Americans are becoming too poor for sex

 

the pic was taken from here

Americans are becoming too poor for sex

What’s up with the Great American Sex Drought?

 

It torments me. I feel so helpless, so speechless, so impotent. Sometimes I have no idea what to tell my dateless friends when they humble themselves and ask for advice. Many of these men are in their thirties, the time of life when people usually have the most sex.

I empathize with the pain they’re experiencing and I start to feel it myself. Sexlessness, when it’s not something we chose, is a painful open wound that festers on our hearts.

I’ve had a few years of sexlessness in my day and let me tell you, it felt awful. Your mind starts to play tricks on you, especially if you’re not overly busy.

Without anything to occupy my mind, I’d stress about it. I used to feel immense pressure wash over me at every moment as I struggled to figure out if I’d ever get it together.

You start to wonder if you’re completely undesirable. It’s hard to separate the experience of now from predictions of the future. It seems like tomorrow will be just be a continued extension of today. I remember my first cold spell in my early twenties when I moved to another state and couldn’t seem to make friends of any sort.

I felt invisible. I felt forgotten. I felt unloved and unlovable.

And when my friends reach out to me, I know they feel the same.

But these thirty something friends of mine are the exception, not the rule. The rule is, people in their thirties are usually settled down in a relationship. They’ve found partners and they enjoy the rewards of the relationships they’ve forged.

But something odd is going on with younger people. They’re just not having any sex. It’s a statistical anomaly that professionals are having a hard time explaining.

Back in 2019, some rather alarming data was released with the General Social Survey from the University of Chicago. In short, the data hinted at the fact that Americans are going through a large scale sex drought. And the people who we generally think of as highly sexually active are some of the people driving the drought.

Published in Science Alert in April of 2019, the findings showed that almost one-quarter of American adults were celibate over the course of the past year. Twenty three present of Americans reported not having any sex. The total amount of sex Americans were having seemed to be on the decline.

Part of the explanation has to do with aging and the differences in population between the generations. Older people tend to have less sex than younger people do, as age wears on health, as marriages oftentimes grow stale, and as life partners sometimes tragically die the number of Americans over sixty years old jumped, from only 18% of the American population to a massive 26%.

They don’t call them the “Baby Boomer” generations for nothing, they come from a post-war baby boom in the wake of the second world war, meaning there are many more people now entering their sixties than there were in previous decades. And a full 50% of this group reports having no sex.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What’s truly startling is the decline in sex that’s taking place in the age group of 18 – 29, a group that’s experienced to most sudden and unexplainable dip.

Overall, sexlessness among this younger cohort rose from around 16% in 1997 to 23% by 2019. That’s almost I out of 4 young people who are not having any sex.

And what’s driving this change? Sexless young men.

While 18% of the women in this cohort were sexless, a whopping 28% of the men are sexless. And this wasn’t always the case. In decades prior, spanning all the way back to the 1980s, men and women in their late teens and twenties had roughly the same amount of sexlessness. But starting around 2008, a huge spike of sexless men began to grow and never stopped.

Professor of psychology at San Diego State University, Jean Twenge says that this may be evidence of a cultural shift in the American way of life, with younger people becoming less rebellious, taking fewer risks, and being generally more socially tolerant, albeit less risky. Her book even describes these phenomena.

And the theory goes that these cultural shifts have made it so younger people are settling down later on in life. Previous generations would settle down in their twenties or even their late teens, getting married and starting a family, but Zoomers seem to be holding off on all of this entirely. The question this theory leaves in its wake, of course, is why?

Some haves suggested something quite painful. The economy.

Stop and think about it. This trend started in 2008, in the wake of recession that crippled the global economy. And since then, the trend has only grown over the past decade and a half, nearly.

As Pew Research discovered, for the first time in ages, more adultsbetween 18 and 34 are living at home than living by themselves or with partners, or any other living arrangement for that matter, such as with siblings.

19% of women at the time lived with their parents, while 25% of men lived with their parents. Twenge assumes that it’s this fact that makes it hard for younger people to bring their partners home and do the deed.

It seems our sex lives are just one more victim in the ongoing housingcrisis we have in America, with a shortage of homes that grows by the year, and no solutions in sight to fix the problem. People are too poor to have sex if they can’t afford the place to do it.

And guess what …

I chose numbers from 2019 because that’s the last full year we have before the pandemic hit. This would suggest that people are having even less sex now than they were in 2019.

We’re sex-starved in America and I think it’s time we change that.

 

 the original article was here.

 

The Single Men who Dream of Fatherhood

 

the pic was taken from here

The Single Men who Dream of Fatherhood

Finding a partner to have a family with isn’t only hard for women.

Names were changed to protect the privacy of the people interviewed for this story.

The trend of women in their late thirties/early forties going the single-parent route to realize their dreams of motherhood isn’t shocking anymore. Stories of women resorting to a sperm donor after one failed relationship too many, or after years of disappointment and heartbreak in the dating world have become more common in the past decade.

