A while back I wrote a post on 10 Critical Things In How To Choose A Wife. Seeing this was a fantasy draft pick, I went all out and described my ideal woman… and carefully covered my ass and said that my ideal woman was spookily similar to the woman I actually married. See how that works, I’m dammed clever sometimes.
Anyway, I did draw some hate for point 6… that she should be a virgin. I said…
“The fewer sexual partners a woman has before marriage the higher her marital satisfaction and the sexual satisfaction she has within marriage. You very much want your wife to sexually imprint on sex with you and completely bond to you. The sex is just going to be that much better over the long term. Not to mention no other ex-lovers lurking on Facebook, sexual diseases, bad experiences and regrets to worry about. The harsh truth to the modern hook up girl is that yes indeed every time you sleep with another man, you damage your long term wife potential. Plus the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and highly promiscuous women before marriage are probably far more likely to cheat on you during marriage.”
What I didn’t know then was not just that I was right, but that I was right to a degree that I am still trying to grapple with. The effect of non-marital partners is not just a minor influence on marital outcomes, or even a moderate one as I had thought, it may in fact be one of the strongest influences there is.
I got put onto the CDC data and the Heritage Study of that same data at The Social Pathologist. Here’s the mind blowing graph that should have you reaching for an adult beverage.
There should be the phrase “ever married” added on the Y-axis on the left.
The good news is that if you’re married to a woman whose only lifetime sexual partner is you, there is a 80.47% chance that she is in a stable marriage, meaning you are in a stable marriage, which rocks. If you head over to The Social Pathologist and read up on the positive effects of education and income and do the math, a well educated, decent job holding virgin is as close to a 100% lock on marital outcomes as you can get. In short according to the CDC… if Jennifer and I divorce, the problem statistically speaking is very probably me. I just love what my tax dollars do.
The bad news is even a single lifetime non-marital sex partner hacks away that 80% success rate down to 53%. That’s a single ex-boyfriend, or a single hook up, the fling in France on that summer vacation. Seriously just one other sex partner decreases marital outcomes by a third. Even if it’s cheating during the marriage as the cause of marital break up, most cheating is never caught and it’s the being caught that really makes the shit hit the fan.
Then assuming you guys can read, the numbers get worse and worse seemingly hitting a 29% plateau from 5-15 partners, then dropping even lower after that. Five sex partners just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to be honest. That’s just one serious boyfriend for every year of college and then someone serious after that and then future husband. But no, apparently she’s like a fourth round draft pick and not someone to build a franchise around.
Quoting The Social Pathologists summary…
“What this data shows is that sexual partner count is a very good–in fact uncannily good–predictor of the risks of divorce.
How good? One extra partner in a woman is equivalent to negating the protective benefit of greater-than-high school education in a woman, two partners equivalent to having a poverty affected marriage, ten or more partners negates any benefit of income or education with regard to marital risk.
From a statistical perspective, the marital dissolution risk of a woman receiving welfare and a wealthy promiscuous educated woman is about the same.”
On one hand I’m heartened that I have solid proof that Jennifer is a great wife choice. Every so often I get shit on for being “just lucky” that Jennifer is a good wife. You know what, three years of an agonizing long distance relationship, immigration and all the drama of getting together… that was hard, really really hard. I knew who I was working for though. Maybe the little pig that built his house out of bricks was “just lucky” too.
On the other hand, I’m horrified at just how damaging non-marital sex can be. I don’t actually consider someone with five non-marital partners to be terribly slutty. That’s just a couple serious boyfriends and a couple hook ups and the short lived relationship with the guy she really liked but he had a real girlfriend the whole time so she dumped him. (Awkward… she wasn’t actually really in a relationship though, so we just nod and smile and agree that she was the dumper and not the de facto dumpee.)
But apparently there’s not much difference between 5 and 15 according to the stats. And 15 is starting to sound pretty slutty. So maybe 5 is pretty slutty too. I’m very conflicted about that. I mean I know people, I have friends that are 5+… they’re nice. I don’t want to see them as damaged goods, but… 80% vs 29%… um, wow. Just wow. I need that beverage.
There are a ton of women who have already gone out and hit 5+ and can’t unfuck their number back down to zero. I guess all I can say is that these are just odds and that you can influence your outcomes. You can make positive choices and choose to stay the course and fight for a marriage and a love together. We all do make mistakes and not all our mistakes are sexual in nature either. The trick is to learn from them and try and move on into a brighter future. If you’re educated and not broke off your ass, you are by no means automatically falling towards the event horizon of the black hole of divorce. But there is an influence at work that is undeniable.
My hunch is that sex is far more powerful at forging interpersonal bonds than we want it to be. Maybe in plain English all it means is that you really just don’t want to marry someone that has five guys she’s slept with being able to message her on Facebook at random for the rest of her life. It only takes one of them to be The Big Bad Wolf that sticks in her mind… then all your shit comes crashing down.
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