The “Sex Recession”: Are People Really Having Less Sex, and What Does That Mean for You?

The “Sex Recession”: Are People Really Having Less Sex, and What Does That Mean for You?

If you have noticed that sex feels less frequent than it used to, or less present than you imagine it should be, you may have wondered whether something is wrong with you or your relationship. The honest answer from the data is: probably not. Because if the research is accurate, you are in very large company.

The term “sex recession” has been circulating in journalism and public health conversations for several years, and in 2025 it received a significant new round of attention following the release of data from the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running and most rigorous sociological datasets in the United States. What it showed was striking, and worth understanding carefully before drawing conclusions about what it means for you personally.

What the Data Actually Shows

According to the 2024 General Social Survey by the Institute for Family Studies, 55% of U.S. adults aged 18 to 64 reported having sex weekly in 1990. By 2010 that figure had fallen below 50%. By 2024 it had dropped to just 37%. That is nearly a 20-point decline over a single generation.

The decline is not evenly distributed. Young adults have been most affected. Among adults aged 18 to 29, approximately 24% reported having no sex in the past year as of 2024, a figure that has doubled since 2010. The share of young adults living with a partner, whether married or cohabiting, fell from 42% in 2014 to 32% in 2024, which researchers point to as a primary structural driver of the decline. Less cohabitation means fewer people with a readily available sexual partner, and partnered status is one of the strongest predictors of sexual frequency.

Even among married couples, the trend is present. Between 1996 and 2008, 59% of married adults aged 18 to 64 reported weekly sex. From 2010 to 2024, that figure fell to 49%. The sex recession is not solely a story about single people or young adults. It is a broader shift in the landscape of sexual activity across American life.

What Is Driving the Decline?

Researchers have proposed several overlapping explanations for why sexual frequency has fallen across the population. No single cause accounts for all of it, and the drivers appear to interact with one another:

•  Delayed and declining partnering. As noted above, cohabitation rates among young adults have fallen significantly. Fewer people living with partners means fewer people in the primary context where sexual frequency is highest. Later marriage, more years of being single, and greater acceptance of solo living all contribute.

•  Digital displacement of social time. Average weekly social time with others fell from 12.8 hours in 2010 to 6.5 hours by 2019, and dropped further to approximately 5 hours by 2024. Researchers have pointed to the role of screens, social media, and streaming in displacing the evening hours once spent with partners. The pattern follows closely on the widespread adoption of smartphones after 2010.

•  Rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Mental health difficulties, which have increased substantially among younger generations, have well-documented effects on sexual desire, relationship formation, and the motivation to seek intimacy. The increase in sexlessness among young adults tracks closely with the rise in reported mental health symptoms in the same population and period.

•  Economic and housing pressures. Financial stress, extended periods of education and training, and housing costs that make independent living more difficult all affect relationship formation timelines, which in turn affect sexual frequency.

•  Post-pandemic social erosion. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated trends in social withdrawal and digital substitution for in-person contact that were already underway. Social and relational recovery has been slow and uneven.

The More Important Question: Does Frequency Actually Matter?

Here is where the cultural conversation about the sex recession tends to go off the rails, and where a clinical perspective is most useful. The framing of a “recession” implies that more is better and that less is a deficit to be corrected. The research does not fully support that framing.

A widely cited study by Muise, Schimmack, and Impett, drawing on data from over 30,000 participants across three studies, found sexual frequency is associated with wellbeing up to approximately once per week, but that beyond that threshold, additional frequency produced no significant additional benefit. The study found a curvilinear rather than a linear relationship suggesting wellbeing benefits from going from no sex to some sex, but not from going from some sex to a lot of sex. And critically, for people not in relationships, sexual frequency had no significant association with wellbeing at all. The benefits tracked almost entirely with relationship context.

Perhaps more important is what the research says about sexual quality versus sexual quantity. A 2023 longitudinal study tracking over 2,100 couples found sexual satisfaction predicted future increases in both relationship satisfaction and sexual frequency, but that relationship satisfaction did not predict future changes in sexual satisfaction. In other words, satisfaction drives frequency more reliably than frequency drives satisfaction. A couple having less sex but experiencing that sex as meaningful and connected will likely fare better over time than a couple having frequent but disconnected sex.

The question worth asking about your own relationship is not whether you are having as much sex as you used to, or as much as some implied cultural norm. It is whether the sexual connection you do have feels satisfying, intimate, and mutually desired. If the answer is yes, a lower frequency may simply reflect your life stage, your shared demands, and your priorities, none of which require clinical intervention.

