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Key points
- People at different decades of life have different types of sexual fantasies on average.
- Fantasies are related to several personality traits that follow life-cycle patterns.
- Fantasies about non-monogamy and BDSM show a rise and fall consistent with the life cycle of personality.
Over the course of my career, I've studied the sexual fantasies of more than 10,000 people from all around the world. One of the most interesting things I've observed in my work thus far is that people at different decades of life seem to have remarkably different kinds of fantasies.
For example, among the most consistent findings are that people in their 20s tend to have the kinkiest fantasies out of all age brackets. In addition, people in their 40s and 50s have the most fantasies about non-monogamy and multiple partners.
So why do people seem to fantasize about different things at different points of their lives? There are likely to be multiple factors at play, given that sexual fantasies are a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon. However, my working hypothesis is that a great deal of this can be explained by age-related changes in personality. Put another way, our personalities evolve over the course of our lives, and our fantasies may co-evolve with them.
Personality Is Not Static Across the Lifespan
While we often tend to think of personality as a relatively stable characteristic of the self that doesn’t usually change much over the course of our lives, this belief isn’t supported by the research. In fact, there appear to be some pretty sizeable personality shifts that take place over time.
Research finds that our personalities follow "life-cycle patterns," with certain traits exhibiting growth and others exhibiting decline over time. For example, with regard to the Big Five personality characteristics, the data suggest that, as we age, we tend to experience growth in traits like extraversion and agreeableness, with declines in neuroticism.
In my own research on sexual fantasies, I've found that the kinds of things we're fantasizing about are significantly linked to all of the Big Five traits, suggesting that our personalities may create predispositions to what we find to be sexually arousing. Therefore, it stands to reason that if our personalities are changing over time, our fantasies are likely to change in predictable ways that accompany those personality shifts.
How Non-Monogamy Fantasies Change With Age
Let's first consider fantasies about practicing non-monogamy, such as being in an open relationship, swinging, or cuckolding (i.e., watching your partner have sex with someone else). According to the data that I present in my book Tell Me What You Want (which involved a survey of 4,175 Americans’ sexual fantasies), non-monogamy fantasies tend to increase with age.
However, the association is one that would best be described as curvilinear rather than linear. In other words, these fantasies rise to a point and then decrease to some extent after that.
Specifically, what we see is that the number of people reporting this fantasy rises until around age 40, stays high through the 50s, and then declines somewhat after that. However, it never drops back down to where it was for the youngest age group. Note that the pattern is similar for men and women, although men consistently report more non-monogamy fantasies across all age groups.
When I look at how non-monogamy fantasies are related to personality traits, I see that people who are high in extraversion (meaning those who are more sociable and outgoing), high in openness to experience (meaning those who are more willing to try new and different things), and those who are low in neuroticism (meaning those who deal with stress better and have more emotional stability) report more non-monogamy fantasies of almost every type.
The 40s and 50s are when we tend to see some of the biggest changes in personality, including increases in extraversion and openness, as well as a decrease in neuroticism. So one way to look at why non-monogamy fantasies appear to increase with age is that this might reflect an underlying shift in certain personality traits that may predispose people to having this fantasy.
How BDSM Fantasies Change With Age
To consider another example, let’s look at how BDSM fantasies are related to age. The pattern in my data is quite different from the non-monogamy fantasies. Again, you don’t see a perfectly linear association, but you do see a general trend for these fantasies to decline with age. They’re most popular among younger adults and least popular among older adults—and, in general, more common among women than men across all age groups.
When I look at how BDSM fantasies are related to personality, I see that these fantasies are linked to higher levels of neuroticism (meaning those who do not deal as well with stress and have more emotional instability), lower levels of agreeableness (meaning those who have less care and concern for others), and lower levels of conscientiousness (meaning those who are less organized and detail-oriented).
A quick aside: I realize this pattern differs from other research on BDSM and personality—however, keep in mind that other studies looking at this have typically examined actual BDSM practitioners, not the fantasy of BDSM in a general sample. Thus, the personality traits of people who are doing BDSM in real life may be quite distinct from the personality traits of people who simply have BDSM fantasies, most of whom have never acted on them. Translation: we’re talking about very different groups of people, so I would not generalize the personality correlates of BDSM fantasies to those who practice kink/BDSM in real life.
So how do those personality traits change with age? As people get older, neuroticism tends to go down, whereas agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to go up. Again, this pattern fits with the idea that age-related changes in BDSM sexual fantasies may reflect broader age-related changes in their associated personality traits.
Conclusions and Caveats
I see similar trends when I look at other types of sexual fantasies (e.g., multi-partner sex). Across the board, our fantasies show consistent associations with personality traits and, further, our fantasies show a pretty consistent rise and fall with age based on the life-cycle patters of those personality traits.
However, let me caution that our fantasies are complex and that personality is just one of many factors linked to sexual fantasy content. For example, two people could have very different combinations of personality traits, yet have similar themes in their fantasies. Case in point: two people could say that their favorite fantasy is about BDSM, but those fantasies could play out in extremely different ways (e.g., sadistic vs. masochistic, dominant vs. submissive, gentle vs. rough) that reflect very different personality profiles.
Furthermore, not everyone's personality changes a lot over the course of their lives, and not everyone experiences the same personality changes in the same directions.
It's also important to highlight that our fantasies are highly individualized, which means that when I say that a given personality trait is linked to higher odds of having a given fantasy, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone with that personality trait has that fantasy, or that everyone with that fantasy necessarily has that personality trait. Keep in mind that we're dealing with general trends here and that there's always a great degree of individual variability.
Facebook image: Goksi/Shutterstock
References
Gensowski, M., Gørtz, M., & Schurer, S. (2021). Inequality in personality over the life cycle. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 184, 46-77.
Lehmiller, J. J. (2018). Tell me what you want. Hachette.
