Weekly sexual activity among American adults ages 18 to 64 dropped from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024, according to General Social Survey data analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies. Young adults have driven the steepest part of that slide: the share of 18-to-29-year-olds reporting no sex at all in the past year doubled, from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2024. That’s the generation that grew up narrating its relationships in real time on social media, normalized therapy-speak about boundaries and consent, and talks about sex more openly than any cohort before it. It is also, by the numbers, having less of it than any generation on record.
The IFS analysis, published in August 2025 by researchers Michael Bailey and Brad Wilcox, doesn’t point to one cause. It points to a slow collapse of the everyday conditions sex has always depended on — and those conditions have eroded for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with attitudes about sex itself.
The Cohabitation Math
Sex researchers have long known that living with a partner is one of the strongest predictors of how often people have sex — proximity and shared space matter as much as desire does. That’s exactly the piece that’s shrunk. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, the share living with a romantic partner fell from 42% to 32% between 2014 and 2024, per the same IFS data. Fewer young adults are moving in together, largely because fewer are forming stable, long-term relationships early enough to make that step make sense — a downstream effect of delayed marriage, tighter housing costs, and a dating culture increasingly organized around apps rather than shared social circles.
The Hours Disappeared First
Before the sex numbers fell, the social-time numbers fell. IFS researchers point to a steep drop in how much unstructured time young adults spend with other people: average weekly social time among young adults fell from 12.8 hours in 2010 to 6.5 hours by 2019, and to just over 5 hours by 2024. That decline predates and outpaces the drop in partnered sex, which suggests it’s not simply that Gen Z decided sex mattered less. It’s that the raw social contact required to meet someone, date them, and build the kind of relationship where cohabitation and sex happen naturally has been quietly rationed away, absorbed by phones, streaming, gaming, and remote everything.
Bailey and Wilcox’s analysis names several contributors layered on top of that: declining rates of partnership and marriage overall, reduced early-career earnings that make independent households harder to afford, rising time spent gaming, falling alcohol consumption (itself often a social lubricant in dating contexts), and what they describe as a post-2010 “Great Rewiring” driven by smartphone use — including the specific, almost mundane habit of scrolling in bed instead of connecting with a partner physically present in the room.
Openness Isn’t the Same as Opportunity
None of this contradicts the idea that Gen Z talks about sex and relationships candidly. If anything, it clarifies what that openness is actually about. A generation fluent in the language of consent, attachment styles, and relationship boundaries isn’t necessarily a generation with more chances to put any of that into practice. Talking about sex has become lower-friction — it happens in group chats, on TikTok, in therapy-adjacent content that treats relationship literacy as a skill worth discussing openly. Having sex still requires the much older, much less digitizable ingredients: a partner, unstructured time together, and often a shared living space, all three of which have become measurably scarcer for people under 30 over the past decade and a half.
The married-adults data in the same IFS analysis reinforces the pattern rather than complicating it. Weekly sex among married couples also declined, from 59% in the 1996-2008 period to 49% between 2010 and 2024 — smaller than the drop among young singles, but moving in the same direction, alongside the same rise in smartphone use inside households. The throughline isn’t generational values. It’s that the infrastructure of intimacy — time, proximity, undistracted attention — has been shrinking for everyone, and young adults without an existing partner or shared home have the least of it to spare.
It Starts Even Earlier Than the Cohabitation Numbers Suggest
A separate data point, reported by Newsweek in September 2025, adds another layer: a 2022 survey from the Kinsey Institute, conducted with Lovehoney, found that one in four Gen Z adults said they had never had partnered sex at all — with a meaningful gender split, roughly one in three men versus one in five women. That’s not a story about people who used to have active sex lives and now don’t; for a notable share of the generation, the pattern is establishing itself before any relationship, cohabitation, or long-term partnership ever gets the chance to form. Combined with the IFS cohabitation and social-time figures, it points to a bottleneck earlier in the pipeline than most conversations about the “sex recession” acknowledge — not just fewer people staying intimate within relationships, but fewer relationships getting far enough to test that question in the first place.
