But not everyone thought this was likely. Last year, we were supposed to have a hot girl/boy summer: an explosion of promiscuity and random, meaningless, one-off sexual encounters. These minuscule considerations of pride and humiliation are obviated when everyone states their intentions in their profile.
From memory, one-night stands are often rooted in pre-emptive face-saving: you don’t revisit in case the other person thinks you are more serious than they are. ‘In your 20s, you’d go into a bar, lock eyes with the one you wanted a one-night stand with and go home with him.’ Photograph: Image Source/Getty Imagesīut perhaps the more important impact is that online dating has ushered in structured communication about what people actually want from sex: whether they want something long-term or no-strings. When you can make the first move on your phone and experience any rejection at one remove, what is to stop you making moves all the time? We think of apps as opening up a world in which more people can connect more easily, with less risk of humiliation, which therefore results in vastly increased numbers of one-off sexual encounters. “And dating apps don’t facilitate one-night stands like mums think.” “It’s very rare to get hit on in real life these days,” adds a female foot soldier in Keane’s Instagram army. You can sleep with someone you’ve just met, knowing you don’t want to take it any further, in a way you wouldn’t with a friend.”’ “Someone would know someone else from another group, the two groups would merge – that used to happen all the time. “Until now, I don’t think I’d ever been out for an evening and ended up just with the people I went out with,” says Jess, 27, from Edinburgh. Where does someone look if they do want a one-stand? Not in bars, apparently. “Obviously, I’m nearly 50 I didn’t think I could do that kind of thing again.” Now, however, she is having two casual “ongoing encounters”, which are “absolutely perfect”, she says. “In your 20s, you’d go into a bar and you’d lock eyes with the one you wanted a one-night stand with, and you’d go home with him,” she says. This has been the experience of Marie, 48, who is recently divorced. In sum, there has been no shortage of sexual activity among single people there is just less churn, which is to say the pace of relationships has changed from a mayfly’s to a caterpillar’s.
Those most likely to have had any physical contact in the four months since lockdown – most likely to have had penetrative sex, most likely to have had sex several times a week or every day, most likely to have sex toys, and most likely to report an improved sex life during the pandemic – were those in the “casual” bracket (having sex but not in a settled relationship). A survey found that 25% of single people felt ‘out of practice’ after so many months of social distancing When they drilled down into these, they discovered patterns that would certainly have surprised and discomfited the health secretary (unless that health secretary was Matt Hancock, who has not been a model of sexual restraint). The researchers then divided the responses into four groups: those not in a relationship and not having sex those not in a relationship but having sex those in a relationship and living apart and those in a cohabiting relationship. Fair enough: it was the start of lockdown and no one was meant to be doing anything with anyone they didn’t live with. In 2020, the usual face-to-face fieldwork was interrupted by Covid, but the web-based study that replaced it found a precipitous drop in the number of sexually active people reporting a new sexual partner over the previous four weeks, down by half (from 8% to 4%). The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) is a huge-sample longitudinal study that has taken place every 10 years since 1990. While it is difficult to separate the immediate pandemic effects from long-term trends, the one-night stand has been replaced by encounters that may still be casual, but aren’t total one-offs: the friendship with benefits, if you like, or the “situationship”.