A new survey has found that women are more likely to regret one-night stands than men, and it’s across the ‘entire distribution of heterosexual’ experiences.
Casual sex can be enjoyable for some people, but it doesn’t suit everyone.
For many, attraction is tied to familiarity—feeling comfortable with someone, building trust, or having an emotional connection before becoming intimate.
Others are more open to spontaneity, enjoying the excitement of a brief encounter with no expectation of anything continuing afterward.
Yet the data suggests that plenty of people don’t come away from one-night stands feeling fully satisfied, and one major reason comes down to orgasm.
An international online survey asked 1,075 participants to reflect on their one-night stand experiences and report how satisfied they felt afterward.
Based on the analysis, women were significantly less likely to report a positive outcome—often because they didn’t reach orgasm.
Researchers found that while regret levels were generally low overall, women consistently reported more regret than men after heterosexual one-night stands.
The findings indicated that regret was linked to factors such as not having an orgasm, being intoxicated, feeling pressured, and worrying about how they might be perceived afterward.
“Decisions about sexual experiences are among the most common causes of regret in humans,” the University of Innsbruck researchers wrote in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. “Women showed systematically higher regret than men across the entire distribution of heterosexual one-night stand experiences.”
At the same time, the results weren’t uniformly negative: around half of respondents said they didn’t regret their most recent one-night stand at all, and many others described their feelings as neutral.
Alcohol also appeared to play a major role in these experiences, with roughly three-quarters of participants reporting they had been drinking beforehand.
Notably, the women who reported regret were describing heterosexual encounters; in experiences with same-sex partners, women’s regret levels did not differ from men’s.
“Sexual satisfaction emerged as the strongest mediator, with orgasm achievement playing the critical role,” the researchers wrote.
They added: “The gender difference in regret after heterosexual one-night stands was fully explained by…sexual satisfaction, heteronomy (feeling pressured), intoxication and reputational concern.”
“The statistically significant gender difference in regret was moderate in size, and…analysis revealed that about 70 per cent of women’s most recent heterosexual one-night stand experiences resulted in higher regret than men’s average experiences,” they concluded.
The researchers also pointed to a broader issue: sexual encounters often prioritize men’s pleasure. They suggested that clearer, more open communication could help reduce the satisfaction gap and potentially lower regret in future encounters.