhood, teens to adulthood.
I am utterly broken. I'm 100% certain that I will remain the way I am. Unable to marry, unable to have meaningful intimate relationships. I'm 30 but I do not feel like my emotional maturity is remotely close.
But all that I can bear. As long as there's a single breath of life in me, it will go towards creating products that will solve challenging problems and get paid for it so I can find peace for my family and myself.
Happy Wednesday, dear reader.
I really relate to your need to support your mom and sister. Whether I wanted it or not, I was the 'man of the house' very early on. It's extremely unfair and affected every relationship I had up until I got divorced.
I also relate to your missing/foggy memories. For a long time I couldn't remember the happy parts of my childhood. It was like life began for me when my parents divorced; and life was hell.
If you haven't, consider therapy. I can't really describe how it helped me move past the emotions of my childhood, but it did. I have no issues remembering the happier times, and I can remember the miserable times without really feeling that black dread spreading across my stomach anymore. If you're still feeling it, you're stuck, and it's okay to get help with it.
Trust me when I say you are not utterly broken. You've been tenacious in your pursuit of peace, be tenacious in your pursuit of a whole self.
Have you tried getting any support regarding intimacy? It is a great feeling to be in love with someone who you can trust and trusts you back.
That really is an emotionally mature and aware thing to be able to say. Kudos for working hard to get there. If any written material helped you develop it, I'm eager to learn of them.
I'm not really sure how I got from A to B except age, pain, and a low tolerance for bullshit (especially my own). My sister believes we are exceptionally analytical and that it has helped us to develop because we are able to be self-critical (not in a pejorative sense). (She's a detective, so maybe she's onto something.) I know that at some point I realized the fear of pain was worse than pain and suddenly it was easy to be emotionally honest with myself and others.
I'm not sure if that helps.
I'd take facebook, unlimited ultra-specific porn, distraction devices in everyone's pockets, long commutes, and lack of 1-1 time over women working. It takes many many leaps of logic through many fields of study to believe that because children don't have a stay at home mother they're less intimate.
Then again I read stories about workplace harassment of women in Silicon Valley and the public stories of sexual harassment in tech show its way over the top than anything I saw or heard of from decades ago. This might be one of those corporate "what they say has nothing to do with what they do" things, kinda like diversity training.
My advice WRT dating coworkers is if either of you tend toward high school drama, its going to end absolutely horrifically, but if you're both adults then working with an ex is not really all that bad. Oh and if "never trash talk an ex" is good life advice, "never trash talk an ex who's also a coworker" is good advice times a million.
Internet also helped the explosion of long-distance relationships where people are having sex for a weekend in a month even if they are in monogam relationships.
Are those idiots a statistically significant percentage of the population?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823356 and marked it off-topic.
With respect to living the lifestyle, Time has an interesting article on the percentage of college grads living at home after graduation, aka failure to launch. We'll assume 50:50 male:female although of course not all degree fields are 50:50, and we'll assume that living in moms basement means the sex life is essentially zilch.
http://time.com/4106297/college-degrees-parents-house/
So half of English lit grads, 40% of CS/IT grads, 30% of engineers, more than half of history majors.
You could argue that the extrapolated trend around 30 is more relevant than just out of school and trying to find a new career, in which case its merely in the 10% to 20% range depending on major.
Far too many college grads are produced than there are jobs for them, by integer multiples too many. Its the opposite for skilled trades, you'll make a lot more money and demand is intense for electricians so I'd imagine "failure to launch" for journeyman electricians is exclusively limited to, like, in home hospice care of ill parents and similar, so figure that rounds down to about zero although I don't have figures.
Maybe unemployed college grads living at home make it work, I never had to do it, but I imagine it would be awkward having uni roommate conversations with your parents and little sister to get them out of the house when you're having someone come over, or I guess they could stay home and listen, or just ewww.
Personally I came home from the Army while going to school in the day and I couldn't take the parenting for more than a couple weeks while I was doing the school GI bill thing, of course that's all the time I needed to get an apartment and car and start school and stuff. Where are you going who you gonna hang out with how late will you be out remember tonight is a school night do I know their parents oh can I meet this girl she sounds nice, is kinda cute or tolerable around thirteen but not a 20-something adult. My score while living at home was definitely zero, although I was too busy setting up apartment, car, school, all that stuff to go out anyway.
So in summary, mid level double digit percentages. Not a rounding error.
And when you're talking about large fraction of the college grad population living with parents, you have maybe 50:50 chance that your partner is also living at home with mom, so its not like you can have sex at her place in some other mom's basement instead of your own mom's basement.
And I'm still not convinced that living at home post-college sends someone spiraling into MGTOW. They might be bitter about it, they might be resigned about it, but I don't believe that it necessarily leads to a rejection of the opposite sex. Big ol' [citation needed] there.
Just because you're not currently in a relationship, and it's difficult to maintain one, doesn't make you a MGTOW, no more than having a lease end a few days before a new one begins makes you homeless.