Everybody Is Talking About Sex

Why Aren’t We Having Any?

Something curious is happening to sex in the twenty-first century. We may be living in the most sexually articulate period in modern Western history, and yet there is mounting evidence that many people, and many couples in particular, are having less sex. We possess a vocabulary for sexuality that would have been unimaginable in our grandparents’ marriages. We speak openly about orgasm, desire

discrepancy, responsive desire, menopause, erectile function, pornography, fantasy, orientation, gender, non-monogamy, sexual trauma and erotic identity. There are podcasts devoted entirely to sex, Instagram accounts explaining how desire works, Substacks diagnosing the dead bedroom, therapists specializing in erotic disconnection, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of advice about how to want, initiate, communicate and perform better.

At the same time, population studies have documented a decline in sexual frequency among American adults over recent decades, including among married and cohabiting people. Reduced frequency could not be explained simply by the growing number of people living without partners; partnered people were having less sex as well.

This is not evidence of a civilization-wide erotic collapse. Nor does the number of times people have intercourse tell us very much, by itself, about the vitality of their relationships. A couple having sex once a month may have an extraordinarily alive erotic connection, while another having sex twice a week may be repeating a dutiful ritual neither particularly enjoys. Frequency is easy to count, which may be one reason we give it more significance than it deserves. Aliveness is considerably harder to measure.

Still, something has changed, and the change is substantial enough that “sexless marriage” has become its own cultural category. What interests me is less whether the term is technically accurate than the amount of anxiety it now contains. People are not simply asking how often other married couples have sex. They are asking what it means that they no longer want the person they love, why affection has become charged with expectation, why being sexually rejected feels disproportionately devastating, why desire appears easily in fantasy but not in the bedroom, or how two people who once could barely keep their hands off one another became companions who coordinate groceries, mortgages, dogs, children, aging parents and vacation schedules but rarely touch except in passing.

Contemporary sexology has offered a necessary corrective to the assumption that this automatically means something has gone wrong. Desire discrepancy is ordinary. There is no reason to expect two people to want precisely the same kind of sexual contact, at the same frequency, at the same moment, across decades of life together. The European Society for Sexual Medicine has explicitly cautioned against treating discrepant desire as though it were inherently pathological. Desire changes with age, health, medication, hormonal state, stress, relationship conditions, sexual context and individual history.

Even our familiar idea of “having desire” has required revision. Rosemary Basson’s work challenges the assumption that sexual desire must necessarily arrive before sexual engagement. In long-term relationships especially, desire can be responsive: interest and wanting may emerge after pleasurable contact has begun rather than appearing beforehand as a spontaneous appetite.

Emily Nagoski has helped popularize another useful distinction through the dual-control model: sexual response is shaped not only by what activates arousal but also by what inhibits it. Asking why someone is not stepping on the accelerator is of limited use when their nervous system has both feet on the brake.

This changes the question considerably. Instead of asking simply, “Why don’t you want sex?” we might ask, “What would make this particular body, with this history, in this relationship, under these conditions, interested in this sexual experience?”

The difference is not semantic. It relocates desire from a character trait to a context.

And context is crowded.

A woman who has spent the day carrying the executive functioning of a household may not experience her partner as erotically compelling when she also experiences him as another person whose life she must organize. Research examining heterosexual couples has found an association between unequal household labor and lower partner-directed desire among women, with perceived unfairness and the experience of the male partner as dependent helping to explain the relationship.

This shouldn't be reduced to the popular slogan that women are too tired for sex. Fatigue may be present, but something psychologically more interesting is also occurring, perhaps. It is difficult to move effortlessly between managing another adult and desiring that adult. The person one must remind to call the plumber at four o’clock may not automatically become an object of erotic fascination at ten.

There are many variations on this problem. Resentment can inhibit desire. So can chronic criticism, unresolved betrayal, painful intercourse, body shame, sexual boredom, medication, depression, illness, menopause, fear of pregnancy, pornography, performance anxiety or sex that has simply never been particularly pleasurable. The person described as having “low libido” may not have globally low desire at all. They may have low desire for the sexual experience currently available to them.

