Casual sex is not something everyone feels comfortable with, and there are many reasons behind that. For some people, emotional connection plays a big role in attraction and intimacy, which makes spontaneous encounters feel less appealing.
Others find that physical attraction alone is not enough to create interest, and they need some level of familiarity or trust before they can fully engage. That difference in how people approach intimacy shapes how they experience these situations later on.
Even so, the study suggests that this group may not be as large as often assumed. One of the main reasons highlighted by the research comes down to a key factor that shapes how the experience is remembered afterward.
An international online survey asked 1,075 participants to reflect on their one-night stands and rate how satisfied they felt. This allowed researchers to compare both emotional reactions and physical outcomes in a more structured way.
This was largely tied to the fact that they did not reach orgasm during these encounters. That gap in satisfaction became one of the strongest factors shaping how they felt afterward.
According to the analysis, regret overall was not extremely high across all participants. However, when comparing responses, women were still more likely to report regret than men, which created a noticeable difference between the two groups.
“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, not everyone felt regret. Around half of those surveyed said they did not regret their most recent one-night stand at all, while many others described their feelings as neutral rather than strongly positive or negative.
Interestingly, the difference in regret appeared mainly in heterosexual encounters. When women reported on same-sex experiences, their levels of regret were similar to those of men, which suggests that the dynamic changes depending on the context.
“Sexual satisfaction emerged as the strongest mediator, with orgasm achievement playing the critical role,” the researchers wrote.
“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 out that many sexual encounters still tend to focus more on male satisfaction. Because of that, they suggested that better communication between partners could help close this gap and lead to more balanced experiences in the future.
When these factors align, people are more likely to feel neutral or even positive about a one-time encounter. But when one or more of them fall short, it can change how the situation is remembered later.
This helps explain why the same type of experience can lead to very different reactions depending on the person and the context in which it happens.
