You may have heard of the “sex recession”. But there’s a “celibacy recession” too.
About a year ago headlines began to warn that, as an Atlantic cover story put it, “Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hook-up apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.” Millennials have less sex than their parents did at comparable ages, and the younger generation, sometimes called Gen Z, has even colder sheets than the millennials.
Careful observers, such as Charles Lehman writing for the Institute for Family Studies, parsed the data and concluded that we’re really looking at a marriage recession: “Today, there are fewer Americans married, and more Americans single, than at any point in at least the past 140 years … ost people who are married have sex – married men and women alike get at least a little.
