Men’s sexual desire peaks around age 40, large new study finds

An analysis of the Estonian Biobank data found that men report substantially higher sexual desire than women. Sexual desire declined with age, more steeply for women, and it was associated with a bisexual or pansexual orientation, recent childbirth, and relationship satisfaction. The paper was published in Scientific Reports.

Sexual desire is a vital component of human romantic relationships and is crucial for overall well-being. It is the feeling of wanting sexual closeness, sexual activity, or sexual pleasure. It can involve thoughts, fantasies, bodily sensations, emotions, attraction to another person, or a general wish for sexual stimulation.

Sexual desire is influenced by hormones, brain activity, physical health, mood, relationship quality, past experiences, culture, and personal values. Some people feel sexual desire mainly after emotional closeness, while others feel it in a wider range of situations and conditions. Stress, tiredness, depression, anxiety, medication, illness, conflict, and low self-esteem can all reduce sexual desire. In general, different people naturally have different baseline levels of sexual desire.

Study author Toivo Aavik, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and his colleagues investigated differences in sexual desire across various demographic groups and its associations with the characteristics of a person’s romantic relationship. More specifically, they were interested in how sexual desire varies with age, gender, relationship status, sexual orientation, recent childbirth, number of children, relationship satisfaction, education, and occupation.

“A lot of sexuality research still relies on relatively small or highly specific samples, and many findings about sexual desire are discussed almost as if they were settled facts despite the evidence often being fragmented or inconsistent,” Aavik explained. “We wanted to take a step back and ask a fairly basic question: how much of sexual desire can actually be explained by simple demographic and relationship variables when examined together in a very large population sample? The Estonian Biobank gave us a rare opportunity to do this with over 67,000 participants.”

The Estonian Biobank is a large national research database that stores genetic, health, and lifestyle information from volunteer participants to support medical and population-health research. It encompasses approximately 20% of Estonian adult residents or past residents, who are referred to as “gene donors.”

The data used in this particular analysis came from 67,334 individuals, 70% of whom were women. The data included an assessment of sexual desire based on two items: “I have strong sexual urges” and “I do not think much about sex.” The survey also captured participants’ age, gender, educational attainment, marital status, sexual orientation, number of children, and whether they had a child during the past year. Participants also answered a question about their occupation, choosing from ten predefined categories.

Results showed that 74% of participants lived with a partner, 5% had a child in the past year, and 95% identified as heterosexual.

Men reported substantially stronger sexual desire than women across almost the entire adult lifespan.

“The biggest takeaway is probably that gender and age matter quite a lot for sexual desire at the population level, more than many people might expect,” Aavik told PsyPost. “Men reported substantially higher sexual desire than women across most of adulthood, and women’s desire showed a steeper decline with age. At the same time, these are average differences — there is still enormous variation within both genders, and many women report higher desire than many men.”

In fact, men’s sexual desire peaked around age 40, while women’s desire steadily decreased starting in early adulthood.

“One thing that surprised us was that men’s sexual desire appeared to peak around their late 30s or early 40s rather than simply decline steadily with age,” Aavik noted. “That pattern does not map neatly onto testosterone trajectories, so it suggests that relational or social factors may also play a substantial role in sustaining desire.”

Bisexual and pansexual individuals tended to report stronger sexual desire than heterosexual individuals, while asexual individuals, as expected, reported lower desire. Participants who had welcomed a child within the past year actually reported slightly higher sexual desire, though this may be because new parents are typically younger.

The study revealed complex interactions between gender and parenthood. Male participants with a higher number of children tended to report higher sexual desire. In contrast, women with a higher number of children tended to report somewhat lower sexual desire.

Relationship status also showed a gender divide. The gender gap in sexual desire was larger among partnered individuals than among single people. Individuals who were more satisfied with their relationships tended to report higher sexual desire, but this link was much stronger among women.

Interestingly, men who classified their occupation as sales workers tended to report higher sexual desire compared to male senior officials or managers, while female sales workers tended to report lower sexual desire compared to female senior officials or managers. The situation was the same with male and female skilled workers and craftsmen, though this effect disappeared after including relationship satisfaction in the prediction model.

“These findings provide the most comprehensive account to date of how basic demographic and relational variables jointly shape sexual desire in the general population, offering a robust foundation for theory development and applied sexual health research,” the study authors concluded in the paper.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of personal and relational characteristics associated with sexual desire, revealing that basic demographic factors account for nearly 30% of the variance in a person’s sex drive.

“Another important point is that demographic variables alone explained almost 30% of the variance in sexual desire, which is actually quite a lot for population-level psychological research,” Aavik said. “That said, sexual desire is clearly not reducible to just biology or demographics — relationship dynamics, personality, mental health, culture, and individual experiences also matter.”

It should be noted that the study only included residents of Estonia, a small European country. Furthermore, the measurement of desire relied on just two self-reported questions.

“Our measure of sexual desire was intentionally simple because this was part of a very large biobank survey, not a dedicated sexuality study. So we captured a broad, general component of desire rather than distinguishing between things like solitary vs. dyadic desire or partner-specific desire,” Aavik explained.

Additionally, the reliance on self-reporting leaves room for bias.

“These are self-report data, which means that responses may partly reflect how comfortable people are admitting or labeling their own sexual desire,” Aavik said. “For example, it is entirely possible that some women underestimate or underreport their level of desire due to social expectations or norms around sexuality. Our future studies should therefore combine self-reports with partner reports or other external assessments to get a more nuanced picture. Also, these are correlational data. We can describe population-level patterns and associations, but we cannot make strong causal claims about why these differences exist.”

Moving forward, the researchers hope to build upon this foundational data to explore the complex, shifting nature of human intimacy.

“One important next step is integrating psychological variables — especially personality traits, relationship processes, and mental health — into the same models,” Aavik said. “Demographics explained a surprisingly large amount of variance, but clearly not all of it. I’m particularly interested in studying the ‘visibility’ of sexual desire — in other words, how accurately partners perceive each other’s level of desire (we already have this data), and how those perceptions shape relationship dynamics. I also want to examine how personality traits and major life events influence desire over time, because sexual desire is clearly not a static trait. It changes across life stages and relational contexts, but we still understand surprisingly little about those longer-term dynamics.”

The paper, “Associations of Sexual Desire with Demographic and Relationship Variables,” was authored by Toivo Aavik, Karin Täht, Uku Vainik, and René Mõttus.