Dimensions of human experience

It recently occurred to me that people who are celibate, either intentionally or despite their best efforts, miss a dimension of experience—not just sex but intimacy. It's a dimension of experience that can't be reproduced though a combination of other experiences. In mathematics one would refer to it as orthogonal to other experiences—that the term dimension should be taken literally. It adds a new dimension to one's range of possible experiences.

The next thought was to ask whether anyone has attempted to identify the dimensions of experience we are capable of. Of course, that's probably too simplistic a notion. Debora asked whether eating chocolate cake is fundamentally different from eating steak? It would probably be very difficult to find a collection of mutually orthogonal experiential dimensions. But it would be interesting to try. I wonder whether such an attempt has been made and with what sort of result.