"People are desperate to have sex – it’s been a long year"

For many single people, and in particular those who live alone, the past year has been both emotionally numbing and existentially destabilising. “Going months without touching another human being has definitely had an impact on me,” says Maggie, who has lived alone for more than 10 years but has felt more isolated during the pandemic than ever before. She finds herself reminiscing about the crackle of fresh sheets on her wedding night, the feel of a lover’s palm on her thigh. “I am surprised by how much I’ve missed intimacy and how vividly these intimate moments come back to me,” she says. Undoubtedly, summer 2021 will be coloured by the pent-up frustrations of people who have been forced to keep their dating lives, and their sexual selves, on the proverbial shelf for a year or more. But can it really be compared to the original summer of love and the sexual revolution of the 60s, a moment that prompted a wholesale shift in attitudes towards sex and relationships? There’s one key difference, says Dr Guy Stevenson, a specialist in the 1960s counterculture: the “nihilism of the internet”. He argues that our overexposure to sexual freedom online means there’s no chance of a period of innocent liberation. “Hasn’t the internet made everyone behave as if nothing’s new, particularly in relation to sex?” he says. Thanks to the pill, promiscuity was a new option in the 60s, “whereas now it’s old hat. And the potential to fulfil any sexual fantasy just by going online means we feel like we’ve seen and done it all already.” A year of isolation might have made us horny, but the 1960s hippy revolution, “was characterised by romanticism and a feeling of innocence”, he says. If we are in for a summer of love, he argues, it may well be one marked by cynicism.