When Lower Frequency Is Worth Paying Attention To

That said, there are circumstances where declining sexual frequency is a meaningful signal rather than a neutral trend, and it is worth distinguishing between them.

•  When the decline is accompanied by distress. If one or both partners are unhappy about the change in frequency, or if lower frequency is generating conflict, resentment, or distance, that is a clinical concern worth addressing. Frequency itself is not the problem; the distress around it is.

•  When desire has changed without explanation. A shift in sexual interest that feels sudden, unexplained, or disproportionate to life circumstances may warrant a medical evaluation to rule out hormonal or other physical contributors, as well as a conversation with a sex therapist about psychological or relational factors.

•  When avoidance has replaced desire. There is an important difference between two people who are satisfied with a less frequent but connected sexual relationship, and two people who have stopped initiating because intimacy has come to feel uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, or too laden with history. The latter is avoidance, and it typically reflects something that benefits from professional attention.

•  When desire discrepancy is causing real strain. If one partner wants significantly more sex than the other, and attempts to navigate this are generating hurt, withdrawal, or persistent frustration, couples therapy and sex therapy can help both partners understand the underlying dynamics and find a path that works for both of them.

What This Means If You Are Navigating It Personally

The sex recession is a population-level trend, not a verdict on any individual couple or person. Reading the data through the lens of your own relationship requires holding two things at once: the knowledge that declining frequency is normal and widespread, and the clinical awareness that when declining frequency is accompanied by distress, avoidance, shame, or relational damage, it is something that can be understood and addressed.

If you are single and the data resonates with your experience of loneliness or disconnection, that is worth taking seriously as a wellbeing concern, not simply a sexual one. The research on social isolation, loneliness, and mental health is clear that connection is a fundamental human need, and that its absence has real consequences for physical and psychological health across the lifespan.

If you are in a relationship and have noticed a decline that bothers you or your partner, the most useful frame is not frequency but meaning: what does sex represent in your relationship? What has changed around it? And, what would a connected sexual relationship actually look and feel like for both of you? Those are some questions a sex therapist is specifically trained to help couples explore.

You Are Not Behind, But You May Need Support

The sex recession is real, it is broadly documented, and it reflects structural changes in how people live, partner, and spend their time. But it does not tell you what is right for your relationship, and it does not mean that declining frequency is inevitable or irreversible. Sexual wellbeing is not a fixed trait. It is something that can be tended to, understood, and restored with the right support.

At Embrace Sexual Wellness, our Chicago-based sex therapists work with individuals and couples navigating every dimension of sexual wellbeing, including those who are simply trying to understand what has changed and what, if anything, to do about it. We bring clinical expertise, current research literacy, and genuine warmth to every conversation.

If something has shifted in your sexual life and you are trying to make sense of it, we invite you to schedule a free 10-minute phone consultation. You do not need to be in crisis to benefit from a thoughtful conversation with someone who knows this territory.

What Is Emotional Intimacy and How Do You Build It With Your Partner?

What Is Emotional Intimacy and How Do You Build It With Your Partner?

Many couples can identify when something has shifted, even if they cannot name exactly what it is. You share a home, a calendar, perhaps children or finances or years of history. But somewhere in the daily logistics, the feeling of being truly known by your partner has grown faint. Conversations stay on the surface. Physical closeness happens less, or feels disconnected when it does. You are together and yet somehow alone.

What most couples are describing, whether they use this language or not, is a decline in emotional intimacy. It is one of the most common presenting concerns in couples therapy, and one of the most important to understand, because emotional intimacy is not simply a feeling. It is a process, and like any process, it can be learned, practiced, and rebuilt.

What Emotional Intimacy Actually Is

Emotional intimacy is not the same as love, commitment, or closeness in a general sense. Those things can exist without it. Research gives us a more specific definition to work with. The Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy, developed by Reis and Shaver and later tested by Laurenceau and colleagues using daily diaries with real couples, is one of the most replicated frameworks in relationship science.

In this model, emotional intimacy is defined as an interpersonal process with two essential components: self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness. In an older study, both self-disclosure and partner disclosure significantly and uniquely predicted feelings of intimacy on a day-to-day basis. Crucially, the research found that emotional self-disclosure, sharing one’s inner feelings rather than factual information, was a more powerful predictor of intimacy than disclosing facts about oneself.

What this means practically is that emotional intimacy is built in moments of genuine emotional sharing met with genuine emotional responsiveness. It is not built through time spent together, through shared activities alone, or through knowing someone’s history and preferences. It is built through the experience of revealing something real about your inner world and having your partner actually receive it.

