On March 29th 2019, Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post reported on the latest 2018 data from the US General Social Survey.
It shows a steady increase in the percentage of Americans who have had no sex in the previous year. Less than 20% had had no sex in the previous year in 2008. This rose slightly to 23% in 2018. This includes an alarming increase in the percentage of young Americans, aged 18 to 29, who didn’t have sex in the previous year. 9% of young Americans in 2008 did not have sex in the previous year compared to 23% in 2018. Broken down by sex, 10% of men, aged 18 to 29, didn’t have sex in the previous year in 2008. This skyrocketed to 28% in 2018. For women, aged 18 to 29, 8% didn’t have sex in the previous year in 2008. This rose to 18% in 2018.
Are policy-makers and legislators going to continue to ignore this clear evidence of an aversion to sex by young women, and especially, young men?
Studies show that more marriage is correlated with more sex.
A study by Jean Twenge, Jean M. Ryne Sherman and Brooke Wells, published in 2017, found that the average adult in the 2010s has sex about 9 fewer times a year than he or she would have had in the late 1990s. About two-thirds of this decline reflects the decreasing likelihood of being married.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-has-married-sex-declined
Charles Fain Leyman, a writer for the Washington Free Beacon argues that “married people have sex more often on average than unmarried people.”
https://ifstudies.org/blog/sex-recession-blame-marriage-stagnation
He continues: “Television’s depiction notwithstanding, the single life is filled with barriers to sex. Ceteris paribus, any two single people potentially interested in coitus have less reason to trust one another, have less ground for shared emotional intimacy, and less steady “access” to one another as compared to a married couple. For millennia, the great appeal of marriage to many has been that it generally provides consistent access to at least some sex.”
I would adapt his final sentence to argue that that has been the case for millions of years. This advantage of monogamous marriage remains in evidence today.
He refers to an analysis of General Social Survey data from 2010 to 2016 by the Institute for Family Studies that found that whereas only around 17% of married Americans never had sex or had it once or twice a year, the equivalent percentage for unmarried Americans was around 33%. For Americans, aged between 25 and 34, it was found that around 5% or less of married Americans never had sex or had it once or twice a year. The equivalent percentaqe for unmarried Americans was around 23%.
W Bradford Wilcox and Samuel Sturgeon similarly report on this finding that young married people have more sex than their unmarried counterparts: “From 2014 to 2016, 89 percent of young (18 to 30) marrieds had sex twice a month or more. Only 60 percent of their unmarried peers had this much sex. Moreover, 22 percent of unmarried young adults had no sex in the preceding 12 months from 2014 to 2016, compared with an infinitesimal 0.5 percent of young marrieds.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/08/why-young-americans-having-less-sex-216953
Other studies show that there is, at least, a correlation between more sex and more happiness.
A couple of surveys from China and the United States have found a correlation between sex and happiness. They also find that the happiness-maximising number of sexual partners is one.
Blanchflower and Osmond (2004) had a sample size of 16,000 American adults.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~blnchflr/papers/02_sjoe002.pdf
Cheng and Smyth (2015) had a sample size of 3,800 Chinese adults
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265126388_Sex_and_Happiness
The Cheng and Smyth study goes further than Blanchflower and Osmond by claiming that more sex causes more happiness. Cheng and Smyth also “identify important gender differences between men and women. For men, there is a stronger relationship than for women, between the frequency, and physical aspects, of sexual intercourse and happiness. For women, there is a stronger relationship than for men between giving, and receiving, affection to/from their primary sexual partner and happiness.”
Another study by Muise, Impett and Schimmack, published in 2015, found that more sex, at least up to once per week, is correlated with more happiness.
So sex is, at the very least, correlated with happiness and monogamous marriage has historically been the primary means for providing sex.
The evidence is clear: More monogamous marriage leads to more sex which leads to more happiness.
The western world, in particular, needs to address the marriage crisis. Fewer and fewer people are entering into matrimony. The marriage rate in the United States, for example, has never been lower today than since records began – less for 7 per 1000 people every year since 2009. This trend is replicated throughout the western world. To address this, I propose that that we transform the cultural institution of marriage into a legal one.