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"I&amp;#039;m getting married this summer, and I have to confess something. I&amp;#039;ve been playing the field. No, wait, come back! Don&amp;#039;t judge me! I haven&amp;#039;t cheated on my man, but I am guilty of the sin of coveting, especially since Tinder was introduced in my friend circle. On any Saturday night, you might find me swiping through a list of the single men in the area, fingers twitching left and right as I treat the dating app like my own personal Pokemon collection. I&amp;#039;m a full-blown addict. &amp;quot;That guy was way too hairy. Why did you say yes?&amp;quot; My friend Megan complained one night after I matched her with someone I assumed was Sasquatch&amp;#039;s metrosexual cousin. &amp;quot;What do you mean?&amp;quot; I asked, confused. &amp;quot;Look at how many guys like us. We&amp;#039;re winning!&amp;quot; Behind my misplaced eagerness to mate my friend with a human gorilla was a more challenging question. Why was I trying to wade back into the murky waters of the digital dating scene right at a time in my life when I should be getting out of the pool for adult swim? Some might say it&amp;#039;s cold feet. The Rise of FOMA You know what FOMO is, besides a terrible acronym, right? It&amp;#039;s the Fear of Missing Out, a brand-new neurosis coined for the generation who can&amp;#039;t spend a Saturday night at home without seeing a thousand pictures on Instagram of parties they aren&amp;#039;t attending. FOMA is the dating equivalent. Sufferers tend to be women in their 20s and 30s, afraid of settling down without an adequate number of sordid sexual experiences under their belts ... and worried that when they do find the one, they&amp;#039;ll wake up and realize that all the good sex stuff is happening outside their bedroom. Symptoms of FOMA may include stabs of irrational joy when your ex Likes your cute photo on Facebook, sweaty palms, Tinder envy, and irritability and shortness of temper when your partner jokes that &amp;quot;Netflix binge-watching is the new foreplay.&amp;quot; And it can be fatal to a relationship. Right before her 27th birthday (perhaps not coincidentally, the average age of first marriage for women in the U.S.), Raquel, now 29, realized that she no longer wanted to be with her boyfriend of eight years. It wasn&amp;#039;t because she had caught him cheating or because he forgot to DVR Scandal. A perky blonde in the high-pressure world of New York real estate, Raquel had a solid, &amp;quot;pretty happy&amp;quot; relationship based on years of trust and mutual admiration. When she broke up with her boyfriend, she knew she&amp;#039;d be giving up not only her first but also the only man she&amp;#039;d slept with ... which is exactly why she needed to call it quits. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re in a relationship, it feels a little like you&amp;#039;re losing all these potential lives and selves and, I guess, sexual partners,&amp;quot; Raquel says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s this kind of loss of possibility.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s part of a growing trend of millennial women who worry that attaching themselves to long-term partners too early means missing out on loads of good sex. Women are marrying later and enjoying their sexual freedom, and for the most part, that&amp;#039;s a great thing. With less pressure to get hitched and start a family, young women are less inhibited and can have a wider range of sexual experiences without feeling judged for their behavior. As one friend put it: &amp;quot;Why choose the prix-fixe meal when you can have a buffet?&amp;quot; Of course, FOMA is nothing new for guys. &amp;quot;Whenever I&amp;#039;m dating someone and I get a crush on another girl or start thinking about what it would be like to sleep with that waitress, it&amp;#039;s a signal to me that maybe this relationship isn&amp;#039;t going to work out,&amp;quot; Jon, a 30-year-old comic, told me at a mutual friend&amp;#039;s birthday party. &amp;quot;Oh, yeah,&amp;quot; said a model-esque woman standing near us. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m not dating right now. I like sex with other people way too much.&amp;quot; Jon chuckled. &amp;quot;Dude,&amp;quot; I nudged him. &amp;quot;She wasn&amp;#039;t telling you a joke.&amp;quot; Why We&amp;#039;re Going Through It &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re seeing a new generation of women who feel like they should be living it up sexually,&amp;quot; says psychotherapist and sociologist Leslie C. Bell, PhD, author of Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom. Bell has studied the struggle young women feel to balance their sex and love lives ... which are not necessarily the same thing. &amp;quot;Many women are getting this historically unprecedented pressure to figure out their relationship patterns and preferences,&amp;quot; Bell says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a feeling that you need to be spending your 20s figuring yourself out by having as many sexual experiences as you can.&amp;quot; Notably, many young women aren&amp;#039;t afraid of being labeled slutty, as past generations were \u2014 but they are afraid of finding their life partner before having lived life to the fullest, sexually speaking. No wonder, then, that Bell also discovered that millennial women often equate &amp;quot;settling down&amp;quot; with just plain &amp;quot;settling.&amp;quot; What brought on this new generation of women with FOMA? Ironically, the way our parents raised us has played a part, Bell says: &amp;quot;The women I spoke with felt that their parents had groomed them for success and marrying or getting into a serious relationship too early could pivot them from success by inhibiting their development or growth. They didn&amp;#039;t get direct pressure to sleep around, just not to settle down.&amp;quot; As Hannah Horvath&amp;#039;s mom told her on Girls, &amp;quot;Keep the job, not the guy. He&amp;#039;s really nice, but stay open to possibilities.&amp;quot; However big an influence our parents have in our neurosis, they&amp;#039;re not the ones cheering on our Saturday-night behavior from the sidelines. Our friends and social circle can be the most extreme enablers of FOMA. &amp;quot;I had a couple of threesomes in college,&amp;quot; says Sarah, a 32-year-old medical student in Vallejo, California. &amp;quot;They just sort of sprung up. They weren&amp;#039;t on my to-do list, but when I talked about them after the fact, the way my friends reacted made it feel like another checked box.