The Three Most Common Sexual Fantasies, According to the Largest Study Ever Done
The first time I said a fantasy out loud to Brittney, I was braced for the wrong outcome.
I had spent about two decades assuming that whatever was in my head was unusual, and specifically that it was unusual in a way that would change how she saw me. That's what shame does — it convinces you that you are the only one, which is precisely the belief that keeps you from ever finding out otherwise. Shame runs on isolation. The whole mechanism depends on you never comparing notes.
Then I started reading the research, and the thing I discovered was almost funny: not only was my fantasy not unusual, it was so common it had a category. With a percentage attached to it.
That's the quiet gift of Justin Lehmiller's work. He didn't set out to normalize anyone's inner life. He set out to count things. But counting things turns out to be one of the more effective shame interventions available, because it's very hard to believe you're a deviant outlier when you're looking at a chart that includes you in the majority.
The Study
Dr. Justin Lehmiller is a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. For his 2018 book Tell Me What You Want, he conducted what remains the largest survey of sexual fantasy ever done in the United States: 4,175 American adults, answering 369 questions about what they fantasize about, how often, and what it means to them.
The headline finding before we get to the content: 97% of participants reported having sexual fantasies. Ninety-seven percent. The remaining 3% is small enough that it's genuinely plausible some of them just didn't want to say.
Lehmiller then sorted the enormous mess of human fantasy into seven broad themes, which together accounted for roughly 96% of people's favorite fantasies. Seven categories. Nearly everything.
And three of those categories dominated.
Number One: Multipartner Sex
The most common sexual fantasy in America is group sex — threesomes most of all, but also larger configurations, orgies, and various arrangements involving more than two people.
This was the single most frequently reported theme in the entire dataset, and it was popular across gender, age, and orientation. It's not a male fantasy that women tolerate. It's not a young person's fantasy. It's close to a universal.
Here's the part that matters, and it's the part the data makes clear: a fantasy about group sex is overwhelmingly not a plan. It's not a request, it's not dissatisfaction with your partner, and it's not a signal that your relationship is lacking. Lehmiller's research found that the vast majority of people who fantasize about multipartner sex have never acted on it and in many cases have no desire to.
Why is it so common, then? Because of what it actually delivers psychologically, which is almost never what the surface content suggests. The most frequently reported emotional driver underneath group-sex fantasy isn't variety — it's feeling desired. Being wanted by more than one person at a time is an extremely efficient way for the mind to generate the sensation of being overwhelmingly desirable. The fantasy isn't about the additional people. It's about the volume of wanting directed at you.
Read that way, a threesome fantasy in a committed marriage isn't a threat to the marriage. It's information about what your partner needs more of inside it.
Number Two: Power, Control, and Rough Sex
The second most common theme covers the enormous territory of BDSM — dominance and submission, bondage, control, surrender, and rough sex.
This one is near-universal and extremely lopsided in one direction: submission fantasies substantially outnumber dominance fantasies. Most people who fantasize about power dynamics are fantasizing about being on the receiving end.
Lehmiller's data on force fantasies specifically is the finding that tends to stop people: 61% of women and 54% of men in his sample reported fantasies involving being forced into sex.
That number deserves careful handling, because it is widely misread. A fantasy about being overpowered is not a desire to be assaulted. The defining feature of the fantasy is that the person having it is in complete control of it — they are the author, they set every parameter, they can end it instantly. It is the experience of surrender with zero actual risk, which is a combination that does not exist anywhere in real life. That's exactly why the mind finds it so useful.
And this is where it becomes relevant to ordinary marriages rather than an exotic subculture. Most of the people in that 61% and 54% are not in the BDSM community. They're people in regular relationships whose daily lives require them to be competent, responsible, and in charge of a great many things. The appeal of submission is the appeal of putting all of that down. For people who carry decision-making load all day — managers, parents, business owners, anyone whose job is being the one who handles it — the fantasy of having no responsibility for what happens next is not deviant. It's the most logical thing in the world.
