Study finds that sexless people are just as happy as sexually active people.

No-Prestige-9484 · 2023-01-20T15:18:26+00:00

The study relies on data from a GSS survey that did not ask respondents whether they were celibate by choice or not—a major confounder that the study was unable to control for. According to NSFG data, most sexless men are sexless by choice.

The authors state that "since sexual abstinence can be presumed to be largely involuntary in most of these studied populations, sexual inactivity has, not surprisingly, been correlated with poorer mental health." This presumption seems to be unsupported by any data.

I don't think anyone on this sub has ever claimed that voluntary sexlessness is harmful. Plenty of men go without sex until their late teens or early twenties without that having any detrimental effects on their well-being. Sexlessness is only problematic if it's both involuntary and prolonged.

anjovis150 · 2023-01-20T14:47:01+00:00

Soon enough we will have studies that will show you that in fact everything is okay while you're living in a pod eating soy Cheetos, and watching government mandated programming. And the study will show that in fact everything used to be awful too. And anyone who asks questions will be asked to provide a peer reviewed source by all of his co podders.

PMmeareasontolive · 2023-01-20T16:51:12+00:00

I'm more surprised at how conservative some of these answers are. For example, 35.1% of total respondents think premarital sex is wrong. 69.3% of total respondents think homosexual sex is wrong. It's data sets span from 1988 - 2002 so some of those things may have changed. Not always for the better; the "sex is required for happiness" philosophy is probably in part FOMO from consuming too much social media, which is a more recent phenomenon.

ShakeNBake007 · 2023-01-20T16:16:46+00:00

I'm getting a money doesn't buy happiness study vibe here.

platinirisms · 2023-01-20T15:34:34+00:00

Makes sense in relation to the study, at the end of the day there’s 100 things going on in life, food, water, warmth, sleep, personal shelter, your job/career, finances, your friends, family, physical health, mental health, hobbies, sex, self respect, freedom, goals, ambitions, dreams, etc.

When you take everything into account, and compare people who are identical in every way, except for the fact they do or do not have sex, the difference is going to be negligible. Especially when you only have 3 options of happiness to choose from, “Very Happy”, “Pretty happy”, “Not too happy”.

Despite everything, not having sex, by itself, isn’t the issue, it never has been, it’s why we don’t recommend Incels to hire prostitutes because it wouldn’t change anything or cheer them up.

To add to this, it doesn’t specify why these people are sexless, are they asexual, do they have a medical condition, do they simply not want to because they have more important stuff in life to focus on, etc. It’s not comparing people who have sex to people who want to have sex/relationship but are constantly rejected.

Even after all of this, there is a trend, unmarried men who have sex are slightly happier than unmarried sexless men who are slightly more not happy.

Now compare unmarried men to married men.

Unmarried men only, on average,
19.5% chance of being “Very Happy”
14.35% chance of being “Not too happy”.

Married men have on average,
41.55% chance of being “Very Happy”
5.85% chance of being “Not too happy”.

Your odds of being “Very happy” more than doubled and your odds of being “not too happy” is almost cut in a third by being in a committed long term relationship with a partner who loves you.

These numbers drop right back down as soon as they’re divorced/widowed.

CliffPR · 2023-01-20T14:21:29+00:00

They didn't ask me so survey invalid.

HazyMemory7 · 2023-01-20T18:45:34+00:00

Lillith back on the "sex doesn't matter" tirade. Pretty damn easy for women to dismiss the importance of intimacy when they can get it at the drop of a hat and don't have comparable libido to men. I have a proposal for any woman that thinks sex and romance aren't relevant components to living a happy, fulfilling life:

Hop on testosterone therapy for women (used presently for women with menopause or with low testosterone symptoms) for a span of at least ~6 months. During this time, you may not have sex or be intimate at all. This is the only way you can realistically get an idea of what it's like to have a young man's libido while being celibate. Women's libido simply does not hold a candle to the libido of a young man; a woman has to in essence be a nympho to have comparable sex drive.

