If you’re foolish enough to be marriage-oriented, a girl’s past promiscuity (measured by n) is not only useful in gauging her propensity towards infidelity but also that of an unhappy marriage and eventual divorce.

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“Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies (and an Atlantic contributor). In an earlier analysis, Wolfinger found that women with zero or one previous sex partners before marriage were also least likely to divorce, while those with 10 or more were most likely.

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Khazan, O. (2018, October 22). Fewer Sex Partners Means a Happier Marriage. The Atlantic. Retrieved July 7, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/sexual-partners-and-marital-happiness/573493/ (https://archive.md/P5IQ2)

University of Virginia sociology prof. W. Bradford Wilcox

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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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Wolfinger, N. H. (2018, April 18). Promiscuous America: Smart, secular, and somewhat less happy. Institute for Family Studies. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://ifstudies.org/blog/promiscuous-america-smart-secular-and-somewhat-less-happy (https://archive.md/F2Kf7)

University of Utah sociology prof. Nicholas Wolfinger

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The findings from this study demonstrate that the number of sexual partners participants had was negatively associated with sexual quality, communication, and relationship stability, and for one age cohort relationship satisfaction, even when controlling for a wide range of variables including education, religiosity, and relationship length. (pg.715)

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Busby, D. M., Willoughby, B. J., & Carroll, J. S. (2013). Sowing wild oats: Valuable experience or a field full of weeds? Personal Relationships, 20(4), 706–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12009

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Generally speaking, respondents who report extensive premarital sexual experience report extensive extramarital activity. Measures of the locus of first intercourse and number of premarital partners show positive associations with (1) rating one's marriage as less happy than average (pg.221-222)

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Athanasiou, R., & Sarkin, R. (1974). Premarital sexual behavior and postmarital adjustment. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 3(3), 207–225. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541486

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Further, for women, having had fewer sexual partners before marriage was also related to higher marital quality. This doesn’t mean that sex before marriage will doom a marriage, but sex with many different partners may be risky if you’re looking for a high-quality marriage…We further found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be. This association was not statistically significant for men. (pg.5-6)

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Rhoades, G., Stanley, S., & National Marriage Project (Rutgers University). (2014). Before 'I do': What do premarital experiences have to do with marital quality among today's young adults?. Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project, University of Virginia. http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/NMP-BeforeIDoReport-Final.pdf

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Our results also confirmed the prediction that men and women who had more experience with short-term relationships in the past (i.e., those with high Behavior facet scores) were more likely to have multiple sexual partners and unstable relationships in the future. The behaviorally expressed level of sociosexuality thus seems to be a fairly stable personal characteristic. (pg. 1131)

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Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2008). Beyond global sociosexual orientations: a more differentiated look at sociosexuality and its effects on courtship and romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1113–1135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.5.1113

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This research brief shows that the relationship between divorce and the number of sexual partners women have prior to marriage is complex. I explore this relationship using data from the three most recent waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) collected in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013. For women marrying since the start of the new millennium: Women with 10 or more partners were the most likely to divorce

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Wolfinger, N. H., PhD. (2016, June 6). Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability. Institute for Family Studies. Retrieved August 24, 2020, from https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability (https://archive.vn/hukEg)

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The women who divorced early in life were higher in neuroticism; had more tense, less close, and more unstable families of origin; were less puritanical in their attitudes; and had more premarital romantic and sexual experience than the stably married women… There is an interesting pattern of relation between the sexual history items and marital satisfaction. For both men and women, pre-marital romantic and sexual involvements were negative predictors of marital satisfaction (pg.31-32)

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Kelly, E. L., & Conley, J. J. (1987). Personality and compatibility: a prospective analysis of marital stability and marital satisfaction. Journal of personality and social psychology, 52(1), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.52.1.27

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Women who serially cohabited and/or had premarital sex with someone besides their husband had higher odds of marital dissolution than women who never cohabited. Teachman’s findings suggest that both sexual history and cohabitation history influence marital stability. (pg.4)

