This is one of many comments floating around the r/DeadBedrooms subreddit on the social-media platform Reddit – a self-described “discussion group for Redditors who are coping with a relationship that is seriously lacking in sexual intimacy”. Frustrated anecdotes like these abound from people who are in low- or zero-sex relationships. “Why does he prefer his own hand over having sex with me?” one poster asks. The subreddit’s outlook is relatively bleak: “Advice is always appreciated,” reads its description, “just don't be surprised if we've heard it all.”

While it may seem natural enough for these stories to come from older couples struggling to retain the spark they had decades earlier, many are posted by people who self-identify as being in their late 20s or 30s. Some say children or marriages put a halt to their sex lives; others say their “low-libido” husbands can watch endless pornography, yet won’t get aroused with them. The list of grievances continues from throngs of millennials posting about their ‘dead bedrooms.’

Although millennials are in or around their sexual prime, some members of this generation around the world have reportedly been “retreating from sex”. Accounts from millennials forums including r/DeadBedrooms corroborate this, especially for married and long-term couples.

Some recent statistics tell a similar story: a 2021 survey of adults ages 18 to 45 across the US, conducted by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and sex-retailer Lovehoney, showed that among married adults, millennials were the most likely to “report problems with sexual desire in the past year”. The survey showed that 25.8 percent of married millennials reported this problem, while only 10.5 percent of married Gen Z and 21.2 percent of married Gen X adults reported the same.

Although “low desire isn’t necessarily synonymous with being in a sexless marriage”, says Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, “when one or both partners in a marriage experience a drop-off in desire for sex, sexual frequency usually declines – and loss of desire is one of the biggest reasons why marriages become sexless in the first place.”

What, exactly, is going on? Sex therapists and researchers suggest a variety of factors that may explain millennials’ sexless marriages, from their current life stages to the almighty influence of the internet. Regardless of the specific reasons causing sexual fractures in the bedroom, overwhelmingly, this generation is facing some unique – even unprecedented – obstacles to healthy sex lives.

The Anatomy of a Sexless Marriage

There are multiple definitions of a sexless marriage. One is literal: the couple has not had any sex at all for a long period of time. Another widely used measure for a sexless marriage is having sex fewer than 10 times a year.

Experts who spoke with BBC Worklife also had varying ideas. New York City-based sex therapist Stephen Snyder says, “I usually think of ‘sexless’ as four times a year or less,” unless that couple is “having sex quarterly and they both say it's awesome”. Kimberly Anderson, sex therapist and assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA's School of Medicine, puts the rate of a ‘low-sex’ marriage at fewer than 25 times per year. Others say the definition is purely subjective; if a couple is unhappy with the frequency at which they’re having sex, there’s a problem worth addressing.

Many factors can lead to a sexless or low-sex marriage. If there’s a “desire discrepancy”, as California-based sex therapist Christene Lozano puts it, that imbalance can grow over time if the couple doesn’t do a good job of addressing it. The person who wants more sex and keeps initiating it might give up and lose self-esteem if they continue to get rejected, for instance. Meanwhile, the partner doing the rejecting might feel increasingly guilty, altogether creating even worse conditions for fostering arousal.

Other factors including medical or mental-health issues can also contribute, as these can make sex impossible, painful, difficult or undesirable. Busy lives, with work and/or children, can remove sex from the equation, too, as can poor communication about each partner’s desires.

Although these aspects contributing to sexless marriages aren’t particular to any generation, some experts have noticed a shift in who’s experiencing sexless relationships, and at what periods in their lives.

“It’s become a shorter amount of time in which [couples] become sexless,” believes San Francisco-based sex therapist Celeste Hirschman, who’s been seeing clients for about 20 years. Anecdotally, she used to see it take around 10 to 15 years for couples to stop having sex with each other. “Now, it’s maybe taking three to five,” she says.

