Monogamous men in long-term relationships aren't doin too hot
Results from my survey
Around 25,000 people have taken my relationships survey. If you’re in a relationship and haven’t yet, please take it before you read this post and get primed!
Also, my perspective on needing a random sample.
Raw data is here, though unfortunately I had to remove a lot of data to keep it anonymized. If you want more specific subsets I can hand them out upon request.
Who took this survey? In my Monogamy vs Polyamory post I have a breakdown, please refer to that for a discussion of how to interpret the results based on the sources. But to summarize - these are mostly (but not entirely) people who follow me; this is biased towards more liberal, sexually open circles. In general, I typically estimate around 15-20% of my test takers are heavily sourced from porn-specific areas.
I also divide males and females in this post; since I had males and females disproportionately come from different sources, this might impact the comparison of the data.
How monogamous are the monogamous? I asked a few questions vaguely tied to this. Let’s check.
I’m excluding gay people for the following graphs (because some of them include heterosexual gender-based predictions), and very poly people (cause I wanna measure sexual satisfaction among people with at least semi-closed relationships. The vast majority of people measured in the following graphs responded either fully or mostly monogamous).
I included most of these graphs in a previous blog post, but am pulling out a specific selection, updating the graphs somewhat, and all of them have about a +10k sample size since the last time I published.
Cheating
I asked people if they’d cheated, and also if their partner had cheated. Above is the self-reported cheating rate, including the % that reported their opposite-sex partner had cheated.
Reminder this graph might be showing asymmetric ratings if I sampled meaningfully different types of populations among males and females!
I failed to get prediction intervals to work, but the smallest bin was the 22+ year range, with 680 males and 142 females.
Frequency of sex
Oo, what if we combine?
I also asked people:
And the results for this question (again, excluding poly and gay people:)
Based on these graphs, among people who took my survey, it looks like monogamous men are less sexually happy, wanna bang other people (or do), and are hiding this from their female partners.
As in: males, on average, indicate nearly “somewhat” levels of interest in having sexual/romantic experiences outside of the relationship, though females predicted their partners were interested at around a “slightly” rate. Males predicted females about as accurately as females answered themselves, though!
Male porn use rises as their rate of sex drops, though this doesn’t hold the same for females.
At around 8-10 years, males satisfaction with their sex life drops to ‘neutral’, and after that they’re (on average) more likely to be dissatisfied than satisfied. By ~16 years on, on average they’re closer to disagreeing with the statement “My partner sexually fulfills me” than agreeing with it. Meanwhile females are more likely to report being sexually desired and being satisfied with their sex lives, their rating averaging out at “slightly satisfied” and holding steady as the relationship continues.
By 12+ years into their romantic relationship, 53.6% of the straight, non-poly males who answered my survey disagreed with the statement “I’m satisfied with our sex life”; 40.5% agreed with the statement; the rest said ‘neutral.’ (n=3720).
13.7% strongly disagreed with the statement, and 6% strongly agreed.
Of this group, 30.6% reported cheating on their partner.
By 22 years out, roughly 2/5ths of males reported cheating, and 1/5ths of females.
In general, females cheated roughly 1.7x more than males predicted they did; males cheated at roughly 2x more than females predicted they did.
So why is this going on? Did any of the questions I asked in the survey correlate with higher sexual satisfaction in longer-relationship, straight, non-poly males? All the following are correlations for males in relationships for 12+ years.