In the beginning, these women were pioneers. They set out to prove not only their independence but to chart a path forward to others who might find themselves in the same situation in the future. Now, the path has been walked enough times that the roadmap is pretty well-established, even if the rest stops and scenic views vary from traveler to traveler.

Now, more women are choosing to freeze their eggs in their late twenties / early thirties just in case they end up having to embark on the trip of single-motherhood later on. Now, that choice is more than an unusual solution to a painful predicament: it has become a safety net to plan for.

These women’s stories, however happy they mind be in the end, aren’t free of pain and heartbreak. Going the single-parent route, in most cases, wasn’t plan A. in most cases, plan A was a traditional family, but there’s only so many years a woman can dedicate to trying for traditional before she’s forced to make a now-or-never decision.

These stories, however, have another effect: they conflate femininity with the desire for parenthood. They emphasize how hard it is for women to find a suitable mate to have kids with, making it seem like the desire for children and a family, and the excruciating pain that comes from not having it by a certain timeline is exclusively female.

Men are framed as responsibility-avoiding bachelors to whom having a child would be the worst nightmare. Men have to be worn out into marriage and nagged into parenthood. But the stereotype of the hesitant father doesn’t always match reality.

The reality is that the landscape of parenthood is changing. The basic steps of meeting someone, getting married and having kids seem so basic to that many people anymore. From wanting a large family to forgoing children due to climate change concerns, desires around parenthood now seem to come in a spectrum and are more varied than ever.

It has become increasingly more acceptable to both men and women to flat out state they don’t want to have children – ever – but that doesn’t mean one’s plans for parenthood have become any easier to align with another person’s. Whether you’re a man or a woman, finding a partner who shares your exact desires on this matter seems more complicated now than ever before.

And single women who dream of motherhood aren’t the only ones who feel adrift.

The single men who dream of fatherhood

At the same pace as there are men avoiding marriage and children, there are those who wish they had a family already (or soon), but who are having trouble making that dream come true.

I have been very interested in the male mindset on this issue. I have spent hours on the phone and exchanged hundreds of text messages with my closest male friends, listening to their desires and attempting to understand their frustrations.

These men have revealed to me, above all, how deep their desire for a family is. They’d like to find a woman to love, a wife to be their life partner, and yes, to give them children of their own.

“A girl at my high school had a baby, and the first time I held it, I knew I wanted to be a father. I was 18, my friend John tells me. John is 45, he’s been married and divorced twice, but so far, no kids. “People say, ‘it’s easy for you, just get a younger girl’, but it doesn’t really work that way.”

John’s first wife pushed back having kids to work on her graduate degree. After that, their marriage fell apart before they could find the right time for babies. John’s second marriage also ended without children.

John is far from an undesirable partner. He’s charming, extremely fit, and very smart. He has a good job and financially stable, still, dating hasn’t been going this way these past few years.

He tells me it’s been harder and harder to find women to date. Just like for many women in their late 30’s and early 40’s, older men are also faced with slimmer pickings in the dating pool. Because John would like to have biological children, he tries to date women younger than 40 and has ended things with women who flat out stated they didn’t want kids. Just like for many singles, online dating is a big part of John’s search for love, but he tells me the number of women still in their fertile years who will increase their preferred age range to include men over 40 is discouragingly low.

Steve (34) and Paul (28) also dream of fatherhood, and while they both wish they were there already, their age makes them slightly more optimistic than John. Coincidently, both Steve and Paul have a broken engagement in their past and have had to start over in their pursuit of a life partner just when they thought they had found the one. They both claim the breakup was for the best but the setback sometimes discourages them a little.

Paul tells me he was 15 when he realized he would like to become a father someday. He always thought it would happen before he turned 30, but he’s still confident he has plenty of time to make it happen.

Steve says having children is something he always knew he wanted. He is more vocal about how much he wishes he were already there with a life partner. He’s painfully aware that it takes a good amount of time to get to know someone, establish a relationship, and get to the point where having children becomes a real possibility.

Steve does the math, “if I have a kid at 35, I’ll be 45 when he is 10 years old,” and “I wouldn’t like to have a kid at 40 and be in my 60’s when my child is in their 20’s. if that’s what ends up happening, I’ll be okay with it, but I would prefer things were different.”

“I’d like to have a child while I still have the energy to keep up, and I’d like to have more time with my children overall,” he concludes.

He finds it’s been hard to meet women who are serious about pursuing a relationship. Hookups, in another hand, he doesn’t have a hard time finding.

What these three men have in common, regardless of age, is a deep desire for a family, to the extent that they wish it had already happened for them. Meanwhile, they try not to lose hears as the years go by. So far, none of them is seriously considering single parenthood as an option.

My sample is limited, but the rise in male single parenthood is very real, and an indication that the yearning for a family is far from exclusively female. Whether in Chicago or in the UK, just as more women are turning towards sperm banks, more men are choosing to become single parents. Some turn to surrogacy, others to adoption.

