 Are more Americans going to be having sex in the summer? Absolutely. As they're coming in, you know, out of this year-plus long time of sexual repression, everyone is very much looking forward to getting back out there. Last spring, only one thing seemed certain. After a year-plus of being socially distanced, single people everywhere were going to hit the streets and the sheets, like some mixture of the pre-menopausal sex in the city girls and the randy castaways of Love Island. Everywhere you look, experts and reporters were predicting a slutty summer, a hot vac summer, and an eruption of raw carnal desire not seen since the heyday of the sexual revolution. There's a bar on every single corner in New York City. Not everybody's an alcoholic. I mean, just because things are available, people don't change who they are. And what this pandemic did was it just made all these singles grow up. They are really now looking for something stable. I mean, yes, looks still count, but not the way they did count. Anthropologist Helen Fisher is the chief science advisor to TheDatingSiteMatch.com, a senior fellow at the Kinsey Institute, and one of the authors of Singles in America, an annual survey of 5,000 representative people of all genders, races, ages, and sexual orientations. Now in its 11th year, Singles in America has charted the growth of what Fisher calls slow love or an extended vetting process in which people, especially women, are far more choosy, deliberate, and intentional in picking romantic partners. The hot vac summer didn't happen, says Fisher, because for decades we've been trending away from bad boys and crazy girls and more towards stable, serious relationships. There's less and less sex going on. And I do think it's because the rise of all these people dedicated to their career. It's amazing how Americans are so dedicated to their career. There's many more women in the workforce. I'm calling them the new Victorians. I mean, they have much less sex than we did in my generation. Fisher says that as women have gained equality and education in the workplace, they've started to exercise more discretion when it comes to pairing off and whether or not to have children. This year in the Singles in America study, when we asked, are you ready to settle down right now, 42% of men said yes and 29% of women said yes. Women are the picky sex. The Singles in America survey finds that men overwhelmingly want to partner with an equal or superior career. That's the so-called Clooney Effect, named for the Oscar-winning actor whose wife, Amal, is a highly regarded human rights lawyer. In other words, a more libertarian world in which men and women have more options due to dating apps and more equality due to social and economic changes turns out to be a lot less libertine. Women aren't stuck in the home. Men aren't stuck with being the sole responsibility for the good economic health of the family. We live in a world now where you can really be who you want to be. You can jump class, get yourself an education, move into the job market at a different level. I mean, this is all good. We're living longer. I mean, we're living longer. It's a more exciting time than any time on the planet.