A recent study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy suggests that over half of adults worry about their sex drive, with most concerns centering on having a libido that feels too low or fails to match a partner’s level of desire. The findings provide evidence that everyday stressors, mental health challenges, and relationship dynamics play a major role in how people perceive their own sexual desire. This research helps explain the wide variety of ways individuals experience and interpret changes in their sexual motivation.
Sexual desire is generally understood as a person’s internal motivation to seek out sexual experiences or pleasure. This motivation can manifest as an interest in engaging in sexual activities with others, solo activities like masturbation, or simply experiencing sexual fantasies. A person’s level of desire tends to fluctuate over time. These changes can happen from day to day, or they can shift broadly across different life stages.
Recognizing that sexual desire naturally goes up and down, professionals in psychology and medicine have recently pushed to normalize these variations. They want to move away from treating a fluctuating sex drive as a medical problem. Despite this push, concerns about mismatched sexual desire remain one of the most common reasons couples seek therapy. Discrepancies in desire often link to lower relationship satisfaction and can create significant tension between partners.
Previous research has focused heavily on extremely low desire or situations where partners have mismatched sex drives. In doing so, this past work has left a gap in understanding how everyday individuals personally view and worry about their own libido outside of a clinical setting.
“Sexual desire concerns are one of the most common reasons people seek sex or couples therapy, yet most research has focused on low desire itself or differences in desire between partners,” said Caroline F. Pukall, a professor of psychology and Canada Research Chair in Sexual Health at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Pukall is also the editor of a textbook on human sexuality and director of the the Sexual Health Research Lab.
“We wanted to better understand how people personally think about and worry about their libido, including what makes them concerned and how those concerns vary across different relationship statuses, genders, and sexual orientations,” Pukall said. “More broadly, we were interested in moving beyond a purely clinical lens to understand everyday experiences of sexual desire.”
Much of the existing literature also centers on heterosexual, cisgender individuals who are currently in relationships. Cisgender refers to people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. The authors of the current study wanted to look at a wider range of experiences to see how people think about their own sexual desire across different demographic groups.
To gather this information, the researchers conducted a mixed-method online survey. A mixed-method approach means the survey included both multiple-choice questions with set answers and open-ended questions where participants could type out their own thoughts.
“One aspect of the study that I particularly value is the mixed-method approach,” Pukall said. “The quantitative data allowed us to identify broad patterns, and participants’ written responses provided rich context about how people experience desire in their everyday lives.”
The team recruited participants by advertising the survey on the social media platforms of the popular science podcast Science Vs. This approach yielded a total sample of 1,317 adults. The final sample included a diverse range of ages, though most participants were younger than 40.
About 55 percent of the sample identified as women, while about 40 percent identified as men. The remaining participants identified as nonbinary or agender. Regarding sexual orientation, about 70 percent identified as heterosexual, and the rest identified as bisexual, pansexual, queer, gay, lesbian, or asexual. Nearly 80 percent of the participants were currently in a committed relationship.
The participants answered a series of questions regarding their perceived level of sexual desire. They also noted how often they engaged in sexual activity over the past year, using a scale from never to every day. They then answered how often they actually wanted to engage in sexual activity during that same timeframe.
The survey also asked them whether they had ever worried about their libido. This section prompted them to identify the reasons for their worry and what specifically bothered them about their experiences. The researchers found that 57.1 percent of the total sample reported worrying about their level of libido.
“One finding that stood out was how many participants were worried about their libido,” Pukall told PsyPost. “More than half of the sample reported having concerns.”
Among those who worried, the most common concern was that their libido seemed too low, which was reported by 47.5 percent of the worried group. Another 42.4 percent worried because their libido did not match their partner’s level of desire. Only 7.6 percent of these participants reported worrying that their sex drive was too high.
When asked what bothered them most about experiencing low libido, the top response was a feeling that they were not satisfying their partner. Almost half of the respondents also noted that they simply missed how sexual they used to feel.
“We were also struck by how often people’s worries centered not only on themselves, but on how their desire affected their relationships, particularly concerns about satisfying a partner or managing differences in desire,” Pukall added. Participants commonly attributed their low libido to mental health issues, with 44.3 percent selecting this as a reason.
Other popular reasons included being unhappy with their body and experiencing side effects from medications. “Another notable finding was the extent to which participants linked low libido to mental health, stress, exhaustion, and parenting responsibilities, highlighting how connected sexual well-being is to overall well-being,” Pukall said.
