Moving past the teens and on to people 18 and older, adults are having less sex than they used to. Analyzing survey data collected from more than 26,000 people between 1989 and 2014, researchers found that the average person now has sex around nine fewer times per year than the average person in the early ’90s.
But not all groups followed the same sexual trajectory — the drop was especially pronounced for the people who were married or divorced, compared to people who had always been single.
In fact, according to one of several ways of looking at the data, singles are now having sex more often than married people are.
And then there are people that aren’t having sex at all. The idea that there are some people who just do not experience sexual attraction has a more prominent place in our cultural consciousness today, something for which the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), founded in 2001, gets much of the credit.
By 2017, there was enough research on asexuality, including large-scale studies, to justify a review article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Defying the early skepticism on the topic, authors Lori A. Brotto and Morag Yule concluded that asexuality is a unique sexual orientation, one that applies to up to 3 percent of adults, and not a sexual dysfunction or psychiatric disorder.
