The great British sex drought: why I haven’t had sex in two years

The Natsal-Covid study polled 6,500 Brits about the four months following the first lockdown in March 2020 and found that only one quarter of adults not in steady relationships had partnered sex. Another survey was done a year on from the first lockdown – less than 20 per cent of people reported having a new sexual partner in the first year of the pandemic, a significant decline since 2010.

Instead of the Hot Vax Summer that was predicted, the UK’s singles didn’t jump into bed with each other the minute we were allowed. The one-night stand is dead. Even Tinder, a dating app for those looking for hook-ups rather than relationships, is switching towards “holistic” profiles that allow users to show more of their personalities, rather than just thirst-trap pictures, to meet the new trend for slow dating. Conversations on the app, usually a brief precursor to an in-person meeting, are 32 per cent longer post-Covid. It used to be that a swipe right was the way to get a shag. Now there’s nothing racy about it. In the past 18 months, sex wasn’t really what we were missing. Well, OK, maybe it was a bit, but we missed connection more.

“Masturbating, watching porn, speaking with people online or hooking up with someone does not fulfil a need for true intimacy,” says psychotherapist and counsellor Samantha Tipples. “Intimacy is born out of routine. Intimacy is knowing someone well, watching TV with them or going to sleep and waking up with them. When we are in isolation or home alone and want someone to watch TV with, but instead we have sex with someone and they leave, it doesn’t fulfil our need for intimacy. It actually creates detachment.”

The great British sex drought isn’t just affecting single people. We’re all (not) at it. “I stopped having sex way before the pandemic,” one half of a very happy couple tells me. Yes, sales of Durex condoms went up, but I’d put that down to a combination of wishful thinking about the summer of love that never was and parents who endured lockdowns without childcare. Certainly, any idea of a baby boom, that lockdown would act as one long blackout, was swiftly proved wrong. The fertility rate dropped to 1.53 children per woman in England and Wales this year, down from 1.93 a decade ago. Cambridge University is even giving fertility seminars.

“With couples who live together, there has been a post-pandemic lag in terms of sexual appetite due to having spent so much time together during lockdown,” says Olivia Petter, journalist and author of Millennial Love. “Desire is often predicated on tension: time apart, ambiguity. There’s been none of that.”

I’ve wanted to rip off partners’ clothes when they’ve brushed up for weddings or are back from a work trip. But many of my married friends now live, work and sleep in the same 75sq m as each other. They don’t even have “How was your day?” small talk because they spend theirs in each other’s pockets and they certainly don’t get a chance to miss each other. I always feel horny on holiday. It’s the heat, skin tight from sea water, wearing fewer clothes and feeling a million miles away from the boring bits of our lives. One friend hasn’t left the UK for two years, spending holidays with her husband on the British coast instead. According to her, that holiday libido boost doesn’t apply in a muddy field.

Another married friend’s sex routine used to be anything but routine. It was spontaneous moments of lust. They’re now considering putting “appointment sex” in their diaries, hopeful that they’ll get round to having some that way. Another couple I know had “loads of sex – for the first two months of lockdown”.

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Spending so much time together was a novelty, until it wasn’t. The Natsal-Covid study found that one in ten people in a serious relationship reported sexual difficulties that started or worsened during lockdown – and that was just four months in, when we were still dressing up for Zoom calls. Our TV habits give us away. Back then, we were all watching poignant shagathon Normal People. Now it’s Squid Game. It’s telling that Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest venture is Netflix show Sex, Love & Goop, which coaches couples to improve their flagging sex lives.

No doubt they could use the help. Only 65 per cent of women in heterosexual relationships orgasm during sex – and that’s with someone whom they’ve told what they do and don’t like, who knows their kinks and mood killers. I don’t know what the statistics are for orgasms with a new sexual partner, but based on my own experience, it’s low. Very rarely have I found someone with whom I just physically clicked. More often than not, getting to a point where the sex is good for me requires talking them through the manual: zero sensation in my nipples, don’t enjoy choking and my clitoris is a half an inch lower, actually.

This summer was tipped to be one of sexual reawakening, but it was a nonstarter. We’re so out of the habit of flirting and sleeping around that it seems like a foreign language. “I said the idea of having someone in my bed now was weird and my therapist said that’s because it’s a concept,” says a friend. “If it were an actual person, it would be different.”