And as others have pointed out, the study did not differentiate between celibate by choice or by involuntarily. Anyone can find one individual study that supports their premise. I wonder what this study set out to prove exactly? I wonder why there is funding for research trying to spread this non-sense? Well, in any case, here are just a few studies illustrating the importance of sex on well-being.

there is evidence of an association between sexual activity and satisfaction, on the one hand, and aspects of emotional well-being, partner satisfaction, and overall quality of life on the other. Although the nature of the casual relationship is unclear, women with more active and satisfying sexual relationships report consistently higher ratings of emotional and relationship satisfaction.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18576229/

Men and women who reported either infrequent/no sexual activity, or were sexually active but reported sexual problems, generally had lower SWB (subjective well-being)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4903037/

Men and women who reported any sexual activity in the past year had significantly higher mean enjoyment of life scores compared with those who were not sexually active (men, 9.75 vs 9.44 [P < .001]; women, 9.86 vs 9.67 [P = .003]). Among sexually active men, frequent (≥2 times a month) sexual intercourse (P < .001) and frequent kissing, petting, or fondling (P < .001) were associated with greater enjoyment of life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6377384/

And there are a plethora of more of those studies. Any way you slice it: you are simply wrong.

alphamaker420 · 2023-01-20T15:42:55+00:00

It's actually hilarious that most of the replies here are along the lines of "studies don't account for or dictate every person's experience" considering how the majority of posts on this sub tout that women are all liars, having a high n count means she's going to cheat on/divorce you, women only go for an objective 20,10,5,2,1% (or whatever the number is today) of men based on some random studies that are either super specific (online dating stats), have faulty collection methods, or are done on a very small sample size. And even when they are well done studies, they still aren't a predictor of the behavior of individual people.

Somehow those studies are all correct and predict the behavior of every woman but this study says that sexlessness doesn't correlate with happiness and it "doesn't account for incels" or is simply untrue because someone says so. Maybe studies are just not indicative of everyone's real-world lived experience and we should all just live life and stop trying to come up with ways to game human behavior?

DebateRoyal4525 · 2023-01-20T14:23:44+00:00

No matter how good the sex is the rest of the day will go on as usual.

gymbro718nyc2 · 2023-01-20T14:44:32+00:00

The funny thing is that the more you convince yourself your life would be miserable wjthout companionship and sex, the harder it becomes to obtain companionship and sex.

DryOutcome3407 · 2023-01-20T15:19:45+00:00

"Between 1978 and 2002" heh, it skipped boom of social media, tinder shenanigans, rise of cost of living, COVID lockdowns, rise of rabid feminism.

Truly amazing.

RegTextoffender · 2023-01-20T15:12:08+00:00

No desire to dig into this at this time but a potential flaw that comes to mind is that people who would be less happy without sex as a rule are getting it, which is why they are dating/married.

Basically lets say 75% of the population needs sex and 25% do not to be happy. Which group is more likely to be sexually active?

This line...

. In particular, never-married adults showed virtually identical levels of happiness between sexually active and sexless participants.

Would be in line with my thoughts. If it weren't for my high sex drive, and a need for sex to be happy, I'd never have put the energy into getting a GF, never fallen in love, and never married.

howdoiw0rkthisthing · 2023-01-20T15:48:22+00:00

I mean I guess it makes sense that sexless married people would be the most resentful.

Also interesting that men consistently reported lower levels of sexlessness even in marriages, which means either there’s an issue with self-reporting or that those men must be cheating on their wives.

2023-01-20T16:27:50+00:00

There's a huge difference between abstaining voluntarily and being unwanted, ugly and socially stunted/autistic. Even for the latter, it's not the lack of sex that depresses them, it's coming to terms with their position in the modern world.

voidofconscious · 2023-01-23T05:51:56+00:00

This is just the same shit the dweebs on Inceltear spew, only with shitty useless sources and too many words. Sex is only unimportant if you can get it whenever you want with little effort.

