Statistical Evidence: 68 Most Common Reasons That Intimacy and Sex Stops in relationships (12 main factors)

This article provides the first quantitative evidence for the reason why intimacy and sex stops in a relationships.

The study used an exploratory approach to first detirmine all the possible reasons for why couples experience difficulties with sex and intimacy.

Quick facts:

• Lack of Effort is the #1 most common reason that sex stops (strongest correlation with no sex).
• Bad Sex does not influence the level of intimacy and sex in a relationship.
• Women report that Character Issues are most likely to destroy intimacy.

Methodology:

We conducted 40 qualitative in-person interviews (with 20 women and 20 men) allowing for the respondents to come up with new reasons and keeping any of our own biases out of the questioning.

Additionally we invited 128 respondents to an open-ended survey that allowed them to list alle the possible reasons for why they beleive intimacy stopped in their relationship.

By doing this we pinpointed 68 reasons for why intimacy stops – they can all be found in the table at the bottom of this article.

12 categories (main factors):

After pinpointing 68 reasons we grouped them in 12 categories – or “main factors” that a decriptors for between 3 to 13 different individual reasons each.

1. Lack of effort
2. Bad sex
3. Behavioral issues
4. Character issues
5. Fading away enthusiasm
6. Children
7. Social circle issues
8. Lack of personal time and space
9. Infidelity and abuse
10. Clinginess
11. Not monogamous
12. Long work hours

With these 12 main factores for why a relationship looses intimacy we set out to find out what factors are the most dangerous for the intimacy in a relationship.

What reasons are most likely to cause problems?

We conducted a quantitative survey where 1.099 respondents where collected (592 women, 507 men).

All respondents where asked on a 1-5 scale how much they agreed that each of the 68 reasons was likely to cause them difficulties in keeping an intimate relationship.

The scores for all factors are aggregated and weighted under each factor.

The mean scores for each factor is listed in the Table.

The results of what reasons people beleive are most likely to cause them difficulties in keeping an intimate relationship are listed in the below table:

How are they correlated with sex?

So, one thing is asking respondents what they beleive are the main reasons for why intimacy stops.

Another approach entirely is asking them about the factors and correlating them with scores on how much sex they actually have.

Doing this we only found significant correlations between 8 of the factors and the frequency of sex in the respondents relationship:

1. Fading away enthusiasm
2. Lack of personal time and space
3. Character issues
4. Infidelity and abuse
5. Children
6. Lack of effort
7. Not monogamous
8. Behavioral issues

Surprisingly a factor such as ‘Bad sex’ did not correlate significantly with loss of intimacy in a relationship!

The same goes for:

• Long work hours
• Clinginess
• Social circle issues

The largest effect size, and therefore biggest factor in why intimacy stops is “Lack of effort”.

12 Factors and The 68 Reasons