Nobody’s having as much sex as they want. That’s not news. But a new survey of more than 53,000 Australians makes clear just how differently men and women feel about it.
The data comes from news.com.au’s Great Aussie Debate, and the numbers are pretty stark. Fifty-seven percent of respondents want more sex than they’re currently having. A quarter of people have sex once or twice a month. A third manage at least once a week. On the other end of the spectrum, 10 percent said sex happens once or twice a year, and 18 percent said less than that.
The gender divide is where it gets revealing. Men were 14 percent more likely to say they want more sex, while women were twice as likely to say they’d prefer less. Age plays into it too—40 to 49 year olds reported the highest dissatisfaction, with 61 percent saying they want more than they’re getting. Thirty-somethings weren’t far behind at 58 percent.
So what’s actually going on? According to Lauren Muratore, an accredited psychosexual therapist from Melbourne, the core issue is that most couples simply won’t talk about it. “If you bring it up, it highlights that there’s a big problem, so it makes everything really black and white,” she told news.com.au. “What I find is a lot of people just would rather avoid the topic altogether. I think that’s probably one of the biggest key factors in the findings.”
Try Talking About Sex, Even If You Don’t Want to
The silence, Muratore says, comes from somewhere specific. “There are many reasons, including social constructs, religion, so many other things that all make people afraid to talk about sex in a relationship.” Beyond that, she points to a deeper assumption most couples carry without realizing it. “There’s an assumption that sex just happens naturally and that it should just be happening, which puts couples into the issue of having just one person as the initiator, resulting in the task being allocated on one half of the partnership. This can create a lot of pressure on the relationship and ultimately become a barrier to intimacy.”
The current state of the world isn’t helping either. “The atmosphere of the general population around the globe, with all the oppression of gendered roles and people’s human rights being violated, and even the economy changing, is also most likely going to be impacting people’s sex lives, whether they’re aware or not,” Muratore explained. “Technology is also interfering with relationships. Just anecdotally, people come home, they cook dinner, and then they sit on the couch and doom scroll. And that is just not an environment that leads to great sex.”
Muratore’s advice skips the romance and goes straight to logistics. Block two hours a week for each other, no phones, no agenda. “It doesn’t have to be for having sex,” she said. “It’s about starting off small and seeing where it leads. It’s about creating a space where two people feel safe, comfortable, and can start tapping into their eroticism.”
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