UVA sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox told the Atlantic:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage (Khazan, 2018)

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 martial 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 that <25% of women with 10+ partners reported higher quality marriages compared to >40% of women with less than 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 ~25% for women in the 4 to 9 partner range) (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).