*relevant to the men who insist on getting married

If you’re a man who isn’t interested in being divorced, don’t marry a person with a high body count, and that’s irrespective of your own.

UVA sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox told award-winning writer of Atlantic Olga Khazan (2018):

Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage

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UofU sociology professor Nicholas Wolfinger (2018) wrote:

The residents of Promiscuous America are predictable in many ways. They’re less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced.

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In addition to being a strong predictor of women’s infidelity, women’s number of lifetime sexual partners has a strong positive association with relationship instability, relationship dissatisfaction, including marital and sexual dissatisfaction, and the likelihood of divorce. Busby, Willoughby, & Carroll (2013) set out to determine whether the number of sexual partners was associated with poor relationship outcomes while controlling for relationship length, education, race, income, age, and religiosity. The results, using a sample of 2,654 married individuals, indicated that the number of sexual partners was associated with lower levels of sexual quality, communication, and relationship stability (excerpt). Athanasiou and Sarkin (1974) found that one’s number of lifetime sexual partners showed positive associations with marital dissatisfaction (excerpt). Rhoades and Stanley (2014) found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be (excerpt). Particularly alarming was a graph they sent to the Washington Post, indicating that <25% of women with 10+ partners reported higher quality marriages compared to >40% of women with <10 partners (graph).

Using CDC’s NSFG data collected in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013, Wolfinger (2016) found that women with 10 or more partners were the most likely to divorce, with the highest 5-year year divorce rates (33% compared to ~20% for women in general) (screenshot). In a longitudinal study, Jackson et al. (2019) found that women with 10 or more partners were over fourteen times likelier to be divorced or separated than women with one partner and over twice as likely to be divorced or separated than women with 2 to 4 partners (excerpt). Using regression analysis, Kelly and Conley (1987) found that prenuptial variables like the wife’s premarital sexual activities are a major predictor of marital satisfaction, with women who divorced early in life having more premarital romantic and sexual experience than the stably married women (excerpt). Penke and Asendorpf (2008) confirmed the prediction that women who had more experience with short-term relationships in the past were more likely to have multiple sexual partners and unstable relationships in the future (excerpt). Cohen and Manning (2010) affirmed that women who had sex with someone besides their husband had a higher risk of marital dissolution—women who had multiple premarital partners aside from their husband had significantly higher odds of marital dissolution (excerpt). UT Austin professor Mark Regnerus (2017) found that those with 20+ partners were twice as like to have ever been divorced (50% vs. 27%) (excerpt). French et al. (2019) found that those with unrestricted sociosexualities and their partners tend to have less marital and sexual satisfaction in addition to describing some mitigating factors (excerpts), getting in touch with Eric Dolan (2019) of PsyPost:

Those with a more unrestricted sociosexuality — meaning those who were more inclined towards casual sex — tended to begin their marriages less satisfied and remain less satisfied over time. And people with more unrestricted partners tended to experience steeper declines in satisfaction, which in turn predicted marital dissolution.

“When people couple up, they (and their partners) enter into relationships with their own personal relationship histories — if those histories include a cast of previous ‘no-strings-attached’ sexual partners and/or acceptance toward casual sex, then staying in a satisfying, long-term relationship (such as marriage) may be more difficult,” French told PsyPost.

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Medical doctor Chris Iliades (2010) of Everyday Health wrote:

And obviously, having multiple sexual partners makes it difficult to sustain a healthy relationship.

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