The social reality raises important questions: if so many men and women want a family, what’s standing in the way of them having that family together, the “traditional” way? Some of these single parents are homosexuals, but that still doesn’t explain why they’re not forming a family with a partner of the same sex instead of by themselves. It turns out, difficulties in relating are not exclusive to one sexual orientation or another.

Could the confused, sometimes discouraging state of modern relationships be to blame? Could our inability to relate and align common goals be a factor? Are we so distracted wondering if there’s something better out there that we are missing the very real people right in front of us? Do we mistakenly believe we have more time to find someone and figure things out than we actually do? Has it become that much easier to go it alone than to pursue a long-term partnership?

To some extent, all of the above.

Regardless of the reasons, I feel it’s important to highlight the realities of men who would like to be parents but are having a hard time fulfilling that dream since it often seems that women’s run to freeze their eggs or to find a mate while “there’s still time” is the only heartbreak that matters in the current state of modern relationships.

 Men may have it easier in terms of the biological clock, but that doesn’t mean they don’t struggle – and are forced to come up with solutions that are “outside the box”.

Updates: it’s been over 2 years since I officially interviewed the men for this story. The original conversations quoted above happened around mid-2018. In the meantime, Paul got married. Steve now has a girlfriend of about six months, whom he’s very happy with, and John is still single.

the original article is here

Men are spoiled and women are desperate

“Men are spoiled and women are desperate”

Or, men are lost and women are tired.

I came across this sentence in a youtube video: “We have a harsh dating climate in today’s society where men have become spoiled and women have become desperate,” Anna Bey.

I personally think men are lost and women are tired.

this pic was taken from here

I am not apt to speak about the experience of homosexuals and other sexual orientations, but I’m not sure that the feelings of loss and confusion regarding dating and relationships are exclusive to heterosexuals.

From where I’m sitting, there seems to be a misalignment between the sexes. It’s not only women who can’t find what they’re looking for, men are coming out frustrated and empty.

There’s a rising number of US adults living without a spouse or partner. Women are increasingly turning to sperm donors and men to surrogate or adoption to have babies on their own. 

Young people are having less sex than ever before.

The unofficial dictionary of romance gains a new expression every day: ghosting, benching, stacking, wokefishing, love bombing, soft ghosting, caking, cloaking, zombie-ing, orbiting. More and more relationships break apart at the first sign of trouble. Heartbreak is a genuine fear, so much that everyone enters a relationship like a lake on a gelid winter morning, one toe gingerly lowered to test the water before the rest of the body is allowed to plunge in.

There’s so much to dissect about the current state of our relationships, it’s hard to know where to begin, especially since, just like in politics, extremism seems to be gaining terrain at dizzying speed.

Women blame men for their immaturity, inability to commit, and supposed interest in only having sex and bailing.

Men accuse women of only being interested in money, having unrealistic expectations, and always having one foot out the door, ready to trade their relationship for a better one the moment the first difficulties arise.

There are plenty of platforms where you can find examples of these extreme mentalities, but Youtube might be the best example. Youtube is slowly turning into a hotbed of extremism. A place where the more you can throw “truth-bombs”, the more views you have and the more money you make. These supposed “truth bombs”, however, are an assorting of generalized, misconstructed concepts that being with “men never’, and “women always”.

These “truth-bombs” are sexism and misogyny packaged to sound like deeply thought revelations that keep viewers glued to the screen and cash pouring into the pockets of the content creators. To be clear, I am not saying Anna Bey is part of the problem. I’m talking about much more extreme creators, a lot of who don’t show their faces in their videos and edit the sound of their voices so that they cannot be recognized.

Nothing spells bravery quite like hiding your face and voice while you “open other people’s eyes to the truth” with “red pills”.

Meanwhile, men continue to feel lost and women, tired.

Despite the fact that we can clearly see how frustrated both sexes are with the state of our relationships today, the conversation we’re having isn’t helping. Men and women’s genuine grievances are being pushed aside by a parade of unfair generalizations that paint all men as useless and immature, and all women as heartless gold-diggers.

We need to do better.

We need to start talking about respecting each other instead of being cautious of each other’s “traps” and “games”.

We need to start talking about how to trust each other and, more especially, how to earn each other’s trust.

We need to start talking about how not to take each other for granted instead of how to always be on the lookout for arbitrary red flags.

And above all, we need to start talking about how to treat each other as mature adults, not as spoiled children.

Men are lost, and women are tired

Men are lost because real, healthy masculinity is under attack. They don’t know how – or don’t feel allowed – to be men anymore.

Women are tired because they’ve been left to take charge and do all of the emotional heavy-lifting by themselves.

There has to be a way to change that.

There has to be a way to meet in the middle. To listen to the legit grievances of both men and women without blindly returning to a past of male dominance and female submission. But for that to happen, first we need to learn how to talk to each other again.

We need to stop generalizing. To stop with the “men always” and the “women never”.

We need to recognize how lost and tired we all are and have compassion for one another. If there’s any place to start the conversation, this is it.

 

This article was copied from this link.