Income and money are strongly related to happiness up to a certain point. Similarly, there’s a linear association between sex and happiness up to a frequency of once a week. Recently, a new study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that Americans are having less sex than 20 years ago. Ars Technica reported:
American adults reported having nine fewer romps a year in the early 2010s than they did in the late 1990s—dropping from an average of about 62 times a year between 1995 and 2000 to around 53 a year between 2010 and 2014. Researchers saw declines across ages, races, religions, education levels, employment statuses, and regions. They linked the sagging numbers to two trends: an increase in singletons over that period—who tend to have less sex than married or partnered people—plus a slow-down in the sex lives of married and coupled people. But the drivers of those trends are still unclear.
The study is based on data from a long-standing national survey called the General Social Survey (GSS). It involves a nationally representative sample of Americans over 18 years old, surveyed most years between 1972 and 2014. The new study involved responses from 26,620 Americans.
Specifically, researchers found that married people’s annual whoopee frequency dropped from an average of nearly 69 in the 1995-2000 period to just below 56 in the 2010-2014 period. The unmarried saw their lovemaking drop from 54 per year to 51 in the same timeframes. Meanwhile, the number of people without steady partners—married or otherwise—rose from 26 percent of survey respondents in 2006 to 33 percent in 2014.
People who took the biggest hits in the bedroom since the 1990s were those with a college degree (about 15 fewer times a year) and people living in the South (about 13 fewer times a year).