Does Casual Sex Make Us Miserable? Here’s What the Science Has to Say.
Does casual sex really make us miserable? Some science suggests so, but there’s much more to the story than meets the eye.
Casual sex can be really depressing.
There aren’t many things in life that can hit you right in the feels, quite like the aftermath of a casual sex experiment that didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. What do I mean by that? I’ll speak for myself and say that a lot of times I’ve explored casual sex adventures, I was chasing certain feelings that didn’t come to fruition when my hookup was complete. I wanted closeness, intimacy, and, perhaps, even a fleeting glimpse of love on a deep level.
Instead, I often ended up with a sinking feeling of worthlessness or depression. In the past, casual sex has sometimes been a wonderful experience where I felt like I connected with someone amazing — but, sometimes, it’s also been the kind of experience that left me wondering, “Is this it? Is this all I’m good for?”
Casual sex reminds us of our place. It reminds us that we haven’t found someone to settle down with, and it sometimes brings us back to the cold, harsh feeling of complete unlovability. It’s like a drug that covers up the pain momentarily, only to wear off and leave us feeling the agony sevenfold once it’s gotten out of our systems.
In casual sex, we get a brief reprieve from our questions of self-worth, from our nagging voice that reminds us that we’re still single — and likely to stay that way — and from our sexual-physical disconnect with the world, but when the temporary fix wears off, the pain usually hurts worse.
One-night stands are a bit like stale corn chips. On the outside, everything appears just right. But the moment you take a bite out of it, you quickly realize that something is a bit off. It might have all the usual delicious flavors of a regular corn chip, but you come to find out the texture is different the moment it crumbles in your mouth.
But on the flip side, casual sex can be mesmerizing, especially if we have it with friends or people we genuinely care about — and we know and respect our emotional limits.
So what gives? What makes the difference between good sex with friends and strangers and bad sex with friends and strangers? Fortunately, science has the answer.
The Mixed Bag of Research
Tracing the research back to 2009, studies over the past decade have sought to clarify the relationship between casual sex and mental health. One study, titled Casual Sex and Psychological Health Among Young Adults: Is Having “Friends with Benefits” Emotionally Damaging?, studied casual sex among young, college-aged adults.
The study asked a diverse group of 1,311 sexually active young adults about their sex lives. 20% of them reported that their latest sexual encounters had been of the casual variety. 29% of men and 14% of women reported having had casual sex in their most recent encounters.
The study concluded that there was no relationship between mental health or wellbeing and casual sex, saying:
Young adults who engage in casual sexual encounters do not appear to be at greater risk for harmful psychological outcomes than sexually active young adults in more committed relationships.
Skip forward to 2014, and another study found the opposite. This study asked 3,907 diverse young people aged 18–25 about their sex lives to learn the psychological impact of casual sex. The study asked them other questions to gauge their self-esteem, life satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, eudaemonic wellbeing, depression, general anxiety, and social anxiety.
Casual sex was negatively correlated with psychological wellbeing and positively associated with psychological distress, meaning participants who reported more casual sex reported less psychological wellbeing and more psychological distress.
As the study says:
Mean comparisons conducted using the sandwich estimator indicated that college students who had recently engaged in casual sex reported lower levels of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and happiness compared to those students who had not had casual sex in the past 30 days. Casual sex was also positively associated with a psychological distress latent variable (ß = .16, p < .001). College students who had recently engaged in casual sex reported higher levels of general anxiety, social anxiety, and depression compared to college students who had not had recent casual sex.
Making Sense of Conflicting Data
At this point, you may be wondering why there’s a contradiction here. I could go on listing study after study that yields results pointing one way or the other, and you could use those studies as evidence to confirm your preexisting suspicions that casual sex is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the worst thing to happen since the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
But further studies have elucidated the differences in outcomes, telling us what makes casual sex magnificent or intolerable.
Another 2014 study did the same thing as the prior studies mentioned, only they took it a step further. They asked the students what they wanted out of sexual experiences. They asked them about their sociosexual orientation, which measures how open to having multiple partners someone is versus how much they want to tie down for life with just one partner.
And, sure enough, the people who scored high in sociosexual orientation were positively correlated with feelings of happiness, wellbeing, and satisfaction from casual sex. In contrast, people who scored low on sociosexual orientation were more likely to experience the adverse side effects of casual sex, such as depression, anxiety, and a lack of wellbeing.
While this may seem obvious, there’s a bit more to it than just saying, “The people who want to have casual sex end up having better experiences with casual sex than the people who don’t want to have casual sex.”
This is so obvious, it’s a cliché.
But how many people have you known in a weird state of erotic limbo? Have you ever seen someone who desired something resembling love, sex, affection, closeness, security, passion, carnal desire, and more, but they didn’t know what?
I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve gone around telling themselves they wanted to have wild, raging hookups and sex flings, but really, they were covering up the pain of unrequited love — or being dumped.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve gone around like Don Juan, claiming to look for the deepest, profound love, when really, they were in search of brief, sensual, sexual encounters and nothing more.
The reality is, a lot of us are walking around confused about what we want. And to make matters worse, we’re inundated with a lot of messages about how sex and relationships ought to be, which only further adds to the confusion of being human and often having conflicting drives.
We want security, but we want novelty. We want passionate, simple sex without complications, but we also want to be loved and know someone is looking out for us, someone who has our back through life’s rough patches.
It seems to me, that in endeavors of both love and sex, the people who wind up having the best experiences are the people who have themselves the most figured out. Granted, there are things like sexual assault, ending up with a bad sex (or romantic) partner, and unearthing old trauma, things that are largely outside our control that can make either experience worse.
But overwhelmingly, the way to having enjoyable casual sex, reaping the psychological benefits of happiness, an improved sense of purpose and wellbeing, and sucking the sweet nectar of joy out of our experiences in life, depends heavily on whether we know what we want and are acting accordingly.
Chasing love by using sex as a tool to get it isn’t a recipe for happiness, but neither is chasing sex by using love as a tool to get it. Being confused about whether we want sex, love, or something in between can also have deleterious effects on our mental health.
So ask yourself, what is it that you truly want out of your relationships? If you were able to sit on Santa’s lap and ask for everything you wanted out of a romantic or erotic relationship, what would you ask for?
Science suggests that thinking long and hard about this might make you happier in the long run.
Thank you for reading. Sign up to my Medium email list, so you don’t miss a beat, and check out my new Substack publication, The Science of Sex, where I discuss these topics frequently. There’s free content as well as exclusive paid content coming shortly, so you can better understand sexuality through the power of science.
I recommend checking out the excellent book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire, which can be found here on Amazon.
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