The Great Sex Recession

When I sit with that reality, my mind goes to Sex and the City . Not nostalgically, exactly, but instructively. The show debuted in 1998 and spent six seasons refusing to look away from the full spectrum of female experience in romance. Perhaps that’s why it has generated more cultural commentary than almost anything else in the genre. It gave us four women who were, above all else, honest about what they wanted. You could live vicariously through each of them. Carrie was the romantic realist. Samantha was the unabashed sensualist. Miranda was the skeptic who kept getting ambushed by her own feelings. Charlotte believed, with almost religious fervor, that the right person was out there. Together they made a portrait of women who were messy and ambitious and reckless and idealistic, sometimes all at once. The whole enterprise of figuring out life and love as a single woman in a city felt like it could be adventurous, even when it was painful. That version of the story feels foreign now. We have not become less candid about our romantic lives; if anything, social media has made us almost compulsively confessional. What we have lost is the appetite underneath the candor. Carrie always ended her columns with a question. So I find myself asking one: Why is an entire generation opting out of intimacy? The Numbers Are Alarming The Institute for Family Studies, drawing on the General Social Survey, reports that Americans are having a record-low amount of sex. Between 1990 and 2024, the share of adults under 30 reporting regular sexual activity fell from 55% to 37%, a slide that began steepening around 2010 and has not reversed. Couples are not immune. A recent survey of 2,000 Americans in relationships found that 1 in 4 now have sex once a month or less. Over the same decade that sex declined, young adults became less likely to be partnered at all: Between 2014 and 2024 , the share of 18-to-29-year-olds living with a partner fell from 42% to 32%. Thirty-eight percent named fatigue as the primary barrier, above infidelity, pornography, work stress, or fading attraction. The reason couples gave for the decline, when surveyed, was exhaustion. Thirty-eight percent named fatigue as the primary barrier, above infidelity, pornography, work stress, or fading attraction. Not broken. Not estranged. Just too tired. Technology compounds all of this in ways we are only beginning to quantify. Research has found that iPhone diffusion alone accounts for 33 to 52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15 to 44, through a combination of reduced in-person socializing, increased pornography consumption, and lower sexual frequency. Hormonal birth control adds another layer; it suppresses testosterone production, which correspondingly suppresses libido. The conditions for desire have been, quietly and systematically, dismantled. The Samanthas Have Left the Building Women are stepping back from dating in disproportionate numbers. According to Mintel , 39% of single women are not dating at all, versus 25% of single men. Of the women who have opted out, 59% describe themselves as independent, a word that in this context functions less as a declaration of contentment and more as a kind of preemptive self-protection. For them, the cost-benefit analysis of modern romance has come up short. Dating apps are a significant part of why. They have gamified courtship in a way that is genuinely corrosive to the romantic imagination. The feedback loop of the swipe trains you to hold the person in front of you lightly, since a better option may be one swipe away. The result is that almost everyone in the pool is simultaneously a contender and a placeholder. I have been as guilty of this as anyone. My algorithm has also served me an education I did not ask for: The behavioral patterns that precede ghosting, the significance of the forehead kiss as a relationship death knell, every indie song ever written about the wreckage of a talking stage. What I have not found, anywhere in that content, is anything that actually helps. The Era of the Situationship The rise of the “situationship” deserves its own examination. More than a talking stage, less than dating, nominally casual. In practice, a situationship is a holding pattern, a Dantesque purgatory enabled by a mutual unwillingness to say what either person actually wants. Modern dating culture has generated an elaborate vocabulary for every gradation of non-commitment: wildflowering (letting a relationship unfold with no labels or expectations), ZIP coding (only dating within your zip code), monkey barring (maintaining overlap between relationships so you never lose your grip), banskying (keeping a relationship deliberately anonymous). Each term attempts to normalize the avoidance of one question that could resolve all of it: What do I want? Everyone wants something. When people begin dating, however casually they frame it, there is always some expectation underneath. Some people set the bar higher than others, but the longing itself is universal. Voluntary ambiguity does not make that longing disappear. It just leaves it unnamed and therefore unmet, which is its own kind of cruelty. Heteropessimism and the Sabrina Carpenter Problem There is a prevailing cultural mood among young women that writer Asa Seresin has named heteropessimism: a posture of weary irony toward heterosexual relationships, blending genuine frustration with something more performative. You can hear it everywhere. Sabrina Carpenter's “My Man on Willpower,” from her 2025 album “Man’s Best Friend,” is about the specific ache of being deprioritized by someone who is now working on himself. Carpenter described the album as “a real party for heartbreak, a celebration of disappointment.” Wry, knowing, self-deprecating—it resonated with millions of women because it named something true. Allan Bloom wrote in “Love and Friendship” that “the turn to science is connected with a longing to simplify and domesticate the raging and chaotic feelings within us.” The same logic drives the current obsession with attachment theory taxonomies, red flag checklists, and relationship content: It is an attempt to put a clinical frame around what is, at bottom, a terrifying vulnerability. Bloom noted, with characteristic dryness, that one no longer needs Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, because Freud can supply the comprehensive truth. We might update that: One no longer needs to feel, because the algorithm will explain the feeling. Two Kinds of Celibacy The word "celibacy" is doing a lot of work right now, and it covers two very different realities: the withdrawal from physical intimacy and the withdrawal from dating and emotional availability altogether. They often travel together, but not always, and the distinction matters more than the umbrella term. It is the withdrawal that comes not from a decision but from depletion. Intentional celibacy, chosen with clarity and purpose, is real and worth defending. There are documented psychological benefits to stepping back from dating: lower stress, greater self-knowledge, the space to process past wounds. A woman who has decided, with full intention, that she is not in a season for pursuing romance deserves nothing but respect. Knowing what you do not want is its own form of wisdom. The other kind is harder to name. It is the withdrawal that comes not from a decision but from depletion. It’s the celibacy of someone who has been through enough disappointing apps and enough ambiguous arrangements that hope has curdled into indifference. This kind gets dressed up in the language of independence and empowerment, and those are genuinely good things, so the camouflage often works. But depletion is not a choice. And pretending it is does not make it one. We Must Demand Hope Here is what I keep returning to: It was never actually casual. Not for anyone who was paying honest attention. Even in the most label-averse, situationship-saturated corner of modern dating, there is almost always someone who cares more than they are letting on. The terminology does not dissolve the feeling. It just makes the feeling harder to admit, and harder to act on. The most countercultural stance a woman can take right now, given the ambient irony and the algorithmic vortex and the general exhaustion, is to refuse to perform cynicism about what she wants. It’s to say plainly: I want a real relationship. I want real intimacy—the kind that requires consistency and the willingness to be known, not the holding-pattern variety. Carrie and Charlotte and Miranda and Samantha were imperfect, often chaotic, and frequently their own worst obstacles. But they wanted loudly. They said so. There was something worth preserving in that refusal to be sheepish about hope. We live in a culture increasingly convinced that hope is naive. The data, the apps, the accumulated lore of disappointment all seem to argue for lowered expectations. I find I cannot agree. In the face of every exhaustion-driven retreat and carefully worded non-commitment, wanting something real anyway is the most honest position available. It always was.