A 2025 study on intimacy and sexual wellbeing in couples coping with sexual dysfunction confirmed this framework and added an important clinical observation: when other aspects of the relationship are under strain, emotional connection becomes increasingly vital as a compensatory mechanism, and its absence in those moments is felt more acutely. The couples who maintain emotional intimacy during difficulty are better equipped to navigate that difficulty together.

Why Emotional Intimacy Erodes

Emotional intimacy does not usually disappear in a single event. It erodes gradually, through patterns that become habitual before either partner notices how much ground has been lost.

The most common contributors include:

•  Chronic busyness and distraction. When daily life is primarily logistical, the conversations that build emotional intimacy, those that involve genuine self-disclosure and attentive responsiveness, simply do not happen often enough. Couples begin to function as co-managers rather than intimate partners.

•  Conflict avoidance. Many couples reduce emotional risk-taking to avoid arguments. This keeps things surface-level but at the cost of the kind of honest sharing that builds genuine closeness. Safety and depth both require a degree of vulnerability, and when vulnerability feels too risky, intimacy recedes.

•  Negative interaction cycles. Patterns like the pursuer-withdrawer dynamic, where one partner reaches for connection and the other pulls back, create conditions in which emotional sharing feels either unsafe or futile. Over time, both partners stop trying.

•  Unresolved ruptures. Betrayals, significant arguments, or periods of emotional unavailability leave residue. When these ruptures are not repaired with genuine acknowledgment and responsiveness, they accumulate as a barrier to future openness.

•  Life transitions. The arrival of children, career changes, health challenges, grief, and the ordinary passages of adult life all reshape the relational landscape. Couples who do not actively tend to their emotional connection during transitions often find themselves strangers to each other when the dust settles.

The Link Between Emotional and Sexual Intimacy

Emotional and sexual intimacy are distinct but deeply interconnected. Understanding how they interact is clinically important, particularly for couples who notice that changes in one seem to affect the other.

A 2014 study found emotional intimacy and sexual satisfaction were both significant predictors of relationship satisfaction, and that communication quality influenced both. The study also found that the relationship between emotional and sexual intimacy was bidirectional: each dimension of closeness supported and reinforced the other over time.

For many couples, particularly those in longer-term relationships, sexual desire is closely tied to the sense of feeling emotionally seen and known. When emotional intimacy declines, sexual desire often follows, not because the attraction has disappeared but because the conditions that support felt desire, safety, connection, genuine presence, have been depleted. Rebuilding emotional intimacy is frequently the necessary foundation for restoring sexual connection.

How to Build Emotional Intimacy: Evidence-Informed Practices

The research on emotional intimacy translates directly into practices that couples can begin incorporating. These are not superficial gestures. They are the specific behaviors that the science of intimacy identifies as the actual drivers of felt closeness.

•  Practice emotional self-disclosure deliberately. Share something about your inner experience rather than your day’s events. This does not require dramatic confessions. It means saying “I felt disappointed when that happened” rather than simply recounting what happened. Research consistently shows that emotional disclosure, not factual disclosure, is the stronger driver of felt intimacy.

•  Respond to disclosure with genuine responsiveness. When your partner shares something, the quality of your response matters more than almost anything else. Responsiveness means demonstrating understanding, validation, and care in the specific language of what your partner has shared. Turning away, minimizing, or problem-solving before listening are all forms of non-responsiveness that quietly erode intimacy over time.

•  Create protected time for non-logistical conversation. Many couples discover they have no regular space in their lives for conversations that are not about tasks, schedules, or children. Protecting even twenty minutes together with a genuine question and unhurried attention creates the conditions for emotional intimacy to occur.

•  Repair ruptures when they happen. Intimacy is not built primarily in the absence of conflict but in the presence of repair. When a disconnection occurs, taking the risk of naming it and attempting to restore connection, rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own, is one of the most powerful intimacy-building acts available to couples.

•  Ask better questions. Research on emotional intimacy consistently points to curiosity as a core driver of closeness. Questions that invite reflection rather than information, such as asking your partner what a difficult experience meant to them rather than what happened, open the door to the kind of emotional disclosure that actually builds intimacy.

•  Be present rather than performative. Intimacy cannot be manufactured through the right words delivered without genuine attention. Research on perceived partner responsiveness is clear: what matters to the disclosing partner is not just what was said but whether the response reflected that the partner was actually listening. Presence is the precondition for responsiveness.

