Adults in many developed countries are having less sex than they did a generation ago, and the reasons extend well beyond any single explanation. The decline shows up across the United States, Europe, and Japan, cutting across age groups and relationship types. What’s driving it is a tangle of economic pressure, digital habits, shifting social norms, and changes in how people form relationships in the first place.
What the Numbers Actually Show
The General Social Survey, one of the longest-running surveys of American behavior, tracked sexual frequency among adults from 1990 through the mid-2000s and found a relatively stable average of about 60 to 65 times per year, or roughly once a week. But more recent analyses have revealed a notable drop, particularly among younger adults and those who are single. Surveys in Europe and Japan have found similar patterns: fewer people having sex, and those who do having it less often.
This isn’t just about one country or culture. The consistency across wealthy nations suggests the causes are structural, tied to how modern life is organized rather than to any quirk of a particular society.
Smartphones and the Competition for Attention
One of the clearest shifts in daily life over the past 15 years is how much time people spend on their phones. Research on problematic smartphone use has found that people who are heavily engaged with their devices, particularly those who use them late at night or during social interactions, are more likely to choose screen time over physical intimacy with a partner.
This isn’t simply about phones being nearby. The pattern involves two distinct behaviors: intensive solo use (late-night scrolling, gaming, online shopping) and social-context use (checking phones during meals or conversations). Both are independently linked to reduced offline sexual activity. The mechanism is partly about time displacement: an hour spent on a phone in bed is an hour not spent connecting with a partner. But it’s also about attention. Constant digital stimulation fragments the kind of sustained, relaxed focus that intimacy requires.
Financial Stress Changes How Couples Connect
Money worries don’t just cause abstract stress. They reshape the dynamics of intimate relationships in specific, measurable ways. Research tracking couples over time has found that when spouses report financial distress, their overall relationship satisfaction drops, and that dissatisfaction spills directly into their sex lives.
The effects aren’t identical for men and women. When wives experience economic distress, they’re significantly more likely to reject their partner’s sexual advances, and their overall engagement with the relationship declines. For husbands, financial strain works more indirectly, lowering relationship satisfaction first, which then reduces sexual initiation by their partner and increases the likelihood of rejection in both directions.
Zoom out from individual couples and the picture gets bigger. Young adults today face housing costs, student debt, and delayed financial independence that would have been unfamiliar to their parents at the same age. Many are living with roommates or family members well into their late 20s and 30s, which limits privacy. Others are delaying committed relationships entirely because they don’t feel financially ready. All of these factors reduce the opportunities and the emotional bandwidth for a regular sex life.
Pornography’s Complicated Role
The relationship between pornography and partnered sex is more nuanced than most people assume, and it differs sharply by gender. A daily diary study tracking couples found that on days when women used pornography, they were more likely to have sex with their partner afterward, regardless of the partner’s gender. Their own sexual desire and their partner’s desire both increased.
For men in relationships with women, the pattern reversed. On days when men used pornography, they were less likely to have partnered sex, and their female partner reported lower sexual desire. For men in same-sex relationships, pornography use was associated with higher odds of partnered sex, mirroring the pattern seen in women.
What this suggests is that pornography doesn’t uniformly suppress partnered sex. For heterosexual men, though, it appears to function as a substitute rather than a supplement, at least on a day-to-day basis. Given that pornography access has expanded enormously over the past two decades, this substitution effect could be contributing meaningfully to the overall decline in sexual frequency, particularly among single heterosexual men.
More People Are Single, and for Longer
One of the simplest explanations is also one of the most powerful: fewer adults are in the kind of relationships where regular sex typically happens. Marriage rates have fallen, the average age of first marriage has risen, and a growing share of adults live alone. People in committed relationships have more sex than people who are casually dating or not dating at all, so any demographic shift toward singlehood will pull the population average down.
This connects back to the economic factors. When people delay financial independence, they delay cohabitation and partnership. When housing is expensive, couples are slower to move in together. The result is more years spent in the earlier, less sexually active stages of adult life.
Modern Life Leaves Less Room for Intimacy
Beyond any single factor, there’s a broader pattern: the texture of daily life has changed in ways that don’t favor physical intimacy. Extended working hours, long commutes, the blurring of work and home life through remote work and constant email access, the sheer volume of entertainment competing for evening hours. Researchers studying the decline have pointed to reduced leisure time and increased lifestyle stress as background conditions that make sex less likely on any given night.
Sleep patterns matter too. Adults are sleeping less than previous generations, and chronic sleep deprivation is one of the most reliable predictors of low sexual desire. When people finally get to bed, they’re often exhausted and reaching for a phone rather than a partner.
Declining Testosterone Is a Factor, but a Slow One
Starting around age 40, men’s testosterone levels drop by about 1 to 2 percent per year. This gradual decline reduces sex drive, energy, and arousal over time. Some research has suggested that population-level testosterone may also be declining independent of age, possibly due to environmental factors like endocrine-disrupting chemicals, rising obesity rates, and sedentary lifestyles. This wouldn’t explain the drop among young adults, but it could contribute to lower sexual frequency among middle-aged and older men.
Antidepressants and Sexual Side Effects
The most commonly prescribed antidepressants, SSRIs and SNRIs, are well known to reduce sexual desire, delay orgasm, and sometimes cause erectile dysfunction. These medications are now widely used across developed countries, with prescribing rates climbing steadily over the past two decades. While persistent sexual dysfunction after stopping treatment is thought to be rare, the side effects during treatment are common and likely underreported. For the tens of millions of people taking these medications at any given time, diminished sex drive is a real and often unspoken part of daily life.
The Connection to Falling Birth Rates
The decline in sexual frequency is happening alongside a dramatic drop in fertility rates worldwide. The global average fell from 5 births per woman in the 1960s to 3.3 in 1990 to 2.2 in 2024. Projections suggest it could fall below the replacement level of 2.1 within the next 75 years. Less sex is only one piece of this puzzle, since contraception, delayed parenthood, and deliberate family planning play larger roles. But researchers have identified a “fertility gap” where couples consistently have fewer children than they originally intended, driven partly by socioeconomic barriers and partly by age-related fertility decline that catches up with people who postponed starting a family.
The sex recession and the fertility decline share many of the same root causes: economic pressure, shifting priorities, the reorganization of young adulthood around education and career rather than early partnership. Neither trend shows signs of reversing on its own.