Adults are having sex less often than they were 20 years ago, according to a scientific study in America of almost 27,000 people.
Researchers found that adults had sex about nine fewer times per year than they did back in the late 1990s.
The study reported that the declines were seen across gender, race, social divides and were largest among people in their 50s and those with school-age children.
Married couples or those living together also saw a marked drop, having sex 16 fewer times per week compared with a decade earlier.
Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, said: “These data show a major reversal from previous decades in terms of marriage and sex.
“In the 1990s, married people had sex more times per year than never-married people, but by the mid-2000s that reversed, with the never-married having more sex.”
The researchers said millennials – and Generation Z that followed – were having less sex than their predecessors, in part because fewer of them were in relationships and more were living with their parents for longer.
Ryne Sherman, co-author of the study from Florida Atlantic University, told The Guardian: “One [possible factor] is the ‘failure to launch’ thing.”
That chimed with the conclusion of the paper, that two trends were responsible for the decrease.
“Much of this decline is due to the lower marriage rate in recent years, as married individuals have sex more consistently than unmarried individuals (a similar trend appears for living together),” wrote the researchers. “In addition, those with steady partners are having sex less frequently.”
The data were collected from 1989 to 2014 through a nationwide study known as the General Social Survey.
It included the question: “About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?”
“While those in their 20s had sex more than 80 times per year, this declined to about 60 times a year by 45 and 20 times a year by 65,” reported the study. “For each year of age after the peak in sexual frequency at 25, participants reported having sex 1.18 fewer times per year.
“Put another way, individuals over age 25 have sex 96.8 percent as often as the previous year (so with each year of age after 25, the number of sex acts per year declined by 3.2 percent.)”
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