That is an important distinction, and in my opinon, contemporary sex educators have been right to insist upon it.

But there is another person in the room.

The suffering of the higher-desire partner is sometimes treated rather casually in the effort to dismantle sexual entitlement. The two should not be confused. No one is entitled to another person’s body. Yet repeated sexual refusal can carry meanings far beyond the loss of sexual release. For some people, being desired is deeply entangled with being chosen, valued, attractive or reachable. Sex may have become one of the principal ways in which that person recognizes the bond itself. When sexual contact disappears, what they experience may therefore be less “I am not getting enough sex” than “I can no longer find myself in your desire.”

This is where a difference in libido can become a relational system.

The partner who feels sexually abandoned reaches more insistently for reassurance through sexual contact. The partner who already experiences sex as pressure feels the increased pursuit as further evidence that affection carries an obligation. Desire recedes. The first partner experiences the retreat as confirmation that the relationship is disappearing and reaches harder. Eventually, even ordinary affection becomes colonized by the conflict. A kiss is no longer simply a kiss. One person is wondering whether it will become a request; the other is wondering whether this is the only opportunity they will have to be wanted.

At that point, neither person is responding exclusively to what is happening in the present moment. Sexuality has become a regulatory system through which each is attempting to manage vulnerability.

This is one reason I find much of the current public conversation about sex both useful and insufficient.

Almost every explanation contains part of the truth. Hormones matter. So do medications, sleep and aging. The quality of the sex matters. Inequity matters. Attachment matters. Novelty matters. Esther Perel has persuasively described the paradox of asking one person to provide both the security of home and the otherness on which erotic imagination often feeds. We want to know our partner completely and still somehow encounter them as mysterious. We want permanence without predictability, familiarity without boredom, safety without losing the distance across which desire can travel.

From my vantage point, there is a certain audacity in whati I might call the modern marital project.

We have asked one relationship to carry an extraordinary amount of human longing, and then we are surprised when the erotic component occasionally buckles under the weight.

Normalization therefore matters. There is no universal sexual frequency that distinguishes a healthy relationship from an unhealthy one. Some couples have little or no sex and experience no deprivation whatsoever. Others have relatively infrequent sex that remains playful, intimate and deeply satisfying. Still others are sexually active while feeling profoundly lonely.

But the corrective can itself become an evasion if “this is normal” becomes the end of the conversation.

Normal is a statement about prevalence. It tells us what commonly occurs. It tells us nothing about whether what commonly occurs is what two particular people desire for their lives.

Atherosclerosis is common. Loneliness is common. Estrangement between adult siblings is common. None of these facts tells us whether we should become curious about the conditions that produced them. Something can be statistically ordinary and still deserve our attention.

If two people genuinely prefer a partnership in which sexuality occupies very little space, there is no reason to manufacture a problem for them. But many people asking about sexless marriage are not asking whether their experience falls within the range of normal human behavior. They already know other couples live this way. What they are asking is more intimate and more difficult: What happened to the part of us that used to feel alive here?

That question interests me much more than how often married people should have sex.

It also suggests that we may be entering the inquiry too late.

Sexology understandably begins with sexuality: desire, arousal, orgasm, frequency, satisfaction, inhibition. But sexuality occurs inside a much larger human capacity that we rarely discuss except when we are trying to make something sound erotic. That capacity is sensuality.

Sensuality is not sexuality with better lighting.

It is the organism’s capacity to receive experience through the senses.

Long before I formulate the thought that I want you, my body is receiving information. I register temperature, scent, pressure, movement, proximity, rhythm and sound. My breathing changes. Muscles tighten or soften. Attention narrows or expands. I experience an impulse to approach, remain still or move away. Some of this information enters consciousness; much of it does not. What eventually becomes the sentence “I want you” is downstream from an enormous amount of bodily reception and interpretation.

