He is 36 years old, single, and has been telling his family he is "not ready" for marriage yet. The real reason is that he engages in online sexual activities with married women and doesn't trust younger women. He has been trying to stop this pattern for two years. He has not told anyone.
She is 29, living abroad, and finds it difficult to adjust to the gap between the culture she grew up in and the one she lives in now. As per her family's value system, she is not supposed to have physical intimacy with the opposite sex. In her daily life, she is surrounded by people for whom it is simply normal. She does not fit either world, and she does not feel comfortable with the self-pleasuring behavior that has developed in-between.
These are not unusual presentations. In my work with South Asian clients navigating compulsive sexual behavior, this is a pattern I encounter consistently: young, unmarried adults, managing something privately that has no sanctioned place in the cultural story they were handed.
The conditions that create this vulnerability are not accidental. They are structural.
The Numbers Behind the Experience
The 2025 Indian clinical study on pornography addiction published in PMC — the most comprehensive clinical dataset on CSBD treatment-seekers in India to date — found that 48.7% of the 589 participants were single. The mean age was 28.98 years. Nearly two-thirds (63.5%) were under 30.
These are not people at the margins. They are young, single adults at the demographic center of what CSBD looks like in India. Nearly half of all treatment-seekers were unmarried when they came forward.
The clinical picture is reinforced by data from the International Sex Survey, which surveyed 82,243 people across 42 countries and found that loneliness, low self-worth, insecure attachment styles, depression, and anxiety are all explicitly listed among the risk factors associated with CSBD. Sexual behavior, the research is consistent, often functions as a regulation strategy for these emotional states. When someone is lonely, isolated, or emotionally overwhelmed, the behavior provides temporary relief. The relief becomes a pattern.
Single South Asian adults who have grown up in families where sexual expression before marriage is not permitted are not experiencing a moral failure. They are experiencing a structural problem: a strong, legitimate need with no culturally sanctioned outlet, a digital environment that provides one, and a cultural context that prevents disclosure when it becomes a problem.
What Premarital Stigma Actually Does
In most South Asian families, the expectation is that sexual and romantic life begins at marriage. This is not always stated explicitly. It is often communicated through what is never said, through conversations that stop at the edge of the subject, through the WhatsApp university, commercial Bollywood movies, through the clear understanding that asking about dating would produce a difficult response.
A 2023 study published in Personal Relationships followed second-generation Indian and Pakistani young adults in the UK who were using online dating apps. The researchers found that while Western culture had shaped their desire to date, their native cultural values constrained every aspect of how they could pursue it: partner ethnicity, pace of the relationship, expectations about physical intimacy. The participants were caught between two entirely different frameworks, with no way to resolve the tension openly.
The Lancet Psychiatry, in a 2023 commentary on South Asian diaspora mental health, identified sexuality as "a site of unresolved acculturation tension" that significantly impacts the mental health of young South Asians navigating both family expectations and the norms of their host countries. Many hide relationships entirely, due to internalized shame and fear of family rejection.
When legitimate expression of sexual and romantic desire has no outlet, the desire does not disappear. It goes somewhere. For a generation of single South Asian adults with smartphones, it often goes online, where access is instant, private, and carries no social consequence. Until, for some people, it does.
Loneliness and the Compulsion Loop
There is a specific kind of loneliness that affects single adults in South Asian communities that deserves its own name.
It is not only the loneliness of being without a partner. It is the loneliness of wanting something you cannot say out loud. Of living in a community where couplehood is the primary cultural milestone, where being unmarried past a certain age reads as a problem to be solved, and where the gap between what you experience privately and what you can say publicly grows wider each year.
A 2023 study in Bioethics described "sexual loneliness" as a neglected public health problem: the state of lacking desired sexual connection, distinct from social isolation. It is its own form of distress.
