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What the Data Actually Says About Sex, Timing, and the Story We’re All Still Telling

On late-in-life dating, cultural mythology, and why the rest of us might be reading from an old script.

Summary

We have a story about when things are supposed to happen. First kiss, first heartbreak, first sexual experience — there’s a rough cultural timetable for all of it, and most people carry it around without ever having agreed to it. The timetable gets absorbed, the way most assumptions do: through proximity, through the behavior of people around you, through what nobody questions.

The data is no longer supporting the story.

Dr. Emma’s Latest Rabbit Hole

What I came back from a recent retreat wanting to dig into — because someone mentioned it offhand and I spent the rest of the week in a research rabbit hole — is a pattern that’s been emerging in the numbers for nearly a decade. The National Survey of Family Growth, published by the CDC, shows a measurable shift in when people in the United States are starting to have sex.

The Data

The 2023 data, compared against 2013, shows sexlessness among men rising from four percent to ten percent, and among women from five percent to seven percent. The percentage of people who hadn’t had sex in the previous twelve months moved from nine to twenty-four percent in men, and from eight to thirteen percent in women. The first significant spike in these numbers appears between 2017 and 2019 — before COVID had anything to do with it.

The average age of first sexual contact has shifted toward the mid-twenties. A decade ago, we were talking about the mid-teens.

This is not a fringe finding. It’s not an outlier. It is a substantial, documented change in human behavior — and the cultural narrative has not caught up.

That gap is what this episode is actually about.

What does it mean to be late?

When Dr. Alivia Stehlik and I started pulling on this thread, what we kept arriving at was the word late. Late to dating, late to sex, late in life — as if there’s an appointment somewhere on a shared calendar that a significant portion of the population has quietly missed. The term “late-in-life virgin” carries an image with it that is rarely generous. And yet if we take the data seriously, the people being described by that term are increasingly not a marginal population. They are, in some meaningful sense, operating closer to where human behavior is actually landing.

“Late” is a story. And like most stories, it belongs to a particular time and place.

Cultural milestones influence perception of lateness

This runs throughout the episode: the way milestones shift depending on when and where you were raised. The women who were considered past their prime marrying age by twenty in an earlier century. The Aggie ring culture that expected engagement before graduation. The LDS university with married housing for undergraduates. The Northeast, where finishing graduate school before marrying felt self-evident. These are not aberrations. They are what the word “on time” actually means — locally, contingently, inside a particular story that someone else wrote before you arrived.

Which raises a question worth taking seriously: if the story is that outdated, who is actually off script?

The clinical piece — and this is where the conversation gets most important to me — is what happens to the person who has absorbed a timetable they never chose. The client who looked across the room at me and said, who’s going to want me now? That moment stayed with me.

The Myth of Lateness

The myth of lateness does damage that the data alone cannot undo. Knowing that the numbers have shifted doesn’t immediately dissolve the feeling that you missed something, that you are somehow less than what you should have been by now.

What I find useful, clinically, is the distinction between two very different kinds of readiness. There’s wanting something — the desire that is already there, already alive, already telling you something. And there’s competency readiness — the sense that you won’t embarrass yourself, that you’ll be good at it, that you’ll know what you’re doing. For most of the Type A++ people I work with, those two things get collapsed into one. They assume that wanting and being ready are the same question, when in fact they’re barely related. You can want something fully and not yet be competent at it. That’s not a problem. That’s how most worthwhile things begin.

Singles in America Survey

The Singles in America survey — run by Match.com in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute — adds another layer of pressure to all of this. Their most recent findings: fifty-two percent of daters report that vanilla sex is a dealbreaker. Among Gen Z, sixty-four percent say a partner who is content with vanilla sex is a dealbreaker. These are not numbers I’m presenting as discouraging. I’m presenting them because if you are someone standing at the entrance to the dating world — for the first time, or again after a long absence — and these are the numbers floating around in the culture, no wonder it feels like a test you didn’t study for. No wonder readiness feels like a destination you can’t quite reach.

Part Two takes up what to do with that feeling, and the clinical room starts to come into focus around three people who are navigating it differently. But the question I want to leave Part One on is the one Dr. Alivia named toward the end of our conversation: the anticipatory feeling that comes with being on the cusp of something is not the same as anxiety in the clinical sense. English collapses them into the same word — but the German philosophers had a different one. Angst. Little-a. The normal, bodily, utterly human experience of standing at the edge of something new and feeling the weight of it. That is not a disorder. That is not a sign you are not ready. That is, in Alivia’s words, universal.

If you have ever sat with that feeling and wondered whether it meant something was wrong with you — it didn’t.

Noteworthy Moments

• “Late is a story. It’s based on a social contract that somebody else wrote.”
• “I don’t believe people are broken. They’re off script.”
• “We’re reading from an old script — because human behavior isn’t matching what we’re saying.”
• “There’s no such thing as safe, spontaneous kink.”
• “Angst is universal.”

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Chapters

• 00:00 — Welcome back, and what a week away surfaces
• 02:25 — The data: sexlessness, shifting timelines, and what the CDC numbers actually say
• 04:02 — Why the first spike appeared before COVID
• 08:00 — AI companions, dating app shame, and what gets disclosed late
• 13:33 — What does “late” even mean? The cultural mythology of timing
• 22:48 — Who’s gonna want me now: the cost of the lateness myth
• 27:05 — Wanting vs. readiness as competence — two different questions
• 29:53 — The Singles in America data: vanilla sex, Gen Z, and why the numbers are daunting
• 38:18 — Finding your people: dating without the apps, and what actually works
• 39:50 — Angst vs. anxiety: naming the thing correctly

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The Receipts

If you love when things get EXTRA nerdy, this section of the show notes is for you!

National Survey of Family Growth, CDC — the source behind the statistics in this episode. Worth reading directly rather than through the coverage.

Singles in America, Match.com and the Kinsey Institute — the annual survey on contemporary dating behavior, including the figures on sexual expectations.

Rollo May, Love and Will — for the philosophical ground underneath all of it: what happens to eros inside a culture organized around productivity, achievement, and the relentless forward motion of getting things done on time.

Keywords: relationships, curiosity, intimacy, long-term love, connection, love maps, bids for connection, vulnerability, desire, communication