Does Abstinence from Sex Lead to Sexual Problems?

How does a long period of time without sexual intercourse affect your sex life when you want to renew it again?

Sex abstinence

Abstinence from sex means that a person chooses not to have sex for a certain reason. In most cases, these reasons are religious by nature, and some people want to wait until they're mature, or because they associate sex with true love ... People who don’t have sexual intercourse, but would like to, and who don't have it because there's no one to have it with, aren't relevant here. A person who practices abstinence from sex makes a conscious decision not to have sexual intercourse for a certain period of time, or to abstain from sex because of his or her beliefs.

Some scientists try to determine the harmful effects of such abstinence on the development of a person, particularly on their health. There's another group of scientists who try to prove the opposite, i.e. that busy sex life is potentially harmful and can cause health problems.

How are these studies conducted? Researchers normally select a specific number of people who constitute a representative sample. These individuals are monitored for a certain period of time and their development is compared.

Ambiguous findings

What do researchers usually find out? Their work reveals that people change through time. Some people don’t have sexual intercourse until the age of 20 and they later develop erectile dysfunction. Others start having sex at the age of 14 and they become addicted to drugs at the age of 20. As such data don’t make any sense, scientists start interpreting them in accordance with their original assumption. For example:

“The aim of our study is to establish whether sex abstinence has any effects on individual's sexual intercourse later in life. The study will include secondary school children.”
“We found that the share of people who have sexual problems later on is larger among high school children who don’t have sexual intercourse – we’ve therefore proved that abstinence from sex causes sex problems later in life!”

If scientists don’t reach such a conclusion, journalists definitely will. No real researcher would draw such a conclusion. The first assumption is that sex abstinence causes problems in sex life. Research is then carried out and researchers establish that people who don’t have sexual intercourse face more sex problems later in their lives. The actual providing of proof is skipped and the hypothesis is "confirmed" by assuming that one variable influences the other. However, facts cannot be interpreted correctly if we follow this line of thinking. Funny interpretations of human behavior can be made in this way, particularly by children. For example, a child sees that every time their parents enter the bedroom, they come out half an hour later smiling and red-cheeked. The same happens whenever there is a family party and they drink beer and wine. It therefore follows that the father and mother drink alcohol while in the bedroom.

Causes for sex abstinence

Abstinence from sex and sexual problems later in life usually have the same cause. We don’t need a lot of studies to confirm that. If people have a negative attitude to their bodies, they don’t have sexual intercourse. When they are faced with their sexuality, they experience more problems, and the latter are based on their negative attitudes to sexuality and not the lack of sexual intercourse. Thus sex abstinence doesn’t cause this attitude, but is its consequence.

The body doesn’t become numb because of abstinence from sex. If you have psychological problems, these can cause sex abstinence and sexual problems that arise later in life.

However, there are also a number of people who consciously decide to abstain from sex and wait until the right moment, and who don’t experience any problems in their sex lives later on. On the other hand, most people who start having sexual intercourse too soon have to face numerous problems when older, problems which are caused by similar psychological impulses that led to their early sex life and not by the act of sexual intercourse itself. Many people also start having sexual intercourse at the age of 14 and enjoy normal sex life as adults.

To conclude, can abstinence from sex cause any problems in sex life? No. Sex abstinence is usually caused by physiological factors or a psychological impulse that also creates sexual problems later in life.

Read more about the lack of intercourse in the Encyclopedia of Sexuality.