Set 7 - Quarter 1
Marriage Musings, Tomboys in Tights, and Wanderlust
Hello from SapphicSavvy!
New Set, new Quarter, new… author. Hi. I'm the new millennial writer behind these posts, and I am aware that I am following a genZ act that spent a full year turning bar charts into stand-up. Big shoes. Doc Martens, presumably, since the majority of us own a pair or two.
Here's what I can promise: I will keep the alliteration, I will keep the speculation clearly labeled as speculation, and I will keep pulling conclusions out of thin air with the unearned confidence of a woman who has looked at a chart for eleven seconds. The tradition lives.
Quick housekeeping for anyone new:
Weekly competitions are called Quarters. Four Quarters make a Set.
We just kicked off Set 7, which means Heat 1 has four Sets left in it, including this one.
The Set winner takes home $500, so please, play your rounds.
Now. We opened the new Set with a question that immediately put this community on trial, so let's go.
The Call Was Coming From Inside the House
Last Set we asked how many times you'd been cheated on. The average came out to just over 1, and the departing correspondent floated a stat about lesbians having some of the lowest documented infidelity rates around, and gently suggested that a tiny handful of bad actors were responsible for all of it.
This week we asked who did it.
About a third of you raised your hand.
Well. The mystery is solved and the call was coming from inside the house.
For context, that number lands almost exactly on the national one. A 2024 YouGov poll found roughly 1 in 3 Americans admit to having cheated on a partner or spouse at some point across all relationship types. So we are not special. We are extremely, boringly average, which honestly may be the most upsetting possible finding. (The stricter measure — the General Social Survey, which asks only about extramarital sex during a marriage — puts ever-married women at 13%, but that question is doing much less work than ours was.)
The age pattern is where it gets fun. Users in their 30s topped out at 45%, users 40s+ came in at 35%, and users in their 20s reported the lowest rate of anyone at 17%. Late teens came in at 27%, which is higher than the 20s and is the kind of result that makes a data person tilt her head. That's our smallest group, so I'd hold it loosely, but I have a theory: at 18, the line between "cheating" and "we never actually defined this" is extremely blurry. You cannot technically cheat in a situationship. You can, however, absolutely feel like you did, and I suspect some of you answered from the gut. Respect.
The 30s peak tracks with something we've now seen across a genuinely embarrassing number of Quarters. The 30s group has led this app in sex toys, polyamory, and orgasms this summer. Y'all are living, and living involves a longer relationship résumé, which means more opportunities for a résumé stain. Time is the confounder. Time is always the confounder.
Okay. Bisexual users came in at 38%, queer at 31%, lesbians at 30%. I want to be careful here, because I know exactly which stereotype is currently stretching in the wings waiting for its cue, and I would like to keep it offstage. A few things. One, an eight-point spread with our highly unequal sub-group sample sizes (we have 4x more lesbians playing than bisexuals) is not a finding, it's a wobble. Two, this question asked "ever," across an entire life, and bisexual users' relationship histories aren't confined to sapphic relationships — a lifetime tally is going to reflect a wider and longer dating history, which is a math problem, not a morality problem. Three, and I cannot stress this enough, we asked what counts as cheating precisely zero times, and research consistently finds women define more behaviors as infidelity than men do. Everyone here was grading their own paper on a rubric they wrote themselves.
Back in Set 6 we found bisexual and lesbian users reporting nearly identical lifetime partner counts, and we said then that the "bisexuals are promiscuous" thing doesn't hold up. It still doesn't. Nobody is running away with this one.
U-Haul Now, Wedding at 31
We asked the minimum age at which a sapphic couple should get married. The overall answer came in right around 25 and a half. Differences by identity were super minimal with lesbian users settling on 26 while bisexual and queer users agreed on 25. But diffs by age on the other hand…
Notice that everyone set the bar just slightly above whatever age they were when they last made a catastrophic decision. Grandfathered in. Very convenient. But here's the part I can't stop thinking about. Pew found that Americans who believe there is a best age to marry put it at 26.5 on average. The census median age at first marriage for women is 28.4. And when you narrow to women marrying women specifically, the numbers jump: recent ACS data puts the mean age at first marriage for women in same-sex couples at around 32, versus 29 for women in different-sex couples.
So this community — the community that invented the second-date U-Haul, that told us back in Set 4 that over 60% of you have said "I love you" inside of one month — set a floor of 25.5 and then, in real life, waits until 32. Six and a half years of buffer. Beloved, who are we protecting? The 40s+ result deserves a serious note though, because I don't think it's just elder caution. Marriage wasn't federally available to us until 2015. If you're in the 40s+ group, your entire model of what a sapphic marriage is got built during a period when it wasn't on the table, and when it finally arrived, most people entered it as fully-formed adults with mortgages. A higher floor might be less "kids these days" and more "I have watched this specific thing go badly, and also I remember when we couldn't." Lea DeLaria wrote the U-Haul joke in 1989. We've had legal weddings for eleven years. The stereotype has a 26-year head start on the paperwork, and I think our answers reflect a community that is still recalibrating.