Answering positively for sexual satisfaction negatively correlated most with positive scores for the following:
"My partner doesn't sexually fulfill me" (r=-0.75)
”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=-0.47)
”My relationship causes me grief or sorrow” (r=-0.44)
”In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea” (r=-0.42)
”My partner judges me” (r=-0.31)
”In a world where your partner was fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would you be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides your partner?” (r=-0.29)
”My partner is more concerned with being right than with getting along” (r=-0.26)
”How often do you watch porn or consume erotic content?” (r=-0.21)
”How often do you and your partner have a fight?” (r=-0.19)
Cheated on partner (r=-0.17)
”I sometimes fear my partner” (r=-0.16)
High ratings on sexual satisfaction correlated positively with higher scores in the following:
”My partner and I are sexually compatible” (r=0.65)
”The passion in this relationship is deeply intense” (r=0.62)
”My partner physically desires me” (r=0.6)
”How often do you have sex?” (r=0.53)
”My relationship is playful” (r=0.45)
”This relationship is good for me” (r=0.45)
”My partner and I feel comfortable explicitly discussing our relationship on a meta level” (r=0.44)
”I think this relationship will last for a very long time” (r=0.41)
”I feel emotionally safe with my partner” (r=0.4)
”I feel confident in my relationship's ability to withstand everything life has to throw at us” (r=0.39)
”My partner knows all my sexual fantasies” (r=0.39)
”My partner enables me to learn and grow” (r=0.35)
”We respect each other” (r=0.35)
”I share my thoughts and opinions with my partner” (r=0.34)
”I have no secrets from my partner” (r=0.33)
”My partner and I handle fights well” (r=0.32)
”If my relationship ended I would be absolutely devastated” (r=0.3)
”It’s hard to imagine being happy without this relationship” (r=0.27)
”We have compatible humor” (r=0.22)
—————
What about cheating? I checked what correlated with males (again, the ones in relationships for more than 12 years) reporting cheating. The cheating column was binary, though the others were spectrums; there might be a better way to represent these relationships but until I figure out how, you can check the raw data yourself.
The following was most negatively correlated with reporting cheating:
”I have no secrets from my partner” (r=-0.31)
”I'm satisfied with our sex life” (r=-0.17)
”I think this relationship will last for a very long time” (r=-0.16)
The following was positively correlated with reporting cheating:
Total number of sexual partners (r=0.35)
”In a world where your partner was fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would you be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides your partner?” (r=0.32)
Reporting their partner has cheated (r=0.23)
”My partner doesn't sexually fulfill me” (r=0.18)
”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=0.16)
(I only included the strongest correlations; stuff that didn’t correlate as strongly or at all were all the other questions I asked about, like “how long did you wait before getting married” or “income”.)
Checking cheating rate by a few other things:
Interestingly, roughly 20% of males who strongly agreed with being satisfied in their sex lives, reported cheating.
Looks like amount of kids don’t seem to impact this too much in my data!
The full question here was “In a world where your partner was fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would you be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides your partner?”.
Yeah, if I had to squint I’d guess having an unsatisfactory sex life accounts for maybe 2x risk for cheating in males?
Anyway; the whole thing is pretty terrible, looks like quite a lot of males in long-term monogamous relationships are sexually unhappy.
I think the proper comparison is to see how satisfied or not men of similar ages are who have no relationship at all, and are single. We don't have that information.
I know plenty of single guys in their 40s and up who basically NEVER have sex...for months or years sometimes. Pretty sure they're not satisfied either.
Isn't it possible that satisfaction with your sex life just gets worse over time, for most people, after their 30s? Would that not be an unsurprising result? How many people even expect to still have sex after a certain age (55? 65? 75?). I would guess most of your respondents who have been relationships for more than 12 years are much older. And it is a very, very rare person indeed who thinks they are having hotter and more satisfying sex at 55 than at 30. I mean seriously, that's actually a ridiculous idea.
I would imagine if you polled people about their satisfaction with their financial lives, you would get almost opposite results, with older people and people in longer relationships being more satisfied than younger people and those in short relationships.
There's a time for everything.
Oh, and the question I've wondered about with all of this data is what's the correlation with how good looking respondents are on all of these? I thought I remembered you asking that question. Definitely would guess there's a strong correlation between being attractive and cheating.
My biggest thought here is that your 20% audience selection from porn is a little understated.
First, your close porn followers have continued following you for years after major porn activity, and stuck through your detailed discussions of sex work, invitations to kink parties/dates, etc.
Second, even if people don't know you from those sources originally, because your content is so sex focussed, it's almost like 80% of us know you from porn just based on the last few surveys.
While "everyone" uses porn, to engage on it in this level I would expect a higher level of focus than general population - we are the real porn experts at this point. And we real porn experts know about being poly and kinks and extramarital affairs.
I know this is the usual "not a random sample" issue, but it's still interesting.