Sex gets framed as a universal milestone. It’s good for your health, your mood, and even your bank account if you end up cohabiting. But a new study of more than 400,000 adults suggests about one percent never cross that line at all. And it’s not just a matter of choice—it’s a web of genetics, geography, and circumstance.
Researchers from Amsterdam UMC analyzed UK Biobank data and an Australian sample, publishing their results in PNAS. The team found no “celibacy gene,” but genetics accounted for roughly 15 percent of why some people never have sex. Those same genes often correlated with traits like higher intelligence, more education, and introversion.
The environment played its part too. Men in regions with fewer women were more likely to report lifelong sexlessness. Areas with greater income inequality also saw higher rates, mirroring earlier work that mapped “incel” posts in the U.S. to similar regions. The math of romance, it seems, can be just as brutal as the biology.
Why Some Adults Just Never Have Sex
Then there’s the body. Men with weaker grip strength and less upper-body muscle—proxies for overall strength—were less likely to have had sex. Across genders, those who never had sex reported feeling lonelier, less happy, and less connected to friends or family. They drank less, used fewer drugs, and often wore glasses from a younger age. If that sounds like a cliché of the bookish outsider, the data suggest there’s at least some truth to it.
The study sketches a stereotype that feels uncomfortably familiar: smart, socially isolated, physically less imposing. But the authors stress that cause and effect are hard to untangle. Does sexlessness breed unhappiness, or does unhappiness block opportunities for sex? And what about the participants who are asexual, uninterested in sex to begin with?
Either way, the findings complicate how we think about “normal” adulthood. Not having sex isn’t rare, and it isn’t reducible to one cause. It’s the result of overlapping pressures—genes, environment, confidence, and luck—that leave some people on the outside of a cultural script that assumes sex is inevitable. For anyone still clinging to the idea that sex is a universal checkpoint, this study makes it clear: the story is far more complicated.
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