Anderson, who’s been working as a sex therapist for 30 years, says the demographics of sexless marriages have indeed changed since she started practicing. “Thirty years ago, a majority of the couples I treated for sexless marriage were 50-plus,” she says, struggling with decreased libido from the hormonal changes and illnesses that come with aging.

Today, however, most of the couples in sexless marriages that Anderson sees are 45 and younger. “The underlying dynamics are quite different than they were/are with older couples,” she says.

The Weight of Stress

Too much stress can get in the way of anyone’s sex life – and millennials are especially riddled with cortisol. “Stress is one of the biggest libido killers,” says Lehmiller, “and millennials are a particularly stressed group in many ways, especially compared to Gen X.”

Major life stages are one factor. Many millennials are at the age at which they’re becoming new parents or have young children, an overwhelming time in people’s lives. In a 2018 study from UK-based counselling network Relate, 61 percent of people in their 30s reported having less sex than they’d like because “young children are in the way”, with 31 percent saying they’ve “lost their libido since having children”. Other generational struggles also feed into stress; millennials were already behind prior generations to meet life milestones, like buying homes; now, spiking prices  and the proliferation of student debt are straining millennials, especially financially.

But most of all, the current state of the workplace is driving stress. May 2022 data from global consulting firm Deloitte, collected across five countries, revealed 38 percent of millennials reported a massive mental-health burden, especially for women (41 percent) versus men (36 percent), largely driven by work anxiety.

The working environment has never been particularly stable or low-stress for millennials, of course. “For example, many millennials started their careers during the Great Recession,” says Lehmiller. But the added burden of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it further strife.

“During times of great technological change, people tend to work extremely hard,” adds Snyder. And as data shows, millennials are particularly workaholics. Overwork often leads to exhaustion, which can lead to couples repeatedly being too tired for sex at the end of a long day – a pattern these experts say can endure if repeated too regularly. And worries around financial stability are only exacerbating the problem. “Greater financial concerns coupled with higher baseline rates of depression and anxiety could be a particularly potent combination in producing high stress and low sexual desire,” says Lehmiller.

Social Media, Pornography and Declining Sex Lives

The influence of the internet also can’t be overstated. Snyder describes social media as a “distraction” from physical interpersonal activities like sex, but Hirschman believes its role in contributing to sexless marriages goes much deeper. She says it’s led to increased “image consciousness” among millennials – the first generation to really be conscripted into heavy social media use.

People feel the need to present perfection on these platforms, she says, with filters and touch-ups that aren’t available in real life. The resulting self-consciousness can follow people into their bedrooms and marriages, making them less body confident. Per Relate’s 2018 data, 37 percent of people younger than 30 who were in low-sex partnerships reported self-consciousness about their bodies, while only 14 percent of those 60 and older said the same.

In addition to social media, the experts agree porn has had an outsized influence on millennials, many of whom came of age just as porn was becoming widely accessible online. This, of course, is a huge shift from previous generations. “In the 20th Century, some guys tended to be sexually compulsive with lots of women,” says Snyder. “These days, they just tend to watch lots of porn.” In other words, they don’t have to seek out sex with another person to have a sexual experience that involves other people, even if those people are only in a video.

Anderson has many younger-than-45 male clients in sexless marriages who suffer from “porn-induced erectile dysfunction”, she says – a condition that makes it either impossible or very difficult to achieve an erection without pornography and with a real-life partner. This can lead to them preferring solo sex over sex with their partners. Some of them get used to having total control over their pleasure, she explains, or to the more extreme images they see in porn that their married sex can’t live up to.

"‘Porn never rejects me’ or ‘Porn never criticises my performance’ are common comments in my office,” says Anderson.

‘Dead Bedrooms’ Forever?

Of course, millennials can’t change that they entered the workforce during a recession and are now reeling from another one. They can’t erase the influence of porn or social media.

And it's clear that a lack of sex is a topic some people find hard to even talk about with the person with whom they are sharing a bedroom, let alone more broadly – making understanding the issues and finding solutions even harder.

