Posted August 22, When people talk about sex outside of a relationship, a one-night stand with someone you just met is typically the first thing that comes to mind. It is the most iconic notion of casual sex, and perhaps the most uncomplicated, clear-cut case. In , a research team at Indiana University undertook an impressive sex study, surveying a nationally representative sample of over 5, U. In a paper published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine based on this sample, lead author Debbie Herbenick and her colleagues reported on the characteristics of last partnered sex among the 1, adults aged 18 to 59 who had had at least one partnered sex experience in the past year.
Only 8 percent of women and 11 percent of men reported their most recent sex to be with someone they'd just met, which makes up about 23 percent of all non-relationship partners. The vast majority of casual partners were someone known longer than a day.
The researchers also broke down the data by age category, but the results were fairly consistent: The percentage of those with a partner they "just met" exceeded 12 percent of the whole sample only among toyear-old women 14 percent and toyear-old men 17 percent. In all other age categories, the percentage hovered between 3 percent and 11 percent.
A second paper , by Vanessa Schick, focused on those age 60 to 94 from the same sample, and it indicated that this pattern was typical even later in life. Only about 10 percent of the men and 8 percent of the women in this group who were sexually active in the past year had their most recent sex with a new acquaintance.
These national data are consistent with other research among young people. Sociologist Heidi Lyons at Oakland University and her colleagues interviewed a random sample of young adults ages 18 to 22 in an Ohio county for a paper published in Sociological Perspectives. On average, people knew their partners for a couple of months before having sex with them, and 20 percent knew them a year or longer. For 61 percent of people, this was not the first time they had sex with that partner, and 65 percent had sex with an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend at some point.
