ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Life without sex: Large-scale study links sexlessness to physical, cognitive, and personality traits, socioecological factors, and DNA.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life without sex: Lack of desire or traumatic retire?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Science and sensitivity in the study of not having sex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Life without sex: Large-scale study links sexlessness to physical, cognitive, and personality traits, socioecological factors, and DNA.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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11 authors.
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Abstract
Romantic (typically sexual) relationships are important to personal, physical, mental, social, and economic well-being, and to human evolution. Yet little is known about factors contributing to long-term lack of intimate relationships. We investigated phenotypic and genetic correlates of never having had sex in ~400,000 UK residents aged 39 to 73 and ~13,500 Australian residents aged 18 to 89. The strongest associations revealed that sexless individuals were more educated, less likely to use alcohol and smoke, more nervous, lonelier, and unhappier. Sexlessness was more strongly associated with physical characteristics (e.g., upper body strength) in men than in women. Sexless men tended to live in regions with fewer women, and sexlessness was more prevalent in regions with more income inequality. Common genetic variants explained 17% (SE = 4%) and 14% (SE = 3%) of variation in sexlessness in men and women, with a genetic correlation between sexes of 0.56 (SE = 0.17). Polygenic scores predicted a range of related outcomes in the Australian dataset. Our findings uncover multifaceted correlates of human intimacy and raise important lines of enquiry in the evolutionary and social sciences.
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