The data behind the trend

The sex recession: an honest look at what the data shows

By Matthew Firth, founder of NexSpark · Aug 23, 2026 · 8 min read

The sex recession is the long-running decline in how often American adults report having sex, and the rise in the share reporting none at all in the past year. It gets written about in waves, usually after a new survey lands, and usually with a headline number and a theory attached. We went and read the actual studies, including the one that concluded there is no recession, because a claim this widely repeated deserves better than a summary of a summary. What the research shows is narrower than the headlines, and it points somewhere other than where most of the coverage does.

What the numbers actually say

Start with the figure that gets quoted most. Analysis of the General Social Survey by Grant Bailey and Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies, published in August 2025, found that the share of Americans aged 18 to 64 reporting weekly sex fell from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024. That age band matters and is usually dropped when the number gets repeated. It's not all adults.

The stronger evidence is peer reviewed and more precise about where the change sits. Peter Ueda and colleagues, publishing in JAMA Network Open in 2020, tracked sexual inactivity using the same survey and found the increase concentrated sharply in young men.

What is causing the sex recession?

The most cited study on the question is the most direct about the answer. Jean Twenge, Ryne Sherman and Brooke Wells, writing in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2017, concluded that Americans were having sex less often due to two primary factors: an increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners.

Note that it is two factors, not one, and the researchers put partnership first. That framing survives in the later work. Ueda and colleagues found that the increase in inactivity among men aged 25 to 34 occurred mainly among unmarried people, which locates the change outside relationships rather than inside them. The Institute for Family Studies analysis found the share of 18 to 29 year olds living with a partner fell from 42% in 2014 to 32% in 2024.

None of that is a story about desire. It's a story about how many people are in a position to have a regular partner at all, which is a different problem, with a different fix.

Why the youngest adults are hit hardest

The generational pattern is the part of this that holds up best under scrutiny, and it comes from the study that is otherwise most skeptical of the whole idea.

Robert Bozick, writing in the American Journal of Men's Health in 2021, analyzed 29,108 American men aged 15 to 49 in the National Survey of Family Growth across 14 years. He separated period effects, meaning something about the era depressing everyone's activity at once, from cohort effects, meaning something specific to when you were born. He found that men born between 2000 and 2004 had significantly higher rates of sexual inactivity than earlier generations did at the same age.

The two strongest predictors he found are worth sitting with. Unemployed men were 13.4 percentage points more likely to be sexually inactive than employed men. Men living with their parents were 10.5 percentage points more likely than men living independently. Those aren't measures of libido or of confidence. They're the two most basic preconditions for meeting someone and having somewhere to take them.

The strongest predictors are a job and your own front door. That's a description of a partnership problem, not a bedroom one.

The case that there is no sex recession

Here's the part most coverage leaves out, and the reason this piece is titled the way it is.

Bozick's own headline conclusion is that the analysis finds no evidence of a population-wide sex recession among men. Rates of sexual inactivity across his 14 year series were, in his words, constant. The cohort effect is real, but the picture of a whole society steadily going quiet is not what the federal data shows once you separate the two effects properly.

He isn't alone. Nicholas Wolfinger, writing for the Institute for Family Studies in 2021, concluded there was insufficient evidence of a sustained trend toward increased celibacy over the previous decade. In 2023 he published a piece asking whether the sex recession was already over, after the 2022 General Social Survey showed sexlessness among 18 to 29 year olds dropping to 12% of women and 11% of men. That's the same organization whose 2025 analysis produced the 55% to 37% figure at the top of this article. An institution publishing against its own headline is a sign of an honest research process, and a warning about treating any single wave as the trend.

There is also a methodological problem that applies to every long comparison on this subject. NORC, which runs the General Social Survey, states plainly that changes observed in 2021, 2022 and 2024 relative to historical trends may be due to actual change in concept over time and/or may have resulted from methodological changes made to the survey methodology during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The survey moved from face to face interviews only to a mix of face to face, web and telephone. Any figure that runs from 1990 to 2024 crosses that break. That doesn't make the trend false. It does mean nobody should quote a two decimal place version of it.

