Popular Culture Still Insists Americans Are Having More Sex Than Any Generation in History, but Shocking New Federal Data Shows It Has Actually Collapsed by Nearly Half Since 1990

Pop culture keeps selling the same story: dating apps, hookup culture, a sexual free-for-all beamed nightly through prestige television and pop songs. The lived reality, according to the longest-running survey of American sexual behavior, looks nothing like it. The General Social Survey (GSS), fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago since 1972, found that 55% of adults ages 18 to 64 reported having sex at least once a week in 1990. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 37%, according to an analysis of the same dataset published by the Institute for Family Studies. Something close to a third of the people who once treated weekly sex as routine no longer do, and the slide hasn’t leveled off.

What the Federal Data Actually Shows

The GSS has asked Americans the identical question about sexual frequency for more than five decades, which is part of what makes this trend line hard to wave off as a fluke of one survey year. Researchers Grant Bailey and Brad Wilcox’s analysis for the Institute for Family Studies traces the descent in detail: the share reporting weekly sex held near half through the 1990s, slipped below 50% around 2010, and kept sliding through the pandemic years and into the current decade. The decline isn’t confined to one subgroup, either. Married adults ages 18 to 64 report weekly sex at a rate of 46%, compared with roughly 34% among the unmarried, and that gap has narrowed mostly because fewer adults are marrying at all, not because unmarried sex has picked up the slack. Even inside marriage, the erosion shows up over time. Fifty-nine percent of married adults reported sex once a week or more between 1996 and 2008, versus 49% from 2010 through 2024.

A retreat of that size, across married and unmarried adults alike, points to something structural rather than a single generation’s preferences shifting.

Marriage, Cohabitation, and the Missing Middle

Part of the decline traces back to a shift that gets less attention than the headline number: fewer young adults are living with a partner in the first place. The same Institute for Family Studies analysis found that 42% of adults ages 18 to 29 lived with a spouse or unmarried partner in 2014. Ten years later, in 2024, that had dropped to 32%. Cohabitation, married or not, has historically been the setting where regular sex happens by default — a shared bed, a shared kitchen, a shared Tuesday night. When fewer young adults reach that stage of a relationship, or reach it later than their parents did, the population-wide average moves with them, regardless of what any individual couple chooses to do once they’re actually living together.

You don’t need a survey to sense the mechanism here. Sex frequency has always tracked opportunity as much as desire, and cohabitation is the single biggest driver of daily opportunity that a relationship offers.

A Generation Opting Out Earlier

The sharpest edge of the trend sits with the youngest adults surveyed. Around 2010, roughly 12% of Americans ages 18 to 29 reported having had no sex at all in the previous year. By 2024, that figure had roughly doubled to 24%, meaning close to one in four young adults isn’t just having sex less often — they’re not having it in a given year at all. That’s a different phenomenon from married couples easing off a weekly routine. It points to fewer young people forming the kind of relationship, casual or committed, in which sex happens with any regularity in the first place, a pattern that lines up with later marriage and a dating landscape that has moved almost entirely onto apps.

Less Time Together, Period

The sexual numbers sit inside a wider retreat from in-person connection that federal data has been tracking independently. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey found that Americans spent an average of 35 minutes a day actively socializing and communicating with other people in 2024, down from 43 minutes in 2014. The share of people who did any socializing at all on a given day fell over the same decade, from 38% to 30%. It measures friendship and family time as much as romance, but it captures the raw material every relationship draws on: unstructured hours spent physically near another person, with nowhere else to be.

Spread across an entire population, less of that raw material shows up gradually rather than all at once, as a line on a chart that keeps drifting down, year after year, for over three decades.

What the General Social Survey has been tracking since long before anyone called it a recession is simpler than a culture war. The daily, unscheduled hours two people used to spend within reach of each other have shrunk, and weekly sex shrank right along with them.