Nearly one in four American adults reported having no sex at all in the past year as of 2018, a record high according to an analysis of General Social Survey data. Among married couples specifically, the share reporting weekly sex fell from 59 percent in the late 1990s and 2000s to 49 percent between 2010 and 2024. Researchers and relationship writers have circled a figure of roughly 15 to 20 percent of marriages qualifying as sexless by the common clinical definition — ten or fewer sexual encounters in the past year. Tabloids treat sexlessness as a punchline or a scandal reserved for a handful of unlucky couples. The data says otherwise: it’s closer to a shared, quiet reality across a meaningful share of long-term marriages.
What the General Social Survey actually shows
The General Social Survey, run out of the University of Chicago’s NORC since 1972, is one of the longest-running datasets on American social behavior, and sex frequency is one of the questions it has tracked consistently for decades. An analysis reported by Fox News found that 23 percent of adults said they hadn’t had sex in the prior year as of 2018, driven heavily by a jump among men under 30, whose rate of sexlessness nearly tripled to 28 percent since 2008. Women 18 to 30 saw an 8 percent increase over the same period, reaching 18 percent. San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, whose research is frequently cited on this data, has pointed to a mix of causes: more young adults living without a partner, more young men living with their parents, and the sheer amount of competing entertainment now available at home.
Married couples aren’t immune to the broader decline, even though they still have sex more often than unmarried adults on average. A more recent analysis from the Institute for Family Studies, also built on General Social Survey data, found that weekly sexual activity among married adults ages 18 to 64 fell from 59 percent during 1996–2008 to 49 percent during 2010–2024. Weekly sex among married people still outpaces unmarried people — 46 percent versus 34 percent — but the trendline for marriage itself is pointed downward, not flat.
A separate study on happiness and sexlessness
A peer-reviewed analysis of General Social Survey data, cataloged by the National Institutes of Health, examined the sociodemographic patterns behind sexlessness among American adults and how it correlates with self-reported happiness. Related research out of Indiana University, led by public health researcher Debby Herbenick and covered by Indiana University’s own newsroom, drew on General Social Survey data spanning 2000 to 2018 and found sexual inactivity climbing fastest among young men — from 19 percent to 31 percent among men ages 18 to 24 over that period. The research links lower income, part-time or no employment, and student status to higher odds of sexual inactivity, patterns that complicate the assumption that sexlessness is purely a marital or attraction problem rather than an economic and lifestyle one.
Why the shame outlasts the reality
The gap between how common sexless marriages are and how rarely people admit to being in one comes down to stigma more than statistics. A marriage without regular sex still gets coded culturally as a failing marriage, something to be fixed or hidden, even though researchers who study long-term relationships routinely find couples who describe themselves as happy, connected, and sexless all at once. What the data actually measures is frequency, not satisfaction, and those two things track together far less closely than pop culture assumes.
None of this is an argument that sex doesn’t matter in marriage — the same research ties regular sexual activity to better self-reported health and relationship quality on average. It’s an argument that the couples living through a sexless stretch are far less alone than the silence around the topic would suggest, and that the numbers are large enough to stop treating it as an outlier problem.
Part of what keeps the stigma alive is that “sexless” gets used as a single label for very different situations — a newlywed couple going through a rough medical year looks nothing like a marriage that quietly settled into companionship after three decades, yet the survey data lumps both under the same twelve-month window. Longer-married couples are also more likely to fall into a sexless stretch simply because they’ve had more years for illness, caregiving, job loss, or grief to interrupt a pattern, not because the relationship itself has failed. Treating the General Social Survey numbers as a portrait of broken marriages misses that nuance almost entirely, and it’s the nuance that would actually help the couples living inside those numbers feel less like an exception.
