Is Gen Z saying goodbye to the One-Night Stand?

The one-night stand is not dead

French data help put this into perspective. The INED Envie survey, based on data from more than 10,000 people aged 18 to 29, found that 66% had been in a couple relationship during the previous twelve months. At the same time, 21% had had at least one one-night stand, while 15% reported another type of ongoing but non-couple relationship, described by respondents as sexfriend, hookup, flirt, affair or similar. One-night stands therefore clearly still exist. What seems to be changing is their place within a much broader and more flexible intimate landscape.

The same INED research also shows that the couple remains by far the dominant form of intimate relationship among young adults. Among those who reported being in a couple, 77% said they were very much in love and another 17% quite in love. Among those who had experienced a one-night stand, by contrast, 65% said they were not at all in love with the person and another 21% said not really. The distinction is therefore still very clear. Casual sex has not disappeared, but neither has emotional commitment. If anything, young adults seem comfortable moving between several relationship formats rather than treating sex and commitment as two opposite worlds.

This is also why the headline “Gen Z has stopped having one-night stands” would be misleading. The evidence points more toward a decline or repositioning than a disappearance. Twenty-one per cent of French 18-to-29-year-olds reporting at least one one-night stand in a year is hardly a sexually conservative generation. The more interesting question is why the one-night stand seems to occupy less cultural space than it did twenty years ago.

Maybe the context for casual sex is disappearing

One of the strongest academic explanations has surprisingly little to do with morality. A longitudinal study of unpartnered 18-to-23-year-olds found that declining alcohol consumption explained about a quarter of the decline in casual sex among young women. Among young men, lower drinking frequency, more computer gaming, and a greater likelihood of living with parents also contributed significantly.

That matters because casual sex does not happen in isolation from the rest of social life. One-night stands have historically been associated with certain contexts: nightlife, bars, clubs, alcohol, spontaneous social encounters, staying out late, and having somewhere private to go afterward. If young adults drink less, spend more time at home, socialize differently and remain in the parental home for longer, then the number of situations in which casual sex can happen spontaneously also changes.

The Times itself picked up on this cultural shift through a very everyday lens. In a follow-up piece, one young woman described preferring Parkrun, brunch, sleep and time with friends to the nightlife culture she associated with earlier years. The article cited the same Times study, which found that only 22% of young women said one-night stands were common among their friends, compared with 74% twenty years earlier. That is anecdotal rather than causal evidence, but it illustrates a broader point: perhaps the decline in casual sex is partly a side effect of a changing social life.

Less drinking, more wellness, more time online, more living at home, and fewer spontaneous third spaces can all reshape sexual behavior without anyone consciously deciding to become “traditional”.

Dating apps created more choice, not necessarily more intimacy

There is another paradox. Gen Z has, in theory, had access to more potential partners than any previous generation. Dating apps can put hundreds of potential matches within a few kilometers on a single screen. Yet the existence of more choice does not appear to have produced a simple increase in sexual activity.

Research among young dating-app users has shown that users tend to have a stronger short-term mating orientation than non-users, but they are not less interested in long-term relationships. In other words, wanting casual sex and wanting commitment are not mutually exclusive. Dating apps can facilitate both. This fits with what we have already seen in the wider dating landscape: young people can use digital tools intensively while also becoming tired of the logic those tools create.

Infinite choice changes behavior. When every profile can theoretically be replaced by another profile, people can become more selective rather than less. The swipe was supposed to make meeting easier, but it also turned intimacy into a filtering exercise. More options can create more comparison, more hesitation, and more reasons not to act. That helps explain why dating-app fatigue and a renewed interest in meeting people offline can coexist with lower levels of casual sex.

The INED data are useful here too. Dating apps were involved in 21% of one-night stands reported by young adults, but only 11% of couple relationships. Apps clearly matter, but they have not replaced every other form of meeting, and they certainly have not turned Gen Z into a generation of permanent hookups.

Sexually open, behaviourally more selective

This may be the most interesting contradiction of all. Gen Z has grown up in a culture where conversations about sexuality are far more visible than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Consent, orientation, boundaries, gender identity, pleasure, and different relationship structures are now part of mainstream conversation. Yet greater cultural openness does not necessarily translate into wanting sex with more people.

Freedom can also mean saying no. It can mean waiting, being selective, wanting emotional safety or deciding that a hookup is simply not worth the effort. Academic research on casual sexual experiences is much more nuanced than the usual debate between “hookup culture is liberating” and “hookup culture is harmful”. A systematic review of 71 quantitative studies found that people generally evaluated casual sexual experiences more positively than negatively, but outcomes varied strongly according to motivation, alcohol use, satisfaction, attitudes toward casual sex, and how well the partner was known.

A 2026 international study on one-night-stand regret adds another interesting layer. It found that differences in regret were strongly connected to the quality of the sexual experience itself, including sexual satisfaction, autonomy in the decision, intoxication, and reputational concerns. That again points away from a simple moral explanation. Whether casual sex feels positive or negative depends heavily on context.

Perhaps Gen Z is simply more attentive to that context.  A generation that has spent years talking about boundaries, consent, emotional wellbeing, and red flags may not necessarily become less sexual. It may become more demanding about the conditions under which sex feels worthwhile.

Is commitment making a comeback?

This is where the Times ‘ findings on marriage become particularly interesting. Almost two-thirds of the young adults in its study still considered marriage important, while only around 20% saw it as irrelevant. Twenty years earlier, 39% of young adults had said marriage was irrelevant. That does not necessarily mean Gen Z wants to recreate its grandparents’ marriages. Support for commitment and support for traditional gender roles are not the same thing.

Young adults can value marriage while wanting greater equality inside it. They can believe in monogamy while being tolerant of people who choose differently. They may want a long-term relationship while postponing marriage due to housing, career, or financial insecurity. The institution can remain attractive while the rules around it change. And there may be another reason commitment has become appealing: clarity.

After years of dating apps, ghosting, situationships and infinite choice, knowing where you stand can itself become valuable. Stability can feel desirable precisely because so many other parts of young adult life feel unstable. Work changes quickly. Housing is expensive. Careers are less linear. Politics and technology move at extraordinary speed. In that context, emotional certainty can become something worth seeking.  That would not make Gen Z more conservative. It might simply make the generation more intentional.

Maybe sexual freedom now means something different

The easiest story would be that the pendulum has swung backward. Millennials embraced hookup culture; Gen Z wants marriage. But generations rarely move in such clean lines. The evidence is much messier and much more interesting.

Young adults still have one-night stands. They still use dating apps. They still experiment with friends-with-benefits, situationships and other relationship forms. They are also more open than previous generations to a wider variety of sexual identities and ways of organizing intimate life. At the same time, couple relationships remain dominant, one-night stands appear less culturally central, and there are signs of renewed interest in commitment. Perhaps what is changing is not sexual freedom itself, but our definition of it.

For one generation, freedom could mean escaping restrictive sexual rules. For the next, freedom may increasingly mean having enough autonomy to decide what kind of intimacy is actually worth pursuing. Sometimes that will be a one-night stand. Sometimes a sex friend. Sometimes a long-term relationship. Sometimes nothing at all. Gen Z may not be becoming less sexual. It may simply be becoming more selective about what sex is for.