&amp;quot; Sarah says she never did anything &amp;quot;just for the story,&amp;quot; but having her posse tune in for the next juicy installment of her escapades \u2014 say, that one time she had sex in a Starbucks bathroom with a near stranger \u2014 was &amp;quot;an extra perk&amp;quot; of her kinkiness. &amp;quot;Some young women in long-term relationships hear from friends, &amp;#039;Why would you settle down now? This is the one time you have to live it up,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Bell. &amp;quot;But sometimes, it is more subtle than that. You might sense a friend&amp;#039;s resentment or her disappointment that you&amp;#039;re not participating in the camaraderie of a shared experience.&amp;quot; Basically, your friends will support your desire to play the field as long as they are in the same boat. But if they&amp;#039;re settled and you&amp;#039;re not, or vice versa, things can get judge-y real quick. We can also blame our FOMA on the internet, says Jessica Massa, cofounder of the &amp;quot;post-dating&amp;quot; website The-Gaggle.com. &amp;quot;Social media puts more people in your sphere whom you&amp;#039;re going to be attracted to. In the past, when you were in a relationship, there were maybe a couple of people IRL around who could tempt you. Now there&amp;#039;s the guy who Friended you on Facebook that you used to hook up with and the guy who&amp;#039;s always Favoriting your Instagrams. And all those other guys who retweet you on the reg. Temptation is always around the corner, and that&amp;#039;s dangerous ... and sometimes sexy dangerous, unfortunately.&amp;quot; Think about it: Before the internet, we had no idea so many guys were possibly interested in us! Now we think: Why spend nights bickering with a boyfriend when we could be connecting with an ex from grad school who&amp;#039;s constantly Liking all our posts? And wait a minute, what&amp;#039;s up with that guy, anyway? &amp;quot;In the scheme of things, it seems very passive for a guy to Like your post or photo,&amp;quot; says Massa. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s actually very aggressive. It shows that he&amp;#039;s thinking about you, that he&amp;#039;s paying attention to what you&amp;#039;re doing. Maybe it&amp;#039;ll start with a couple of Favorites on Twitter. But when he starts Liking your Facebook photos, it means he&amp;#039;s liking that picture of you, liking how you look and what you&amp;#039;re about.&amp;quot; Teegan, a 24-year-old teacher from Vancouver, believes that pop culture&amp;#039;s portrayal of sexy singles plays into her squeamishness about boyfriends, although she currently has one. &amp;quot;What women are scared of is that if they settle down too early, they&amp;#039;ll be missing their Sex and the City years \u2014 the years of being uncommitted and fabulous. It is tempting to think that maybe my best single years are ahead of me,&amp;quot; she admits. &amp;quot;I could see how people could think that maybe you&amp;#039;re wasting your time on couplehood, which hasn&amp;#039;t been shown a great deal of positive attention in the media.&amp;quot; True. Just look how quickly Nick and Jess on New Girl broke up, and those two were the perfect couple! What to Do If You Have It So what to do about chronic FOMA? Unlike regular FOMO, which just makes you feel bad about your life, FOMA can spur us into taking action. Zoe, a 26-year-old filmmaker from Pahoa, Hawaii, puts it this way: &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re in the happy part of your relationship, you might not even notice that cute guy in line at the grocery store \u2014 you&amp;#039;re so &amp;#039;la la la.&amp;#039; But when the relationship isn&amp;#039;t going so well, you start to flirt back a little bit more, you think of how this guy could be better than the relationship you&amp;#039;re already in. You have to think, &amp;#039;Why am I liking this attention so much? Am I not getting the attention I need, and should I ask for it?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; A few years ago, Zoe had been getting frustrated with her long-term boyfriend&amp;#039;s inability to spark with her under the sheets. (&amp;quot;He was vanilla; I was a sundae,&amp;quot; she says.) Also, she had her eye on her cute yoga instructor. &amp;quot;I was like, &amp;#039;I need to be getting sexually fulfilled in another relationship.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; But she soon realized that she had just traded one meh relationship for another. The yoga instructor, who was smart and funny and good at yoga, spent most of their conversations talking about how he was smart and funny and good at yoga. &amp;quot;He was awesome in bed \u2014 he would turn me into a pretzel \u2014 but it turned out I didn&amp;#039;t like him at all. He was arrogant.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with putting off getting into a relationship, nor does suffering from an occasional pang of FOMA necessarily mean your relationship is unhappy. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s kind of a human phenomenon to feel like you&amp;#039;re missing out,&amp;quot; says Bell. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s inevitable we&amp;#039;re going to get crushes on people, even if we&amp;#039;re settled, and that&amp;#039;s natural. Culturally, we&amp;#039;ve been sold a bill of goods that we&amp;#039;re supposed to feel certain about these things, but inevitably, even in happy relationships, we&amp;#039;re going to have some mixed feelings and it&amp;#039;s important to know that.&amp;quot; And while Zoe&amp;#039;s and Raquel&amp;#039;s stories can give us pause about ditching our boyfriends or swearing off relationships because there might be a knee-buckling orgasm waiting for us around the bend, the best kiss-and-tell tales have a happy ending. Sarah says she cured her FOMA by &amp;quot;marrying a man who is up for anything. He allows me to be adventurous without pushing me out of my safe zone. And I&amp;#039;m totally cool with having sex in beds now, because Starbucks bathrooms are gross.&amp;quot; This article was originally published as &amp;quot;Do You Have Sex FOMO?&amp;quot; in the August 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition! 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