Tomboy Taxonomy
72% of you were tomboys. Not real interesting by identity with only a 5 point spread. Seems like the majority of us had the phase, nothing to litigate.
Worth flagging, though, since this stereotype tends to get treated like a prophecy: it is not one. Around half of American women in general recall being tomboys, and one comparative study clocked 16% of straight women against 70% of lesbians. Real gap! Not a pipeline. Sociologist C. Lynn Carr found that the framing is what actually mattered: girls who understood tomboyism as rejecting femininity skewed queer, while girls who understood it as choosing masculinity were no gayer than anyone else. So the cleats were never the tell. The attitude you had about the tights, however.
Now lets look at the chart by age.. A 26-point spread, and I refuse to believe that older sapphics were simply better at climbing trees. Time for some sapphic speculation…
First, the label used to be the only door. If you were a kid in the 80s or 90s, gender expression had about two settings. Girly, or tomboy. That was the menu. "Tomboy" was the catch-all bin for any girl whose interests wandered off the approved list. Liked soccer? Tomboy. Refused tights? Tomboy. Cut your own bangs with the craft scissors as an act of political protest? Bad bangs, and also tomboy. For a lot of our 40+ users, it wasn't so much a phase they chose as a word that got applied to them, and it stuck because there was nothing else on the shelf. Of course 84% report it. What else were they going to report?
Second, the vocabulary exploded, and so did the number of ways to end up here. If you're 19, you've got masc, butch, futch, stud, soft butch, GNC, nonbinary, "not femme," and roughly forty other terms that describe the actual thing with actual precision. Tomboy is what your aunt called you at Thanksgiving in 2003 while side-eyeing your cargo shorts. But the bigger piece is that you can now be a kid who loved lip gloss and Bratz dolls and a truly unhinged amount of pink and still grow up to be extremely sapphic about it. No forms to fill out. Femme is a whole route. Androgynous is a whole route. "I genuinely just liked horses" is a route.
Which is, if you think about it, a nice finding? The 84% is partly a story about how few boxes there used to be. The 58% is a story about how nobody has to squeeze through a particular one anymore. Being a tomboy went from near-mandatory rite of passage to one option on a very long list, and the shrinking number isn't a loss of culture so much as the culture finally having elbow room.
Fifty Nifty
Last up: states visited. The overall average was about 16.
And once again, we are dead-on aligning with national data. YouGov's most recent numbers put the average American at 16 states visited outside their home state, with a near-identical age gradient — 32% of Americans 65+ have hit 30 or more states, compared to just 5% of adults under 30. Our chart does the same thing in miniature: 10 states for late teens, 13 for 20s, 18 for 30s, 22 for 40+. This is not a personality trait, it's an odometer. You cannot rush this one.
Queer users came out on top at 18, with lesbian and bisexual users tied at 16. At this point the queer-user-does-the-outdoor-thing trend is less a finding and more a running bit — queer users led on plants, on pets, and on camping trips just last Set. Whatever is going on there, the road trip is clearly part of it.
I do want to note one thing, which is that back in Set 3 we learned the average sapphic has driven 571 miles to see someone she was dating. Sixteen states, and I'd wager a nontrivial number of them were crossed for a girl. That's not tourism, that's a pilgrimage. The Subaru knew what it signed up for.
Quick real note before I let you go: not every state is an equally comfortable place to be visibly sapphic right now, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend the map is neutral. Plan accordingly, travel with people who have your back, and there's no shame in a state staying uncrossed off the list.
That's everything I've got for my first outing. Be kind to me in the chat, and get your guesses in for Q2 of Set 7.
XOXO SapphicSavvy
P.S. here's some additional reading if you're into that sort of thing:
Cheating:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-of-cheating-in-america
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/is-america-experiencing-an-infidelity-epidemic/
https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2020/5/1/rates-of-infidelity-among-heterosexual-gay-and-bisexual-adults/
https://gomag.com/article/everyone-on-the-l-word-cheats-do-lesbians-cheat-more/
Marriage Minimums (and the U-Haul):
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/best-age-to-get-married-have-a-child-buy-a-home-and-retire-heres-what-americans-say/
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/payne-manning-median-age-marriage-same-sex-different-sex-couples-2019-fp-21-11.html
https://diva-magazine.com/2025/03/13/you-hauled/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Haul_lesbian
Tomboys:
https://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-tomboys-r-us-225569/
https://www.autostraddle.com/read-a-fcking-book-liz-princes-tomboy-271056/
https://www.autostraddle.com/tomboys-of-literature-an-incomplete-survey/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200809/field-guide-to-the-tomboy-high-heels-and-pink-no-way
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-sexuality-and-romance/201611/do-tomboys-grow-be-lesbian
States Visited:
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52307-which-states-have-americans-visited
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/average-american-has-visited-just-12-states
https://www.autostraddle.com/tag/road-trip/