Sexless in the city

In City firms, it was revealed this week, it is apparently common for male brokers to go "whoring" after office hours - a phrase that refers not to the visiting of prostitutes, but to the ogling of strippers in a lap-dancing club after a long, stressful day. A senior manager of leading City brokers Cantor Fitzgerald told the High Court that: "On a good night at Spearmint Rhino, you can see 80 per cent of the market in the audience", and that some bankers even conduct business meetings while enjoying the spectacle.

Leaving aside its puerility, and the fact that it might well exclude female colleagues, such behaviour is symptomatic of a great unspoken, and rather British, condition. Odds on, say experts, that many of those brokers and bankers - happy to collude in a testosterone-fuelled fantasy world - aren't actually having sex with anyone at all. Their lives, and the lives of their wives or partners, are just too busy for it. City hours allow no time for a personal life, so instead they fit sex into, and not around, work.

"It's perhaps no coincidence that men who work long hours feel the need to visit these places," says 32-year-old Sean White, a Canary Wharf banker, whose girlfriend Jennifer works 13-hour days managing her own fabric-design firm.

"It's kind of a substitute for the real thing and, yes, I know how sad that sounds."

For such an overtly sexy city - lap-dancing clubs thrive, the population is overwhelmingly young - busy London is surprisingly sexless. All over town, men and women, singles and couples, are either finding it increasingly hard to make the time for intimate relations or have set their standards so high, no one matches up.

Surveys reveal that Londoners have less sex than almost anyone in the country; we admit to making love 108 times a year compared to, say, people in the North East who boast 122 bonks annually, while those who live in southern England claim a lowly, but realistic, 97.

Lots of Londoners aren't having sex at all. "For the past year and a half, I've been working a 12-hour day, often longer if I'm required to go out and network in the evenings," says 23-year-old David Cunningham, an executive with PR firm Lewis Communications, who moved to London from Glasgow two years ago.

"The last thing on my mind at the end of the week is sex. It's all very glam in this industry and I go out a lot, but for one reason or another, the action has seriously slowed since I moved here."

It's partly to do with hectic lifestyles and constant tiredness. Sean and Jennifer White have to pencil in times to see each other, let alone have sex.

"Most evenings, we're not home till 9pm," says Jenny. "We say hello, sink the best part of a bottle of wine and slump into bed absolutely shattered. Even at the weekends, we're often working. It's very easy under those circumstances to slip into a routine where sex doesn't happen, and the longer it goes on, the more we seem to accept it. It's not that our jobs mean more to us than our relationship, but at the moment they're a priority over, well, the physical side of things."

Single young Londoners, meanwhile, are not only lacking the time for relationships but are pretty choosy about their partners - and less keen on free love than their baby-boomer parents. "That no-strings thing gets boring," says Cunningham (who has never been to a lap-dancing club in his life, though some of his friends have occasionally). "I can't stand people wasting my time, and I really value what little personal time I get. I don't want to spend it with people I'm not really into.

"I don't have enough time to sleep properly, let alone meet different people," says Ben Scammel, a 25-year-old who runs his own online merchandising business among other time-consuming projects, and won't compromise in his quest for the perfect partner.

"Plus, it's actually quite difficult to meet people who are worth talking to. I don't want to go to Fabric nightclub and end up with a one-night stand. That's kind of cheap. So, what do you do? One of my friends has just become a male escort, which is one way of dealing with the problem."

Another is to join the speed-dating or lunch-only agencies that have recently sprouted in London, working on the basis of minimum time-input, maximum return.

At the deliberately exclusive Gorgeous Network, for example, professional Londoners are sent on multiple dates where they meet four or five people on the same evening, spend 20 minutes with each candidate, and then tick a card to say which one they liked most. Lunch Only offers a one-on-one dating service, but never in the evenings, allowing busy people to either slope off early if they're not impressed, or fit a quick date into a hectic schedule without giving up those precious after-work hours.

"It's especially hard to meet people in London," says Clare McCann, a 25-year-old DJ with Kiss FM, who subscribes to Gorgeous.

"Everyone's working so hard, there's not enough free time, and people here can actually be quite unfriendly. Your social life ends up revolving entirely around the office, and it's never a good idea to date people at work."

Mary Balfour, director of Lunch Only, says: "The nature of intimate relationships between men and women has changed a lot. Even in the recent past, we entered into relationships for economic reasons just as much as emotional ones. Nowadays, the emotional aspect of a relationship is by far the most important and if that doesn't work out, or you can't devote the time to it, people move on. Our standards, what we expect from each other, are much higher than they once were and so people run the risk of ending up alone." And, as a consequence, not having sex.

"Men are a bit of a distraction, to be honest," says City solicitor Kay Parker, 29, who's just left a relationship where "sex sort of ended after a year or so".

"I want to do well at work and I can't really afford to invest all that time in a man, particularly at the start of a new relationship where you have to be available a lot. Sod it, I'm happy to be single for a while - though sex would be nice."

If she had the time, would she go out with a man who regularly visited lap-dancing clubs after work? "That does happen in London. No, I wouldn't go out with anyone so seedy. You have to ask what their problem is."

Possibly not enough sex of the real, actually-doing-it variety.