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.
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........