The “Sex & Intimacy Concerns and Desires Survey”
I’m conducting an ongoing survey of subscribers to my online offerings. See the survey and take it yourself.
What are the demographics of the survey respondents?
Currently, of nearly 1,000 respondents to date:
Country:
Approximately 50% are from the US and Canada. The rest are widely spread, internatonally.
Gender:
45% are men, and 55% are women. There are a handful who selected “transgender” or “other.”
Sexual Orientation:
96.2% prefer sex primarily with the opposite gender, 3.8% are bi-sexual or prefer the same sex or “other.”
Age:
19% of the women are in their 30s, 32.3% are in their 40s, and almost 30.7% in their 50s.
The men tend to be slightly older, with 11.3% in their 30s, 22.9% in their 40s, 39.4% in their 50s, and 19.4% in their 60s.
Relationship Status and Interest:
72.2% are in an intimate relationship, and 93.9% are motivated to improve their love life. Of course, the nature of this survey is to self-select people who are interested in improving their love lives, because they signed up for one or more of my offerings.
Design of the Survey:
Before I developed the survey, I did phone interviews with 10 individuals to get more in-depth understanding and to help me create the survey. I found these folks by sending an email to a random 100 or so people on my list, and took those who replied.
The survey consists of:
- 5 demographic questions,
- 3 “yes, no, not sure” questions about how they felt about improving their love lives,
- 19 questions are multiple choice on a Likert scale. The answer choices on the scale were:
- Extremely important
- Important
- Nice but not Important
- I don’t care
- I don’t want this
- N/A
and
- 2 open-ended fill-in questions (exact wording below) for more in-depth understanding of the desires and concerns of the survey respondents.
Although responses were required only for the demographic questions, nearly everyone answered all the questions.
What were the main themes that emerged?
So let’s start with the multiple choice, because that’s where a big surprise jumped out at me.
A desire for deeper intimacy during lovemaking was the biggest trend for both men and women.
Given that the common perception is that women want intimacy and men want hot physical sex, I think the most surprising finding is the men in this survey overwhelmingly rated the most important thing on the list as “deep intimacy during sex.” 93.8% of men rated deep intimacy during sex as extremely important or important (almost as high as for women, with 95.7 %).
With men, “hot physical sex and deep intimacy at the same time” came in second, but it was not a close second, with far fewer saying is was very important. “A soulful or spiritual connection during sex came in 3rd for men. And “hot physical sex” came in a distant 4th in importance for men.
And 75.5% of the men want “sensuous or erotic time together without always having sex.” And only 14.3% wished their partners needed less foreplay, although 66.2% feel it’s important for their partners to engage in more foreplay. And 78.6 % want their partners to initiate sex more often.
So, I think men have been getting a bad rap about what they want out of sex. Or when women ask me where all the good lovers are, maybe I should say they seem to be on my email list. (And perhaps men upgrade their values as they age.)
What else showed up?
There were a lot of heartfelt, in-depth responses to the two open-ended questions:
- With regard to sex and intimacy, what are you most frustrated or concerned about? (Or what are you embarrassed or ashamed to admit you’re frustrated or concerned about.)
- With regard to sex and intimacy, what do you most want to know more about or have answered? (Go ahead and ask…anything goes!)
They produced so much data, that analyzing the data from them has been a major undertaking. The information is very rich and in-depth, but these are the predominant themes that have emerged thus far:
The most prominent theme revealed in the answers to these two questions were divided by gender, and they are the flip side of the same coin:
- Men want to satisfy women, and to be potent and virile, to perform.
- Women want to be satisfied.
What else?
Continuing with the open-ended survey questions, the next theme set was also paired in a similar way:
- Men want their partner to let go and be more spontaneous and adventurous and not repressed. As an expression of this, they also wanted their women to initiate more.
- Women wanted to let go, not be blocked, get in touch with their sexuality, to be comfortable in their bodies
The theme of intimacy also showed up again in these two open-ended questions. Both men and women want deeper intimacy, and a deeply loving, enduring spiritual or soulful connection.
And last, though not as prominent, both men and women expressed concerns about aging – particularly women with loss of libido and men with loss (or fear of loss) of erectile functioning.
So, what am I doing with all this?
I’ve been and am continuing to develop products and programs to help people address the needs and interests expressed in this survey. My whole focus is helping people release the self-limiting patterns and inhibitions that keep them from enjoying healthy joyful sexuality and connect more intimately with their partners during lovemaking. I believe this is, or can be, a deeply spiritual expression of our humanity.