KayRay1994 · 2023-01-20T14:35:50+00:00

I do think people with sexless lives can be happy - they can be happier than people with messy, but active sex lives but will always be less happy than those with active, healthy sex lives.

Now with that out of the way, this study seems to avoid a lot of the last 8 years, which is especially when loneliness amongst both sexes has become more of a notable issue. It’s important to note that within the last 8 years, dating apps have become normalized and social media has become a constant presence in everyone’s life - on top of that the past 8 years have seen serious algorithmic changes that seriously ended up impacting people’s sense of self - so i’m not so sure that this survey is compatible to the current climate

BigZaddyZ3 · 2023-01-20T14:52:18+00:00

The “sex is a psychological need” gang have left the chat…

Nihi1986 · 2023-01-20T15:17:07+00:00

Fucking BS, honestly... It's been proven several times that sex helps with stress and makes you overall mentally healthier. And in case you doubt it, just remember how you feel in a decently working relationship with sex, probably much better than when you go sexless and romantically lonely. Seriously, who did they use for the study?

feanoric · 2023-01-20T15:16:25+00:00

You know who is the happiest people? Opioid Junkies.

LillthOfBabylon · 2023-01-20T14:13:06+00:00

Crazy, almost like people aren't a monolith and have their own spectrum of needs... /s

Its2ColdInDaHamz · 2023-01-20T16:05:29+00:00

just detach yourself from/avoid being reliant on external sociosexual validation/expectations bro

jverveslayer · 2023-01-20T16:23:37+00:00

I've had periods of my life where I was sexless and periods of my life where I could more or less have as much sex as I wanted with a wide variety of attractive partners.

Once you have that for a while, you get used to it and it's not special anymore. Sometimes you sleep with a new attractive partner, but it just feels like a waste of time and you wish you did something productive or hung out with your friends instead. I can definitely go a while without having sex, focusing on other things, and be content. It's not fulfilling in the same way that it used to be.

At the same time, it also really sucks having that desire but not being able to fulfill it. I'd say that I'm a little happier now having that access to sex when I do want it. Though I will say that getting more attractive partners didn't make me more happy. But being able to fulfill that basic need did raise my baseline happiness in my personal experience. Kind of like how being rich and buying luxury may not make you more happy, but not having to stress about money all the time does.

Of course I could still be happy before, and I could still be unhappy now - there are a lot more important factors than this

Robotemist · 2023-01-20T23:54:50+00:00

I take any happiness study with a grain of salt. Modern narcissism causes miserable people to project faux happiness to the world in order to validate the choices that got them to where they are. You can easily tell people who are single and sexless, they'll very soon tell you how happy they are traveling, eating and living by themselves.

prizefighterstudent · 2023-01-21T10:17:21+00:00

Most dudes can tell you that when they’re in a funk, they start tweaking. Energy is a bit lower, moving with more uncertainty, and maybe even a bit of desperation. You’re not “on” like you are when you’re getting laid / making headway. I can’t imagine what it’s like for dudes not getting action years on end.

I’m a strong believer that having consistent sex with a woman you actually desire can fix many issues in a young man’s life. I’ve experienced it and seen it happen firsthand on too many occasions for it not to be true.

s86ahmed · 2023-01-21T11:55:55+00:00

You think this sub would exist if this were true lol

Ohmaygahh · 2023-01-21T16:49:45+00:00

LOL. let the gaslighting/programming begin!

sadbitch55 · 2023-01-22T01:50:45+00:00

Life would be easier if we did not need to have sex...

Urbantexasguy · 2023-01-20T18:24:54+00:00

Let's be honest.....a good portion of the excitement around sex, is the anticipation of it.

It's a bit like Christmas for a kid....you hope the actual event, matches the buildup.

Or as a guy once said...."The most fun I ever had with my Corvette, was the day BEFORE I got it".