The study also revealed several demographic differences in how people perceive their sex drives. Gender was moderately associated with libido ratings. Men were more likely to report having a high libido, while women were more likely to report having a low libido.
Women were also significantly more likely than men to report worrying about their sex drive. Relationship status played a role in these concerns as well. Participants who were in relationships, particularly those in relationships lasting between one and fifteen years, were more likely to report low libido and express worry about it.
Age did not seem to impact how people rated their libido or how much they worried about it. Interestingly, while the researchers did not find differences in the actual levels of libido between heterosexual and sexually minoritized participants, the minoritized group did report higher levels of worry about their sex drive.
“The biggest takeaway is that concerns about libido are extremely common, and many people worry about whether their desire is ‘normal,’” Pukall said. “Participants frequently described concerns about having lower desire than they wanted, changes in desire over time, or differences between their own desire and a partner’s.”
“Importantly, our findings reinforce that variation in sexual desire is a typical part of human experience, and that factors such as stress, mental health, relationship dynamics, major life transitions, and parenting can all influence desire,” she added. “Although some group differences emerged, many of the statistical effects were relatively small, suggesting that individual experiences and life circumstances may be more important than broad demographic categories alone.”
In the open-ended responses, a smaller subset of participants elaborated on their personal struggles. Many described their libido as wildly inconsistent, disappearing for weeks at a time before returning. Others explained that pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding drastically reduced their sexual desire.
“Those responses consistently highlighted themes of uncertainty, fluctuation, stress, mental health, parenting, and relationship dynamics, reminding us that sexual desire is deeply embedded within the broader context of people’s lives and relationships,” Pukall noted. Some participants pointed to intense stress, busy lifestyles, and chronic exhaustion as major factors that ruined their mood for intimacy.
Some participants also shared that low libido negatively impacted their sexual self-esteem, making them feel undesirable or unworthy of their partners. A few individuals even disclosed that their low sex drive made them worry they would be pressured into unwanted sexual activity just to keep a partner happy. Others highlighted cultural factors, such as growing up in religious environments that promoted abstinence, which made it hard for them to enjoy intimacy later in life.
While this study provides an informative look into how people view their own sexual desire, it has some limitations. Pukall warned that the findings do not necessarily represent the exact prevalence of these issues in the wider public.
“One important caveat is that this study should not be interpreted as showing how common libido concerns are in the general population,” Pukall said. “Participants were recruited through a podcast audience and voluntarily chose to complete a survey about libido, so the sample is not representative of all adults.”
Pukall also emphasized that experiencing a dip in sexual motivation is not automatically a bad thing. “I would also caution against interpreting low desire as inherently problematic,” she explained. “Our findings suggest that distress often stems from uncertainty, social expectations, relationship concerns, or life circumstances rather than from any objective standard of what libido ‘should’ be.”
The researchers used the terms sex drive and libido interchangeably without providing a strict definition for the participants. This means participants may have interpreted the questions differently based on their own personal definitions. The study also did not separate spontaneous desire, which happens out of nowhere, from responsive desire, which occurs in reaction to a sexual situation.
Another limitation involves the survey questions themselves. The researchers created their own questions rather than using established psychological questionnaires. This choice allowed them to tailor the survey to their specific goals, but it makes it harder to compare these findings directly to older studies.
Social expectations and pressures could have also influenced how people answered the survey. For example, cultural norms often pressure men into reporting high levels of sexual desire to appear more masculine. These types of social pressures can create response bias in surveys where people self-report their behaviors and feelings.
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to address these methodological constraints. “An important next step is using more comprehensive, validated measures to better capture the many dimensions of sexual desire,” Pukall said.
“We would also like to examine these experiences in larger and more diverse samples so we can better understand differences across specific gender identities, sexual orientations, cultural contexts, and life stages.” The ultimate goal is to translate these insights into better support systems for individuals navigating changes in their sex drives.
These efforts could help therapists and educators better assist people experiencing distress. “Ultimately, we hope this work contributes to educational and clinical approaches that normalize variation in desire while helping people communicate more effectively about sexual needs and expectations,” Pukall said.
The study, “Worrying About Low Libido: A Mixed-Method Evaluation of Sexual Desire Across Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Relationship Status,” was authored by Julianna T. Park, Samantha L. Levang, Melody Garas, Blythe Terrell, Wendy Zukerman, and Caroline F. Pukall.