How many Sexual Partners is Normal?

A new YouGov survey has found the average number of people Brits have had sex with.

A total of 2,456 out of 4,006 UK residents polled were comfortable sharing how many sexual partners they’d had in their lives, and their answers were used to find the median.

However, before we delve into the survey findings, it is important to remember that the idea of someone having slept with ‘too many’ or ‘too few’ people is a fallacy.

Whilst findings like these are interesting, don’t forget that there is no ‘perfect’ number of sexual partners for a person to have in their life.

The survey found that the average number was four sexual partners.

It also found that the average was five for men and three for women.

A quarter of respondents reported sleeping with 10 or more people, but there were gender differences here too, with 30% of men saying they’ve had at least 10 sexual partners compared to 20% of women.

Meanwhile, 9% of the Brits who answered claimed to have not yet had sex, with 12% of men and 7% of women saying they were virgins.

Unsurprisingly, the survey found that these figures change over generations.

Respondents over 60 were the age group most likely to have slept with one person in their lives, while on the other end of the spectrum, one in five (21%) aged 40-59 said they’d had sex with at least 15 people.

That made 40-59-year-olds the age group who’d had sex with the most amount of people on average.

17 was the most common age when people lost their virginity.

In the same way, a person cannot be defined by their ‘body count’, it is worth highlighting that virginity is a social and cultural construct and not a medical term.

Additionally, sexual wellness brand Lovehoney surveyed over 2,000 adults to investigate how many people have had sex on the first date, and why they are, or aren’t, open to it.

Unsurprisingly, over 70% of men are open to sex on the first date, but 61% of women are not.

Nearly half of the respondents to Lovehoney’s survey said that they have had sex on the first date.

Men are particularly prone to a first-date hook-up, with just under 60% of male respondents admitting to having done this.

Women, on the other hand, are slightly less inclined to jump into bed right away, with only 43% having had sex on the first date.