Jack Morin's The Erotic Mind gets at the mechanism: arousal is generated by attraction plus obstacles. Power dynamics are a very clean way of manufacturing an obstacle — resistance, constraint, forbiddenness — inside a situation that is actually completely safe. I've written about Morin's erotic equation because it explains more fantasy content than any other single framework I know.
Number Three: Novelty, Adventure, and Variety
Third place is the whole universe of something different. New settings, new activities, public or semi-public scenarios, new sensations, anything that breaks the established pattern.
This is the most emotionally reassuring finding in the dataset, and also the most commonly misunderstood. Fantasizing about novelty is not a sign that you're bored with your partner. It's a sign that you're bored with the script — and those are completely different diagnoses with completely different treatments.
I've written before that you don't get bored of your partner, you run out of your model of your partner. The novelty theme in Lehmiller's research is the empirical shape of that. The desire isn't for a different person. It's for a different configuration of the same person, in a different place, doing something unrehearsed.
Which is extremely good news, because novelty is the single most actionable of the three. You can't easily add people to your marriage. You may not want to explore power dynamics. But you can change the room, the time of day, the sequence, the clothes, the level of lighting, who starts it, and roughly a thousand other variables — and the research says that's what a large share of people are already fantasizing about anyway.
The Other Four
For completeness, since the seven themes together cover nearly everything:
Taboo and forbidden activities — voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishes, and the broad category of things that derive their charge from being off-limits.
Partner sharing and non-monogamy — including swinging, open arrangements, and the cuckolding and hotwifing scenarios that have become increasingly visible online. Related to multipartner fantasy but psychologically distinct, often driven by compersion or by the intensity of jealousy itself.
Passion and romance — the one that gets left out of every article about fantasy research because it isn't scandalous. Being deeply loved, feeling emotionally connected, being cherished during sex. It's a major theme, and women reported it more often than men.
Erotic flexibility — fantasies that cross one's usual orientation or gender boundaries, which Lehmiller found to be far more common than most people assume, including among people who identify as exclusively straight.
What the Numbers Are Actually For
I want to be direct about why I think this research matters, and it isn't trivia.
Almost every person I've coached who was carrying sexual shame was carrying a version of the same belief: what's in my head is abnormal, and if anyone knew, they would think less of me. That belief is remarkably resistant to reassurance. You can tell someone they're normal all day and it won't move, because shame doesn't respond to comfort.
It does, however, respond to data.
There is something that happens when a person reads that 61% of women report the specific fantasy they've been hiding for fifteen years. It's not relief exactly. It's more like a structural collapse — the isolation that the shame was built on simply isn't there anymore, and without it the shame has nothing to stand on. I've watched that happen in real time in sessions, and it's one of the better things about this job.
So the real finding of Lehmiller's work isn't which fantasy came first. It's that you are statistically ordinary, your inner life is shared by millions of people who are equally certain they're alone in it, and the only genuinely unusual thing about any of this is how rarely anyone says it out loud.
Two Things to Remember
A fantasy is not a plan. This is the most important distinction in the entire subject, and Lehmiller's data supports it heavily — most people never act on their favorite fantasy and don't want to. Fantasy is a space with no consequences, which is precisely what makes it work. Feelings aren't behaviors, and the fact that something plays well in your head carries no obligation whatsoever to pursue it in the world.
The content is rarely the point. Every one of these themes resolves, underneath, into an emotional need: to be desired, to put down responsibility, to be surprised, to be loved. The specific scenario is just the delivery mechanism your particular history happened to build. Which means the useful question about a fantasy is never what is it — it's what does it give me. And the answer to that is almost always something you and your partner can work with directly.
That's the conversation worth having. Not a confession. An investigation, run together, into what each of you is actually after.
Brittney and I built Coelle because there's a large gap between knowing what you want and having anywhere to practice it. Guided audio gives couples a structure for exploring together without either person having to direct.
If you have something you've never said out loud, or you want help turning a fantasy into a conversation rather than a secret, that's the center of the work I do. Book a free discovery call here.
Source: Justin J. Lehmiller, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life (Da Capo Press, 2018). Survey of 4,175 American adults.
