If you live a busy, modern lifestyle, you will be aware that there just isn’t the time to do important things, like have sex and maintain the human race. There’s Facebook to check, emails to respond to, and that entire series of Breaking Bad – the one you’re pretending you’ve already seen – isn’t going to watch itself.
On Saturday, at the Hay festival, David Spiegelhalter, the Winton professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge university, was talking about his book Sex by Numbers. He highlighted figures from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyle, which show how average rates of sex have declined over the past 30 years: from five times (over a four-week period) in 1990, to four times in 2000 and three times in 2010. Spiegelhalter blamed technology. “I think it’s the box set, Netflix. ‘OMG, I’ve got to watch the entire second series of Game of Thrones.’ The point is that this massive connectivity, the constant checking of our phones, compared with just a few years ago when TV closed down at 10.30pm or whatever, and there was nothing else to do.”
It won’t be news to anyone who has ever been annoyed by their partner’s phone habit that tech devices are probably having a negative effect on relationships. In a small 2014 study of 143 heterosexual women in relationships, the majority reported that phones or tablets frequently interrupted time with their partner, such as mealtimes or conversations. Those who reported this most frequently were less satisfied with their relationship.
At the current rate of decline, “by 2030 couples are not going to be having any sex at all. Which is a very worrying trend,” said Spiegelhalter. But I wonder if 2030 might be optimistic. We anxiously await the next survey, seeing as, since 2010, the iPad was launched, Netflix has taken off and Candy Crush was invented. It’s a miracle anybody is still having any sex at all.