As one Redditor wrote on r/DeadBedrooms just a couple days ago, with busy lives and myriad pressures, even raising the subject can seem impossible. "I just don’t even know what to ask for anymore," wrote one struggling woman. "I want to fix this, I just don’t know how."

This article originally appeared on bbc.com.

The post The Millennials in Sexless Marriages appeared first on FamilyToday.

Dedeker Winston has been in non-monogamous relationships for more than a decade, yet she has never seen such keen interest in open relationships. The subject has traditionally been very taboo in many places, including the US, where Winston is based.

In 2014, when she started the Multiamory podcast, she and her co-producers had to decide whether to use their real names on the ethical non-monogamy show. “At that point, there was pretty much only one or two other podcasts actually broaching this subject,” says the dating coach. “And the people who were producing and hosting those podcasts used pseudonyms.”

But things have changed. Around 2016, Winston noticed a real “explosion of interest around non-monogamy,” about a year after she started work as a dating coach specializing in those types of relationships. “That was when I feel like I saw the biggest turning point, of all of a sudden so many people online being willing to talk about being non-monogamous,” she says, “and to express the fact that they have an interest in these sorts of things.”

Sarah Levinson, a counselor at Creative Relating Psychology Psychotherapy in New York City, who specializes in sexuality and relationship dynamics, has also noticed an increasing interest in open relationships within the past decade. “It was much more obscure 10 years ago, and now it's incredibly common,” she says.

These accounts as well as some data show a growing interest in consensually non-monogamous relationships, including open relationships. Experts say many societal and cultural factors that have led to a wider embrace of non-traditional relationship styles, and the pandemic may even be playing a part. But while interest in open relationships may be climbing, experts are mixed on how wide their uptake may actually be – at least for right now.

'Free Passes' and Swinging

There are many ways to engage in non-monogamy, says Levinson. “It could be anything from living with multiple partners and sharing finances, or it could be supporting your partner in once a year having a free pass at a work conference out of state to have a hook-up.”

Open relationships fall under the non-monogamy umbrella, but many tend to differentiate between those types of arrangements and other types of non-monogamy, like polyamory. Polyamory often means participating in multiple intimate partnerships, while open relationships are more often associated with people engaging in primarily sexual relationships outside of their prioritised, two-person partnership. In other words, open relationships are less focused on emotional connections with people outside a primary relationship, and more on sexual ones.

For some, this means going on casual dates and having ‘friends-with-benefits’-type relationships with people other than their primary partners. For others, an open relationship just means that occasional “free pass” to have a one-night stand or brief sexual fling. And for others still, the arrangement could look more like swinging – such as having sex with other couples as a couple, but not going on dates separately. Winston also brings up “don’t ask, don’t tell”-style open relationships, in which both members of a couple permit the other to have sexual relations with other people – they just don’t want to discuss those experiences together.

Other terms, like “monogamish”, which US-based relationship and sex columnist Dan Savage popularised several years ago, can overlap definitionally with some of these open-relationship arrangements. Savage has discussed his monogamish relationship on his podcast, in which he and his partner are committed to each other, but still have non-committal sex with other men.

People of all stripes are engaging in open relationships. Over the past few years, Levinson says she’s been seeing “quite a bit of diversity” among those participating in open relationships in her sessions, in terms of everything from “economic resources” to “ethnicity”. (However, she acknowledges that as a counsellor working in New York City, she gets to see a different sample than one might come across in other more conservative parts of the US.)

Among Winston’s client base, podcast listeners and website visitors, she’s found many who are interested or participating in open relationships tend to skew relatively young – between the ages of 25 and 45. And many identify as queer, bisexual and/or pansexual. However, in her practice, she’s worked with clients interested in or practicing open relationships who are as young as 19 and as old as in their 70s. “The people who come to my door completely span the spectrum,” she says.

‘Getting Curious’

Dating-app trends help highlight the rise in interest in open relationships. For one, there has been an emergence of platforms particularly focused on non-monogamy, including open relationships, to cater to rising curiosity. But even more traditional dating apps, such as OkCupid, have seen a spike in interest in open relationships.