AquaChip · 2023-01-20T14:19:32+00:00

People usually make up their own misery. If you think sex is the center of the universe and you’re not getting it, you’re going to be miserable. If you detach sex from your overall happiness (think Buddhist monks) not getting it is not going to bother you.

gate18 · 2023-01-20T16:16:34+00:00

The only issue is, if you as an individual focus on one thing, you'll prevent yourself from being happy.

If you are tall (some think it as the perfect hight) you can make yourself unhappy if you want to be short.

That's the same with sexlessness. Yes, when it comes to sex, the culture helps you feel bad about the fact that you aren't getting any, but ultimately it has little to nothing to do with happiness.

SiegfriedSigurd · 2023-01-20T16:47:29+00:00

This is pretty interesting because if it holds true, it would refute a lot of the incel claims. It also ties in with this phenomenon of people saying that they're depressed even though they appear to have a healthy relationship, good job, friends etc. Incels snarl and whine about those people, and claim that they could never be depressed if they're getting regular sex.

I think the most likely explanation for the entire problem is evolutionary psychology. In dry spells, our bodies are driving us all the time to have sex - making it something larger than life and of the utmost importance. Once we get it, the allure quickly wears off and it no longer occupies the same priority ranking in our heads.

Because incels cannot and will not get sex, they're permanently stuck in that awful position. The obvious answer is prostitution, but that raises moral issues and I think deep down it wouldn't satisfy the incel desire for someone to truly like them. Our brains know we're cheating if we buy sex.

angypanda123 · 2023-01-20T15:22:50+00:00

Incels wont admit it, but not every man cares that much about sex, much less consider it a need even in relationships.

gofigure62 · 2023-01-20T16:00:10+00:00

I'd assume that there is a difference between people who are indifferent and perfectly fine with being sexless, compared to the people who aren't fine with being sexless and don't want to be sexless.

Similar to how there's a difference between people who choose to be single and are indifferent to whether or not they're single, and those that desperately want to be in a relationship but can't find or maintain one.

However, it could be possible that irrespective of the groups, it could be that a majority of the people who are sexless are find or indifferent to being sexless, and the people who aren't happy with being sexless are an overall minority to the general population.

wtffellification · 2023-01-20T20:09:13+00:00

As a person (28m) who has gotten laid a week ago (and will get laid tomorrow again, yay) and the last time before that was like 5 years ago...

I've been feeling a lot better and healthier this past week - and while maybe it's not solely the fact that I have gotten laid, but rather the fact that I have gotten laid with a person whom I also seem to be getting along with - it feels like I've been missing a big chunk of my life and that shows in my overall well being, physically as much as mentally

abaxeron · 2023-01-20T20:25:29+00:00

This is probably your best post here thus far. Even if not the most upvoted. Thanks, great job; also, I love that the study operates with non-trivial sample size.

AutoModerator · 2023-01-20T14:07:34+00:00

Attention!

You can post off topic/jokes/puns as a comment to this Automoderator message.
For "CMV" and "Question for X" Threads: Parent comments that aren't from the target group will be removed, along with their child replies.
If you want to agree with OP instead of challenging their view or if the question is not targeted at you, post it as an answer to this comment.
OP you can choose your own flair according to these guidelines., just press Flair under your post!

Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Rexagon_2017 · 2023-01-20T20:14:38+00:00

So one user, Hazy wrote:

Lillith back on the "sex doesn't matter" tirade. Pretty damn easy for women to dismiss the importance of intimacy when they can get it at the drop of a hat and don't have comparable libido to men. I have a proposal for any woman that thinks sex and romance aren't relevant components to living a happy, fulfilling life:

Hop on testosterone therapy for women (used presently for women with menopause or with low testosterone symptoms) for a span of at least ~6 months. During this time, you may not have sex or be intimate at all. This is the only way you can realistically get an idea of what it's like to have a young man's libido while being celibate. Women's libido simply does not hold a candle to the libido of a young man; a woman has to in essence be a nympho to have comparable sex drive.

