How Many Sexual Partners Do People Have?

Is that correct?

We have National Health Stats Reports for the US (although I think the numbers would probably vary a lot by state, by city, by town, by neighborhood, etc.)

But this study interviews (in person) 13,000 men and women. The interviews are anonymous, and the survey response rate is around 75 percent (considered a fairly high rate).

It only gives data on ages 15-44 (and this one was done in 2006-2008):

The average is 3 or so people for women. For men, 5 or so people.

But averages don’t really mean much, I think, because how many of us date The National Average. We date individuals.

So how many people out there can we find that have had 1 partner? 0? Over 15?

Well, 10 percent of people 15 to 44 have never had sex.

Around 15 percent of men and over 20 percent of women have only had 1 partner. Then comes the average numbers. Around 30 percent of people of these ages have had 3-6 partners. Then the number drops off a bit. Around 30 percent of women have had 7-over 15 partners (mostly 7-14 partners). Around 40 percent have had that many. Only around 8 percent of women have had sex with more than 15 partners (although from social media I’ve heard MUCH higher numbers from women, and it doesn’t seem uncommon. The comments on the stats also were from a lot of people who said their numbers were WAY higher. There was a LOT of doubt about the national survey numbers, and criticism that the age range was so broad.)

Another note that might be interesting to you: of those people who’ve had more than 15 partners, a lot of those are people who were married and separated/divorced and are currently not living with someone.

Here’s some interesting things though written by active people:

“I’m 22 and I’ve been with 50 guys since I was 17. My experience is that it just becomes smoother & more natural to go from kissing to sex the more you do it. However I have also found that the more people I sleep with the harder I find it to get turned on by the same guy. Being with someone new is the only thing that excites me now & it saddens me and worries me that I won’t be able to settle down in the future. I actually wish I’d been more careful & selective in the past and kept sex special. I have been abused before though, and I think that is what led me to stop viewing sex as “special”, I partly became promiscuous to numb & block out the bad memories.”

“I’m 51 and my number of partners has been 3 but I consider myself asexual, and I can tell you I had been under tremendous pressure in my younger years to have sex. I was date raped once and assaulted twice but I managed to get away on the last two. There is a lot of pressure on “nice girls” by some men who I would call “sexual predators” because they just want to have sex with as many women as possible.”

“I’m 33 and have been with roughly 60+ partners (mostly male; I am counting both genders). interestingly, my number was 10 when i got married, and around 50 when we divorced–he was gay and I am not and we both needed outlets.”