Sexuality Stack Exchange Archive

Do older individuals engage in casual hookups as often as young adults and teens?

The hookup culture seems to occur only in teens and young adults, or perhaps academics mainly focus those groups because many academics work in universities, where people of those ages are very close to them and always available as participants for research?

I have heard of the Casual Sex Project, and I notice older single people do engage in casual sex, but the Casual Sex Project only has narratives, not statistics. So, it’s impossible to speculate the reasoning behind the behavior or extrapolate any meaningful information or correlations out of it.

Is it really true that older individuals engage in far less hookups than teens and young adults?

Answer 249

While I'm not finding an answer to your exact question in this, the AARP has sponsored several studies (one from 1999, another from 2010) which have some potentially relevant information. Quoting a few snippets from the latter:

Those with recent (but not current) sexual partnerships characterized those relationships as one-encounter partnerships (31 percent), casual relationships (28 percent), and relationships that have ended (21 percent). Women are more likely to have had a relationship that ended than men, who are more likely to have had casual or one-encounter “relationships.”

Of course, that's of people having sexual partnerships, and it doesn't have data with which to compare with young people. That said:

The frequency of intercourse definitely declines with age. (See Table 18.)

So, it would stand to reason that casual "hookups" would likely decline overall as well. However, the reasons for the decreases are complex, and the degree of decrease seems to be changing over time:

The sexual revolution continues in the older population as boomers continue to age. Opposition to sex among those who are not married is down by half over the past 10 years...

I don't happen to know of any research comparing the two directly, or even giving data about younger populations that could be compared. Perhaps such research is out there. What clearly can be said, though, is that single-encounter sexual acts definitely happen amongst older individuals.

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