When Building Intimacy Feels Out of Reach

For some couples, the practices above are difficult not because they lack goodwill but because the patterns that have developed over years make emotional risk-taking feel genuinely unsafe. This is where professional support makes a meaningful difference. A 2025 study found EFT produced significant improvements in both shame reduction and intimacy outcomes for couples, with gains across emotional, social, sexual, intellectual, and recreational dimensions of intimacy. EFT works precisely because it addresses the underlying attachment dynamics and interaction cycles that make emotional intimacy feel dangerous, not just the surface behaviors.

Couples therapy is not only for couples in crisis. It is for couples who have noticed a growing distance, who find themselves wanting more depth and not knowing how to create it, or who have tried the practical steps and found that something underneath keeps pulling them back into the same patterns. The presence of a skilled third party changes the conditions of the conversation in ways that are difficult to replicate on your own.

Connection Is a Skill, and It Can Be Learned

Emotional intimacy is not something you either have or you do not. It is something you build, through specific behaviors practiced consistently over time, and it is something you can rebuild, even after long periods of disconnection, with the right support.

At Embrace Sexual Wellness, our Chicago-based couples therapists work with partners at every stage of relational life, from couples navigating a slow drift to those working through significant ruptures. We use Emotionally Focused Therapy and other evidence-based approaches to help couples understand the patterns that are keeping them disconnected and create new experiences of felt safety and genuine closeness.

If you and your partner are ready to rebuild your connection, or if you simply want to understand what has shifted and how to address it, we invite you to schedule a free 10-minute phone consultation today.

Somatic Therapy for Sexual Trauma: What It Is and How It Works

Somatic Therapy for Sexual Trauma: What It Is and How It Works

You can know, intellectually, that the trauma is in the past. You can understand it, name it, have worked through it in talk therapy. And yet something in your body still responds. Sex feels unsafe even when your mind knows it is not. You go numb at a moment of closeness. You startle at a touch that should feel good. Your nervous system has not received the message that the threat is over.

This is not a failure of insight or willpower. It is how trauma works. And it is one of the central reasons that talk therapy alone, while valuable, is sometimes not sufficient for healing the ways sexual trauma has settled into the body and disrupted the body’s capacity for safety, pleasure, and connection.

Somatic therapy offers a different entry point: one that works with the body directly, rather than around it. Understanding what somatic therapy is, how it addresses trauma physiologically, and what the evidence says about its effectiveness can help survivors make informed decisions about their healing.

Why Trauma Lives in the Body

Trauma is not simply a memory. It is a physiological event that reshapes how the nervous system responds to perceived threat. When a person experiences something overwhelming, the body initiates survival responses: fight, flight, or freeze. In many cases of sexual trauma, the freeze response is dominant. The person becomes immobilized, unable to fight or flee, and the defensive response that was initiated in the body never completes.

According to the model underlying Somatic Experiencing, one of the most established body-based trauma therapies, this incomplete defensive response leaves the nervous system in a state of chronic activation or shutdown. A 2021 scoping literature review summarizing research on Somatic Experiencing found that post-traumatic stress symptoms are understood, within this framework, as a persistent overreaction of the innate stress system: the body remains primed for a threat that has passed, unable to return to a baseline state of regulation.

The impact on sexuality is both direct and significant. A 2023 study on trauma-focused treatment and sexual functioning found that sexual dysfunction is highly prevalent in individuals with PTSD, and that symptoms including reduced sexual desire, difficulty with arousal, dissociation during sex, and avoidance of intimacy frequently accompany trauma regardless of whether the original trauma was sexual in nature. The body’s threat response does not distinguish between contexts: if the nervous system is chronically activated, the conditions for sexual safety and pleasure are undermined across the board.

What Somatic Therapy Is (and What It Is Not)

“Somatic therapy” is an umbrella term for a range of therapeutic approaches that incorporate body awareness, physical sensation, and nervous system regulation as primary tools for healing, rather than treating the body as secondary to cognitive or verbal processing. The most researched modality within this category is Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine and grounded in neurobiological and ethological research on how animals complete and discharge survival responses after threat.

Other body-based approaches that fall under the broader somatic umbrella include sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and trauma-sensitive yoga, each with their own theoretical frameworks and evidence bases. When a clinician describes working somatically with trauma, it is worth asking specifically which modality or approach they are using, as these differ in meaningful ways.

What somatic approaches share is the premise that healing trauma requires engaging the body’s own regulatory processes, not just the thinking mind. This is sometimes described as a “bottom-up” approach, in contrast to the “top-down” approach of purely cognitive or verbal therapies. Both directions of processing are valuable; somatic work is most often used alongside, rather than instead of, other therapeutic approaches.

Somatic therapy does not involve sexual touch of any kind. Sessions take place in a fully clothed, professional setting, with the therapist using verbal guidance, attention to sensation and posture, gentle movement, breath work, and tracking of physiological states to facilitate nervous system regulation and trauma discharge.

