‘There’s no way I could sneak someone into the house’: Why everyone is having sex outside on dates
With more and more of us living with our parents for longer, opportunity for sex is increasingly hard to come by — so, why not get creative?
Three years of oral examinations were perfect fodder for Ellie*, 25, to nurture a crush on her dentist — and, after running into him at a festival and shamelessly flirting, it turned out he felt the same. So, they finally bit the bullet and went on a first date. But when the end of the evening came, she didn’t want to invite him back to her house where she lives with her parents and older sister.
“We’ve been obsessed with each other since the day we met; there was lots of tension, lots of flirting, and obviously we wanted to do things,” says Ellie. “So we found a park bench that was secluded and dark, and he went down on me. A couple of weeks later we ended up on the bench again, and this time we had sex. I was wearing a skirt so it was pretty easy. It was fun, reckless, and stupid, and certainly isn’t going to be a regular thing, but there is something teenagery and nostalgic about it.”
Ellie isn’t the only one reverting to adolescent adventurousness with where she’s having have sex — according to a recent Lovehoney survey, 40% of young people say their living situation is directly impacting their love life. More than half (51%) of 18 to 24-year-olds and 38% of Gen Z live in shared living arrangements, with 37% and 27% respectively living with their parents, Lovehoney finds — and this is up 9.9% since 2014.
And fair enough, if you’re lucky enough to have a rent-free option, why wouldn’t you take it? We’re not exactly living through an economic boom. Salaries have been stagnant since the pandemic, the job market is increasingly difficult for young people to enter, and the cost of living and rent is so high that two in five workers have little to no money left after paying bills — and this continues to grow for those living in cities in particular. Add that to the already-existing intimacy crisis — fuelled by dating apps, polarised politics, and the lingering effects of the pandemic — and the possibility of sex becomes almost impossible.
Sharing a wall (or even a front door) with your parents and siblings while trying to navigate all certainly doesn’t help. Living with family isn’t exactly compatible with spontaneous sex, no matter your relationship status — 54% of young people wouldn’t have sex with a long-term partner under their parents’ roof. But it’s especially tricky if you’re having casual sex, or trying to, as 77% of young people wouldn’t bring back a one-night stand while other people are in the house.
Unsurprisingly, this means young people living with their family are having sex 49% less than the average person in the UK — or 35 times per year, compared to the national average of 68. But those who do manage to squeeze sexy time in are, like Ellie, often resorting to some whacky places: 22% say they have sex in the bathroom, 18% in their cars, and 28% in hotel rooms or Airbnbs.
Amber*, 27, tried the whole renting-a-hotel-every-other-week debacle in her last relationship, but now she’s single, she only has sex at sex parties. Although she works as a sex coach, and is open with her parents and brother about her job, she never brings partners home to their shared house. “Even though I’m very lucky to have a great relationship with everyone I live with, I just couldn’t bring someone home and say, ‘We’re not dating, we’re not together, we don’t do anything romantic and I don’t like them, I’m just sleeping with them’,” Amber says.
These close relationships also come with a lack of privacy. “My parents work from home, so everyone’s home all the time,” continues Amber. “We’re in and out of each others’ bedrooms.” Sneaking people into the house is simply not an option because someone is always home, she explains, and often her parents will be awake to make sure she comes home safe from a night out. To top it all off, their house has a doorbell with a camera on it that makes a noise every time you open and close the door. “There is just no way I could ever do it secretly, so now I just go to sex parties and that’s it.”
But it’s not like there’s a sex party happening every night. And, as a self-described “homebody”, Amber simply isn’t looking to go on dates — which she describes as “like asking me to go to war” — either. All of this means she’s had sex six individual times in the past 18 months. “For some people that’s a lot, for some people it’s not,” she says. “For me personally that’s only six.”
Credit: Cosmopolitan