Are You Meant to Be a Bachelor?
Researchers find men with a certain gene are less likely to be married Men's Health By: Abby Lerner If the thought of being in a committed relationship makes you break out into a sweat, there's nothing wrong with you—you may just be programmed to be single. Swedish researchers looked at variants of a particular gene—the “monogamy gene”—that encodes for a hormone called vasopressin and found that one of these variants (or a lack thereof) is associated with a distinctive kind of pair-bonding behavior in men. The findings suggest an explanation for why some men commit to monogamous relationships while others have a hard time shaking their frat-house habits. Men who carried only one copy of the “monogamy gene” were more likely to be unmarried or to report some form of marital crisis within the last year, compared to similar men without the gene. Those with two copies of the variant were more than twice as likely to have a dysfunctional marriage, according to the study from