Where our own argument gets complicated

If the explanation is that fewer people are partnered, then partnership rates should be falling. Mostly they are, among the young. But Pew Research Center reported in January 2025 that the share of American adults living without a romantic partner fell from 44% in 2019 to 42% in 2023, the first such decline in roughly two decades, and it happened across every age group. Pew attributes it mainly to falling divorce, not rising marriage.

That's a genuine complication and we'd rather print it than route around it. The honest reading is that the overall stock of partnered adults has stabilised while the entry point has not: 86% of adults aged 18 to 24 were still living without a partner in 2023. People who are already together are staying together. People who have not started are starting later, or not at all.

What has actually changed is how much people are around each other

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been measuring how Americans spend their days for two decades, and the trend there needs no interpretation. In 2025 Americans spent 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating, down from 41 minutes in 2015. The share who did any of it on an average day fell from 38% to 30%.

Work by Enghin Atalay at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found the share of free time spent alone rose from 43.5% in 2003 to 48.7% in 2019, before the pandemic pushed it higher, while time spent with people outside the home fell from 21.9% to 17.3% over the same period. A 2025 analysis in PLOS ONE by Siyun Peng and Shawn Bauldry, using the same time use data, found Americans spending roughly half an hour more per day alone in non-work activities in 2022 than in 2003.

Fewer hours in rooms with other people is upstream of almost everything else on this page. You can't meet someone you're never near.

What any of this suggests you do

We're a matchmaking company, so treat what follows with the skepticism it deserves. But the research points somewhere fairly unglamorous, and it isn't at the individual.

Almost every measured driver in the literature is structural. Employment. Housing. Whether you have somewhere to be that puts you near the same people more than once. Whether you are partnered. Not one of the significant predictors in Bozick's model is a personal quality you could fix by trying harder, and none of the peer reviewed work identifies falling desire as the mechanism. That should be a relief, if anything, because structures are easier to change than temperaments.

In practice that means the useful moves are the boring ones: repetition over novelty, the same room more than once, and, if you are dating, doing it somewhere the outcome is a plan rather than a maybe. We have written about the exhaustion that sets in when the apps become the whole strategy and about how most couples actually meet, which is still, stubbornly, through other people.

The same decade produced a parallel decline in friendship, measured with different data and reaching the same place. Our sister publication covers that side in its piece on the friendship recession. Read together, the two look less like separate crises and more like one shortage of unstructured time around other people, showing up in two different parts of life.

Common questions

Sources

• Jean M. Twenge, Ryne A. Sherman & Brooke E. Wells, Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989–2014, Archives of Sexual Behavior 46(8), 2017.
• Peter Ueda, Catherine H. Mercer, Cyrus Ghaznavi & Debby Herbenick, Trends in Frequency of Sexual Activity and Number of Sexual Partners Among Adults Aged 18 to 44 Years in the US, 2000–2018, JAMA Network Open 3(6), 2020.
• Robert Bozick, Is There Really a Sex Recession? Period and Cohort Effects on Sexual Inactivity Among American Men, 2006–2019, American Journal of Men's Health 15(6), 2021.
• Grant Bailey & W. Bradford Wilcox, The Sex Recession: The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping, Institute for Family Studies, 30 August 2025.
• Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Is the Sex Recession Over?, Institute for Family Studies, 23 May 2023.
• Risa Gelles-Watnick, 5 facts about single Americans, Pew Research Center, 8 February 2023.
• Richard Fry, Share of U.S. adults living without a romantic partner has ticked down in recent years, Pew Research Center, 8 January 2025.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, 2025 Results, released 25 June 2026.
• Enghin Atalay, How Time Spent Alone in the U.S. Has Changed Over the Past Two Decades, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, April 2022.
• Siyun Peng & Shawn Bauldry, In-person social isolation in the age of smartphones, PLOS ONE, 2025.
• NORC at the University of Chicago, General Social Survey, including its published guidance on 2021 onward methodology changes.

Figures are rounded as published. See each source for full methodology. Journalists and writers are welcome to cite this page and its chart, just link back so others can find the sources too.