“While the majority of OkCupid daters seek monogamous relationships, in 2021, users seeking non-monogamous relationships increased 7 percent,” an OkCupid representative told BBC Worklife. Among more than 1 million UK-based OkCupid users who responded to the question, ‘Would you consider having an open relationship?’ in the app, 31 percent said yes in 2022, compared to 29 percent in 2021 and 26 percent in 2020.

Additionally, 2022 data from dating app Hinge showed one in five Hinge users “would consider” trying out an open relationship, while one in 10 have already engaged in one. Hinge’s director of relationship science Logan Ury says there may be a pandemic effect, since she believes it was “the perfect opportunity to pause and think more about what we want.”

Counsellors and professionals including Levinson and Winston have also observed an uptick. Winston says that much of the recent interest she’s seen in open relationships comes from millennials who are simply “questioning the way they’ve been raised” – in most cases, to believe that long-term, married monogamy is the end goal of intimate relationships.

This may stem from an overall trend towards open mindedness, believes Levinson. “Societally, we are all more open-minded to all sorts of identities that are less conventional… people are more willing to challenge societal constructs in a general way.” This has opened the door for people to question their own desires, too.  When “you keep choosing monogamy and it's not working… you start getting curious about [whether] there’s another way”.

And for those who are curious, there are more resources than ever. Along with the “explosion of interest” in open relationships, adds Winston, there’s an “explosion in content creators and people writing about it in media… in apps, in community meetups”. This means information about non-monogamy is widely accessible – not in “old, dusty LiveJournals [personal online journals]  in the corners of the internet”, which is where Winston says she needed to look for information more than a decade ago.

More Fantasy Than Reality?

Despite more people embracing non-monogamous arrangements, and a rising visibility around open relationships, the general perception still leans negative. “Research and public opinion polls suggest that attitudes toward consensual non-monogamy are mostly negative overall, although they appear to have trended more positive in recent years,” says Dr Justin Lehmiller, Kinsey Institute research fellow and host of the Sex and Psychology Podcast.

While those negative attitudes may not stop people from thinking about being in open relationships, it can deter them from engaging in them. In his research about sexual fantasies, for instance, Lehmiller has found that “most people have fantasised about being non-monogamous in some way before, such as by participating in swinging, opening up their relationship or being polyamorous”. However, he adds, “relatively few are practising it in real life”. Although there is no post-pandemic data on how many people are in these arrangements, Canadian research from 2019 puts the figure at about 4 percent, with a similar figure emerging in a 2018 US study.

Levinson believes this may in part stem from an entrenched perception that open relationships are broadly seen as ‘unhealthy’. Among her therapist colleagues, Levinson has observed that plenty still view the “dyad” or “couple bubble” as the “only workable way of having a secure attachment”, she says. She feels these attitudes can “cut into people feeling like this is a viable option for them”. Religious beliefs can also deter people from engaging in sexual and/or dating relationships with more than one person at a time, as can the cultural norms of certain communities.

Even so, Winston sees people, particularly millennials and Gen Z, continuing to move away from the idea that one partner can fulfil all their needs (something the traditionally monogamous concept of marriage encourages). She points to more platonic friends deciding to live together and co-parent as well as declining marriage rates, to suggest a possible future societal shift in the way people engage in relationships. “People are branching out more into creating the relationships that make the most sense for their lives,” she says.

While Levinson agrees there will be a continued increase in “creative relationship structures” for similar reasons, she doesn’t think it will become a global phenomenon. Too many cultures around the world present challenges to people hoping to open their relationships, and the taboo remains globally prevalent.

OkCupid’s head of global communications Michael Kaye has a different view. “The behaviours we see among daters today have been around forever. But people are becoming more open and transparent about how they identify [and] what they want in a relationship. I think with every single passing year, were becoming a little bit less judgmental about others.”

This article originally appeared on www.bbc.com

The post The Rising Curiosity Behind Open Relationships appeared first on FamilyToday.