I now look at one-night stands the way I do smoking in pubs. Really? We used to do that? Having winnowed our social circles down to households and support bubbles, a stranger feels like exactly that – and I feel particularly vulnerable as a single woman right now. I went on a few dates in parks, only to be reminded that women aren’t safe in parks or pubs or anywhere, really, let alone in a stranger’s house. And learning to live around a highly transmissible virus has had a knock-on effect (and not just because I worry that every person I meet might have asymptomatic Covid-19). Having learnt to social distance, to lean away from colleagues as we speak, to cross the road to avoid crowds, to wear my mask in the pub on the way from my table to the loo, I’m finding it impossible to switch off my new hyperawareness of proximity and hygiene or look at a man’s hand without wondering where it’s been and when he last sanitised it.

“There was this huge build-up for some sort of post-pandemic sexual revolution,” says Petter, “but the truth is that the anxieties and fears people experienced during the pandemic won’t just magically disappear.”

Covid was a cultural reset. It broke our routines and made us reprioritise. Dating was something I had to do because I like minibreaks, because the rent on a nice little flat with a balcony in London is extortionate if you’re not splitting it with someone else and because I want a child eventually. But since my dating routine – download an app, go on a few dates, maybe sleep with one of them until I discover a red flag, delete the app, then repeat – was interrupted, I’ve realised how much I haven’t missed it. It doesn’t help that many of my generation can afford to live only in house shares while they’re single, so instead of waking up with a new sexual partner on Egyptian cotton sheets in a chic city flat, sharing a pot of coffee like they do in films, we wake up to meeting (or avoiding) the housemates, trying to get a turn in the shared bathroom and then a long journey home from an unknown suburb.

For lots of single people, the enforced pause on our dating lives wasn’t such a bad thing – not all bad, at least. Off the dating treadmill, we were able to reassess what we want, and if those Cambridge University fertility seminars are anything to go by, for young women that isn’t settling down and popping out a few kids. At times, it was truly miserable to be alone during lockdown, to have no one to cuddle or even just make me a cup of tea. But I know one group that had it far worse: mothers. Is it really surprising that women are choosing to wait? I saw my colleagues take on full-time childcare on top of full-time jobs and bear the worst of the extra labour needed to keep families going. Sure, they could have sex legally when I couldn’t, but I doubt very much they were. They looked like they might scream on every Zoom conference call, and not with pleasure. I imagine my vibrator and I were having a much saucier time in lockdown than they ever did, true intimacy or not.

Children aside, for every friend who found a deeper connection with their partner in lockdown, I can count at least two who seriously considered ending things. Many did. Lockdown allowed singles to be selfish, to lean in to the enforced alone time, to work out what we need – sexually, but emotionally too. After 18 months of a clean break with fast dating, I’m over it. We all are, if Tinder’s about-turn is anything to go by. That culture was toxic, but we were too close to it to notice. Now? I think we all deserve better.

“If there’s less first-date sex going on, a probable cause is that our criteria might have shifted,” says Justin Myers, the author and GQ columnist also known as the Guyliner. “Traits we were willing to overlook – a mismatch on politics or cultural appreciation or attitudes – might have become insurmountable,” he says. “We’re on our guard, especially when it comes to giveaway opinions, such as a stance on vaccinations, Covid restrictions and precautions, and things like working from home. Now, we’re more likely to go, ‘You know what? I’m not sure this is worth it,’ when faced with someone whose post-lockdown outlook doesn’t match with our own. For example, an anti-masking stance, expressed with passion on first meeting, is very much the anti-boner for many. Careless in the streets, useless in the sheets.”

I haven’t forgotten the pangs of skin hunger from the time when even a hug wasn’t allowed. I’d sleep with someone tonight if I walked into a room and saw a man I fancied. Perhaps, if the sex were any good, it would remind me what I’m missing. But with masks on and a shift towards less socialising in general, those unplanned meet-cutes are less likely now than ever (and I wasn’t exactly living in a rom-com pre-pandemic). It might be time to get back on the horse, but dating in 2021 really is the ultimate mood-killer.