How Somatic Therapy Addresses Sexual Trauma Specifically

Sexual trauma creates a particular challenge for healing because the body part associated with the trauma is also the body part associated with intimacy, pleasure, and connection. Survivors frequently experience a splitting: a learned disconnection from their own physical experience as a protective strategy, which can generalize from the original threat to all sexual contexts.

Somatic therapy approaches this through several mechanisms that operate below the level of conscious narrative:

•  Nervous system regulation. Before any trauma processing can occur, the nervous system needs enough stability and capacity to tolerate activating material without becoming overwhelmed. Somatic work begins by building this regulatory foundation, helping the client develop the ability to move between states of activation and calm without becoming flooded or shut down.

•  Titration and pendulation. Rather than flooding the client with traumatic material, somatic therapy works in small doses, approaching the edges of distress and then returning to a resource or a regulated state. This back-and-forth movement, called pendulation in Somatic Experiencing, gradually expands the client’s tolerance and begins to discharge stored survival energy without retraumatizing.

•  Completing interrupted defensive responses. A core principle of SE is that the freeze response leaves incomplete motor sequences in the body: impulses to fight or flee that were suppressed. In a safe, titrated way, somatic therapy creates conditions for these responses to complete, which can produce a profound sense of release and resolution.

•  Restoring interoception. Sexual trauma often disrupts interoception, the ability to sense and interpret one’s own internal bodily states. Somatic work gently rebuilds this capacity, helping survivors reconnect with their bodies as a source of information and eventually of pleasure, rather than only as a site of threat.

•  Addressing dissociation. Dissociation during sexual activity is common among trauma survivors and can be profoundly distressing. Somatic approaches work directly with the physiological patterns underlying dissociation, helping clients develop greater presence and continuity of experience in their bodies.

What the Research Shows

The evidence base for somatic approaches to trauma is growing, though it is important to characterize it accurately. The 2021 literature review found preliminary evidence for positive effects of somatic experiencing on PTSD-related symptoms, with gains also noted in emotional regulation and overall wellbeing. The review’s authors were appropriately cautious, however, noting that the evidence base includes methodological limitations: most studies had small samples, few were randomized controlled trials, and long-term follow-up data were limited.

A more recent 2025 meta-analysis found somatic therapy was congruent with many patients’ lived experiences and their beliefs about mental health and further research is needed to develop somatic based interventions for PTSD.

The honest summary of the evidence is this: somatic approaches to trauma show meaningful promise and are widely used in clinical practice with good clinical rationale, but the research base is younger and less standardized than that of more established approaches such as CBT or EMDR. For most survivors, somatic work is used as part of a broader integrative treatment plan rather than as the sole intervention, and this integrative approach is consistent with how the research community understands best practice.

Somatic Therapy in the Context of Sexual Wellness

When somatic approaches are incorporated into sex therapy or sexual wellness treatment for trauma survivors, the goal is not simply symptom reduction but restoration: restoring the client’s relationship with their own body, their capacity for presence during intimacy, and their access to pleasure and connection on their own terms.

This work may involve:

•  Mapping body-based responses to sexual contexts. Understanding which physical sensations, postures, or situations activate threat responses, and working gradually to expand the window of tolerance around those cues.

•  Rebuilding a sense of safety in the body. For many survivors, the body itself has come to feel like an unsafe place. Somatic work helps to rehabilitate this relationship, creating the physiological conditions that make pleasure accessible again.

•  Integrating cognitive and body-based approaches. Combining somatic work with the psychoeducation, cognitive restructuring, and relational repair that sex therapy also offers creates a more comprehensive pathway to healing than either approach can provide alone.

Progress in this work is not linear, and it often requires patience. But for many survivors, it is the approach that finally reaches the places that talking alone could not.

Healing Is Possible, and It Starts with the Right Support

Sexual trauma affects the body, the nervous system, the capacity for intimacy, and the sense of safety in one’s own skin. Healing it requires approaches that meet the body where it is, not just where the mind can reach.

At Embrace Sexual Wellness, our Chicago-based clinicians work with survivors of sexual trauma using trauma-informed, body-aware approaches that respect both the complexity of what you have experienced and the pace at which your nervous system can safely engage with healing. We integrate somatic principles with sex therapy and evidence-based psychological approaches to provide care that is both clinically grounded and genuinely responsive to you as a whole person.

If you are a survivor of sexual trauma and are ready to explore what healing can look like for you, we invite you to take the first step. Schedule a free 10-minute phone consultation today. You do not have to navigate this alone.