What if boredom between sheets was one of the most revealing symptoms of the sexual crisis that France is going through? While several studies have been a marked decline in the frequency of sexual intercourse (Inserm, Ifop-Lello 2024) for several years in recent years, a new survey by the Discurv Institute for Xlovecam explores an often neglected factor: sexual boredom, especially among women. The results are final: weariness is permanently installed in the bedroom, and eroticism seems to lose ground in the face of everyday comfort. There is an urgency to rekindle the spark!
French women increasingly disillusioned in bed
First striking observation: 56% of French women say today is bored during their sexual intercourse (against 36% in 1996). A progression of 20 points in thirty years, which highlights increasing discomfort in female intimacy.
Even more surprising, it is not the older generations who draw this figure upwards, but young women aged 25 to 34, of which almost two thirds (63%) admit to feeling sexual weariness. This generational paradox questions: youth, supposed to embody desire and exploration, seems to be confronted with a form of erotic indifference.
Eroticism in automatic pilot
Eroticism, let’s talk about it! If the boredom progresses, it is also because the effort to maintain the flame was eroded. 36% of couple people recognize that they do not make enough efforts to renew or enrich their sex life, a figure twice as high in 1997 (17%).
This relaxation results in a sexuality increasingly perceived as routine: 26% of French women use this term today to qualify their intimacy, against 19% in 2015. And initiatives to get out of this monotony are in clear decline: only 16% of people in couple say they are proactive to “wake up the flame”, against 31% in 1997.
Less sex, less love?
Behind this sexual lukewarmness, it is the whole relationship of couple that seems to falter. In 1997, only 9% of couples expressed dissatisfaction with their sex life. Today, this figure reaches 23%. The share of couples declaring being “very satisfied” also drops: 32% against 47% in 1997.
The logical consequence: a drop in tangible sexual activity. 45% of French women say “to make less love than before”, while 20% admit total abstinence – a record. The feeling of making “as much love that before” collapses, going from 49% in 1996 to 37% today.
But beyond the body, it is also the heart that cools down: 10% of people as a couple do not feel “no longer really in love”, against only 3% in 1997. Conversely, those who say they are “in love as on the first day” represent only 42% of couples, down 8 points.
Sexual boredom: symptom or cause of the crisis?
Behind these figures is emerging a France in loss of speed, where pleasure too often gives way to routine, and where the load of desire is based on less and less solid bases. If this survey reveals discomfort, it also offers a new reading key to the “sexual recession” observed for several years: what if, basically, weariness and conjugal comfort have become the main enemies of desire?
Leave yourself or find yourself?
For Dr. Sébastien Doerper, sexologist, consulted for a previous article, sexual boredom in installed couples is neither surprising nor irreversible. “”When the routine settles down, that everyday life becomes weighing – between mental load, fatigue and hassle – it is common for desire to stretch. But rather than resigning yourself, you have to seek how to recreate an intimate space, reinvent your sexuality with two“He explained.
In this context, consulting a professional can help to take stock, to put words on everyone’s expectations, to explore avenues of renewal. “We remain, basically, in a dynamic of discovery”he insists.
What if that is not enough? Separation should never be the first option. “When two people love each other and built together, it is essential to try to restore dialogue, to understand what is no longer going under the duvet – and why. It is only having really tried everything that we can consider putting an end to it.”