Research makes the connection between this kind of loneliness and behavioral risk clear. A longitudinal study published in Wiley found that loneliness at one point in time predicted sexual risk-taking six months later. The relationship runs forward: loneliness creates conditions for compulsive behavior, not immediately, but over time.
The mechanism is well-documented in CSBD research. Sexual behavior provides temporary relief from negative emotional states: loneliness, anxiety, stress, shame about the loneliness itself. The relief is real. It just does not last. And the pattern that develops around seeking that relief is the problem.
The Cultural Layer That Keeps It Hidden
What makes the situation specific for single South Asian adults is not just the conditions that increase CSBD risk. It is the cultural conditions that prevent anyone from addressing it.
A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry directly examined how Asian cultural values shape attitudes toward seeking help for compulsive sexual behavior. The finding was stark: collectivism and familialism predict reluctance to pursue professional treatment for CSBD. When combined with norms that prioritize family reputation and social harmony, these cultural values significantly discourage people from acknowledging problematic sexual behaviors, let alone seeking help for them.
This is the full architecture of the trap.
The conditions for developing CSBD are structurally elevated: premarital stigma removes sanctioned outlets; loneliness from the unmarried-but-expected-to-marry position increases emotional vulnerability; a digital environment provides low-barrier, anonymous relief. And then the conditions for addressing CSBD are structurally suppressed: collectivist norms, fear of shame, the impossibility of the disclosure. The behavior develops in exactly the environment most likely to prevent it from being treated.
The India clinical data captured the result: 78.9% of CSBD treatment-seekers had never sought help before, despite having the disorder.
Steps for Single South Asians Who Recognize This Pattern
1. Understand the conditions, not just the behavior. What you are dealing with is not evidence of weakness or moral failure. It is a predictable outcome of a specific set of structural pressures. This does not remove your agency. It does mean the starting point for change is understanding the environment, not blaming yourself only.
2. Separate the loneliness from the behavior. Compulsive sexual behavior in single adults often begins as a response to loneliness and ends up making the loneliness worse. The behavior provides temporary relief and then deepens the isolation because it cannot be spoken about. Therefore, loneliness is one of the primary causal factors and not an outcome of compulsive behaviour.
3. Look for someone who understands the cultural context. A therapist or life coach unfamiliar with South Asian family systems will not fully understand the specific weight of premarital stigma, the particular tension of the diaspora identity, or what disclosure means within a collectivist family structure. Seeking someone with cultural competency is clinically significant for the recovery process.
4. The double life is expensive. Many single South Asian adults navigating this pattern are living two entirely separate versions of themselves: one visible to family and community, one private. The energy required to maintain that split is significant, and research on shame consistently shows that secrecy amplifies distress over time. The goal of recovery is not to expose the private self to the family. It is to no longer need to live in two worlds.
5. Dating and relationship pressure do not need to determine your timeline. The urgency to marry, from family or from an internalized clock, often intensifies the emotional vulnerability that underlies CSBD. Part of what clients in this position are working on is their own relationship to that pressure. What do you actually want? What would a life look like that was built around your own values? These are not small questions, and they do not have to be answered quickly.
The Gap Between Expectation and Reality
Taking a stand of being single in a culture that expects marriage, sexually curious in a culture that expects abstinence, struggling privately in a culture that expects composure, is genuinely difficult. It is not a character flaw. It is a structural tension that millions of South Asian young adults are navigating without language for it.
The research is clear that the risk factors for CSBD are elevated when the youth wants to take this stand, and the help-seeking barriers are equally elevated. That combination is not the person's fault. But it does mean the effort required to reach support is higher than it should be, and that making it anyway matters.
I work with clients who describe the first conversation about this as the most difficult thing they have done. And also, consistently, as the first moment of actual relief they have had in a long time.
If you recognize this pattern, you are not uniquely broken. You are navigating something specific and difficult, and there are people equipped to help with exactly this. The gap between the life expected of you and the one you are quietly living does not have to remain a secret. It can become the starting point for something different.