Interoception research gives us a scientific language for part of this process. Interoception refers broadly to the nervous system’s sensing, interpreting and integrating of signals arising within the body. These signals contribute to emotion, motivation, homeostatic regulation and our subjective sense of ourselves as embodied beings. Sexual research has found relationships between interoceptive awareness and the degree to which subjective sexual arousal corresponds with physiological arousal.

The implications reach far beyond sex.

Before I can tell you what I want, I must be able to detect wanting in myself. Before I can establish a meaningful boundary, I must register the bodily information from which the boundary arises. Before I can surrender, I must be capable of distinguishing surrender from submission, openness from compliance, excitement from alarm. Before I can receive another person, I must possess some capacity to receive myself.

This contemplation makes the contemporary sexual predicament appear somewhat different.

We are living in a culture that has become extraordinarily sophisticated at representing the body while simultaneously making it remarkably easy not to inhabit one. We photograph bodies, improve bodies, compare bodies, diagnose bodies, quantify bodies, exercise bodies and watch other bodies performing sexuality on screens. Meanwhile, enormous portions of ordinary life take place in cognitive and technological environments requiring almost no sustained attention to sensation.

We wake to a screen. We work through a screen. We communicate through screens. We order food without smelling it, conduct relationships through text, exercise while watching television, walk while listening to podcasts and fall asleep beside illuminated rectangles delivering the rest of humanity into bed with us. We can spend an entire day asking the body to function efficiently while paying remarkably little attention to what it is experiencing.

Then we close the laptop, brush our teeth, climb into bed beside someone with whom we have discussed insurance premiums and the leaking dishwasher, and expect the organism to become sensually available on command.

It is almost comical when considered physiologically.

Perhaps the remarkable thing is not that desire sometimes fails to appear. Perhaps the remarkable thing is that we expect embodiment to operate like an application we can open when convenient.

Sex requires capacities that much of contemporary life does not particularly cultivate. It requires attention to sensation. It requires receptivity. It requires the ability to tolerate wanting and being wanted. It asks us, at least temporarily, to relinquish some executive control and allow experience to unfold before we know exactly where it is going. Even highly familiar sex contains an element of uncertainty because another living body is involved.

This does not mean that our screens have caused the sex recession, any more than unequal housework or menopause or responsive desire can explain it by themselves. Human sexuality is too complex for a single culprit, and every generation has found ways to be distracted, exhausted, ashamed, overworked and erotically confused.

But I think the decline in sex invites a larger inquiry than the current conversation usually permits.

What if some portion of what we call a problem of sexual desire is embedded in a broader diminishment of sensual life?

What if we have become increasingly comfortable thinking about the body while becoming less practiced at receiving through it?

And what if the disappearance of sexual contact between partners sometimes occurs downstream from a quieter disappearance; the gradual loss of curiosity about sensation, pleasure, bodily information and the felt presence of another human being?

This would not mean that every sexless relationship is secretly yearning to become sexual. It would mean that sexuality belongs to a larger ecology of embodiment, and we cannot fully understand what is happening in the bedroom while treating that ecology as irrelevant.

Additionally, there is an historical irony here worth examining. Over roughly the last century, Western culture has accomplished an extraordinary loosening of the constraints surrounding sexuality. Sex has become progressively less tethered to reproduction, religious obligation, rigid gender roles and marital duty. We have acquired freedoms for which previous generations fought very hard.

Yet during approximately the same historical period, everyday life has become increasingly abstracted from direct bodily experience.

We have become more sexually free while at the same time, perhaps, in some respects, less sensually inhabited.

That is not a conclusion, really. It is a personal observation and an evolving question.

And it is the line of inquiry I want to follow, because understanding what has happened to sex in the twenty-first century may require us to look backward before we look further into the bedroom. We need to understand how sex came to carry so much psychological meaning, how marriage came to carry so much erotic expectation, and how a culture that liberated sexuality also created conditions in which human beings could spend more and more of their lives at a distance from their own bodies.

Only then can we begin to ask whether what we are experiencing is merely a change in how often people have sex, or part of a much larger transformation in how human beings experience themselves, one another, and the sensual world.