‘I feel a bit rusty’: Has Covid killed our sex lives?

T his year was meant to be a replay of the roaring 20s, your hot girl or boy summer. We’d be hedonistic, bacchanalian and, above all, getting laid. All the pent-up energy of lockdowns, the only time it has ever been illegal for people from different households to have sex, would explode in one helluva bonkbuster summer. But has it panned out that way? Or has Covid ruined our sex lives?

Have we really stopped having sex?

Every decade since 1990, the UK has carried out a detailed National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal). In 2020-21 it was replaced by the smaller Natsal-Covid study, which painted a complicated picture: of those in cohabiting relationships, 78% saw a change in their sex life, usually for the worse. One in 10 reported sexual difficulties that started or worsened in lockdown. Even though 63% reported some sexual activity, 75% of those who did were in a cohabiting relationship. Times have inevitably been even leaner for couples who weren’t living together. As for people who weren’t in a relationship, the lockdown months were a catastrophe: only one in 30 women and one in 10 men had a new sexual partner.

A rise in sexual activity can often be detected by a rise in STI rates, but these are hard to judge at present. Anecdotally, professionals have reported a jump. Will Nutland of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who is co-founder of the not-for-profit Love Tank, which researches health inequalities, says: “All my clinical colleagues have noted STIs rising. There’s been a big increase in syphilis, particularly among straight women.” But the general feeling is that Covid-driven lack of STI services means these are mostly stored-up cases from 2020. In summary: just as summer failed to materialise, so did the love.

Does long Covid kil l your mojo?

Short answer, probably. Robyn, 37, caught the virus last December, felt better in January, then found her symptoms coming back. “The main thing is dreadful fatigue and brain fog. I forgot my housemate’s name. I technically could go on a date, but I’ve barely enough energy to walk to the corner shop, let alone have sex.” And anyway, she adds: “I’ve got absolutely nothing to say for myself. My interests are napping and having baths. I’ve got no sparkling personality. Oh, and since December, I’ve had no sex drive at all.”

But Eleanor Draeger, a sexual health and HIV doctor, counsels against too much extrapolation. “People with all sorts of physical disabilities have sex, and long Covid is a physical disability. They may not be having hanging-from-the-chandelier sex, but they can still have sex.” However, she agrees that if low libido is a symptom, it will be pretty decisive.

How does fear of catching Covid affect our sex lives?

It’s not unreasonable to try to avoid catching Covid. Rose, 27, lives in Edinburgh and works in responsible investment, so uses the phrase “risk budget” more than most of us. But she says “I don’t want to waste that budget on spending time with anyone other than my friends.” She doesn’t want to try getting off with friends: “You’d ruin a friendship at a time when it’s so hard to make new ones?”

Has social distancing atrophied desire for intimacy ?

There’s a subtle but gigantic mental barrier to cross in going from two metres to zero millimetres apart. “People are not necessarily scared of Covid,” says Nutland. “They’ve just forgotten how to be close.” This doesn’t always have a sexual dimension – many people describe anxieties about everyday proximity and crowded spaces. “We’ve lost those social and sexual skills,” he adds, “though they’ll come back with a bit of time.”

Have lockdowns shaken our body confidence?

Nearly half of us – 48% – put on weight in lockdown, and 29% said they drank more. But that interacted with more nebulous feelings of pessimism and low self-esteem that come with too much time indoors. Jenny Keane, a sex educator who was running an online orgasm workshop when the pandemic broke out, says feedback she was getting “centred on low libido, lack of desire and low self-esteem, which are in a vicious circle.” So she tailored a course on “body confidence and sexual self-care”.

Not everyone sank into despair about their bodies. Anya, 38, is frustrated by the fact that she is in decent shape but there’s no one to appreciate it. “I wouldn’t get on Love Island, but I want someone to bear witness to the fact that I’m reasonably attractive and look good naked.”

Have we become obsessed with hygiene?

Sanitised sex is a contradiction in terms. It isn’t reasonable or possible to be intimate with someone while maintaining germ barriers. After 18 months of trying to keep ourselves physically separate, it is quite hard to stop seeing closeness as a threat. Draeger has seen this play out vividly in her clinical work, to the point where an STI diagnosis that wouldn’t normally have caused a huge amount of angst has had a hugely damaging effect. “People have told me having an STI felt really stressful in the context of Covid,” she says. “They just felt that everything was unclean.”

Phil Samba, 31, a researcher and campaigner who helps black gay men in particular access HIV and STI testing, says: “Suddenly the message was ‘Just wank.’ That really irritated me. That didn’t work during the HIV/Aids pandemic, and it wasn’t going to work now.” But it was still “very triggering” for people who lived through the HIV epidemic. Samba says: “People were dying of a mystery virus spread through interaction, and it put people back into that 1980s fear.”

Are we all just happier staying at home now?

Alan, 50,

says: “I’ve got so used to pottering about my flat that I think, ‘Yeah, that’s my life now.’” Greg, 45, divorced with two children, ended a relationship at the start of lockdown partly because his kids, 10 and 12, were not happy about it. “Now I can’t even go to work without the dog going up the wall. Everybody’s got used to this cocooned, slightly selfish world. I’d struggle to bring anybody else into my life. I was supposed to be having a date tonight, but I don’t really fancy it. I feel a bit rusty.”

Saturday magazine