And as others have pointed out, the study did not differentiate between celibate by choice or by involuntarily. Anyone can find one individual study that supports their premise. I wonder what this study set out to prove exactly? I wonder why there is funding for research trying to spread this non-sense? Well, in any case, here are just a few studies illustrating the importance of sex on well-being.

there is evidence of an association between sexual activity and satisfaction, on the one hand, and aspects of emotional well-being, partner satisfaction, and overall quality of life on the other. Although the nature of the casual relationship is unclear, women with more active and satisfying sexual relationships report consistently higher ratings of emotional and relationship satisfaction.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18576229/

Men and women who reported either infrequent/no sexual activity, or were sexually active but reported sexual problems, generally had lower SWB (subjective well-being)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4903037/

Men and women who reported any sexual activity in the past year had significantly higher mean enjoyment of life scores compared with those who were not sexually active (men, 9.75 vs 9.44 [P < .001]; women, 9.86 vs 9.67 [P = .003]). Among sexually active men, frequent (≥2 times a month) sexual intercourse (P < .001) and frequent kissing, petting, or fondling (P < .001) were associated with greater enjoyment of life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6377384/

And there are a plethora of more of those studies. Any way you slice it: you are simply wrong.

He didn't get a response but I'm interested as to how you match his studies with yours.

Personally, I think one confounding issue might be the fact that the OP's study includes Women and old people generally. As a young man, as much as I'd like to deny it on ideological grounds, attention from women has a huge boost on my happiness. Just a smile or a giggle can make my day. The reason is probably that I'm a 23-year-old male. It would be fairly weird if young males of any species were content without sexual success, evolution being what it is.

I would be interested in how an evolutionary framework results in sex being unimportant to male happiness/esteem.

Electrical-Pool3157 · 2023-01-20T21:46:31+00:00

Note the year range: 1988–2002
Wide range of ages, age =18–89 years
The non-sex-havers are a mix of people who choose no sex and those who don't have a choice, so it isn't surprising

You go wrong by thinking the results mean more than what is actually said.

SoldierExcelsior · 2023-01-20T22:55:27+00:00

Sex doesn't make me happier I do it because of biological urges and for health bennefits...Accomplishing my goals and money makes me happy

randomcommentt · 2023-01-21T00:00:58+00:00

Happy to see academic studies being used in a discussion -- it is better than the "in my experience" or "I have a friend who told me".

However, a comparison of self-reported numbers between different individuals is absolute nonsense. It only works if a 6 in my book is also a 6 in your book. And with many different standards of living, this is very unlikely.

Even one's own judgment of their life fluctuates over time. In fact, one can influence it based on questions that are previously asked. If I'd give you a questionnaire with questions like "do you have access to the internet?" or "do you think you are likely to die due to starvation or lack of clean water?", and then ask your happiness, you will give a higher grade than when I ask "have you won an Oscar or Nobel Prize?" and "do you own a yacht or mansion?"

Our judgment is a very subjective comparison based on influences that we experience at that moment. Ask a lot of questions, and we'll be like "it could be better, it could be worse", and then we are more likely to give a similar, average grade as someone who has an objectively worse life (who will also go "could be better, could be worse based on the questions).

TLDR: any study drawing conclusions based on a comparison between self-reported numbers of different individuals cannot be trusted or seen as "fact".

despisedlove2 · 2023-01-21T01:00:27+00:00

This study is a demonstration to RP Tradcon and RP MGTOW that they don't need female association in their lives.

Title	Study finds that sexless people are just as happy as sexually active people.
Author	LillthOfBabylon
Upvotes	54
Comments	197
Date	January 20, 2023 2:07 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/10gxu0w/study_finds_that_sexless_people_are_just_as_happy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/study-finds-that-sexless-people-are-just-as-happy.1149627 https://theredarchive.com/post/1149627

Comments