Serial cohabitors’ higher number of sexual and cohabiting partners suggests that they have a longer history of dissolved relationships -- i.e., sexual, (most likely dating) and cohabiting relationships – that they bring to their cohabiting and later marital relationships. This relationship experience may affect the quality and stability of their cohabiting relationship and the odds of marrying their cohabiting partners. Consistent with Teachman (2003), who found that both sexual and cohabiting partnerships significantly predicted the odds of marital dissolution, our findings suggest that studies of union formation and stability should consider the full range of sexual experiences in early adulthood. (pg.11)

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Cohen, J., & Manning, W. (2010). The relationship context of premarital serial cohabitation. In Social Science Research (Vol. 39, Issue 5, pp. 766–776). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.04.011

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When compared with their peers who report fewer partners, those who self-​report 20 or more in their lifetime are:

  • Twice as likely to have ever been divorced (50 percent vs. 27 percent)

  • Substantially less happy with life (p < 0.05) (pg.88-89)

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Regnerus, M. (2017). Cheap sex: The transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy.

University of Texas-Austin sociology prof. Mark Regnerus

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Second, intimates’ sociosexuality was negatively associated with their average (across all assessments) marital and sexual satisfaction; relatively unrestricted (vs. restricted) intimates reported lower marital and sexual satisfaction. (pg.7)

Data drawn from two independent, longitudinal studies of newlywed couples provided support for our predictions. Specifically, unrestricted (vs. restricted) intimates began their marriages less satisfied and remained less satisfied over time; although intimates with unrestricted (vs. restricted) partners began their marriages no more or less satisfied, they experienced steeper declines in satisfaction over time.2 Notably, unrestricted partner sociosexuality indirectly predicted marital dissolution through intimates’ declines in marital satisfaction. (pg.11)

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French, J. E., Altgelt, E. E., & Meltzer, A. L. (2019). The implications of sociosexuality for marital satisfaction and dissolution. Psychological Science, 30(10), 1460–1472. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619868997

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  • Over half of women who only had sex with their husbands high quality marriages reported high quality marriages

  • Slightly over 40% of women who had sex with 2-10 partners reported higher quality marriages

  • Less than 25% of women who had sex with 10+ partners reported higher quality marriages

graph

https://i.imgur.com/ucSkZsL.jpg

Rampell, C. (2014, August 26). In marriages, what happens in Vegas may not stay in Vegas. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/08/26/in-marriages-what-happens-in-vegas-may-not-stay-in-vegas/ (https://archive.ph/EvBYN)

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  • Women with 10+ sexual partners were 14.53x more likely to divorce than women who had only been with their husbands and over twice as likely to divorce than women with 2-4 sexual partners (pg.7, table 3)

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Jackson, S. E., Yang, L., Veronese, N., Koyanagi, A., López Sánchez, G. F., Grabovac, I., Soysal, P., & Smith, L. (2019). Sociodemographic and behavioural correlates of lifetime number of sexual partners: findings from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. BMJ sexual & reproductive health, 45(2), 138–146. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsrh-2018-200230

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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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Dolan, E. W. (2019, November 5). New psychology research indicates your sociosexual orientation could make your marriage more difficult. PsyPost. Retrieved December 12, 2021, from https://www.psypost.org/2019/11/new-psychology-research-indicates-your-sociosexual-orientation-could-make-your-marriage-more-difficult-54765 (https://archive.md/PCP0D)

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

https://i.imgur.com/p4dsiQo.jpg

Iliades, C., & Bass III MD MPH, P. (n.d.). Is there a price to pay for promiscuity? EverydayHealth.Com. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from http://www.everydayhealth.com/longevity/can-promiscuity-threaten-longevity.aspx (https://archive.md/Va0EJ)

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sociosexually unrestricted individuals are more likely to: 1) engage in sex at an earlier point in their relationships; 2) engage in sex with more than one partner at a time; and 3) be involved in sexual relationships characterized by less investment, commitment, love, and dependency. Sociosexual orientation (just like all other personality traits) is a relatively stable trait of individuals over the life course; in other words, people are either sociosexually restricted or unrestricted most of their lives… As you can imagine, sociosexual orientation has a great impact on the risk of divorce. Sociosexually unrestricted individuals are far more likely to experience divorce than sociosexually restricted individuals because they are more likely to engage in extramarital affairs.

https://i.imgur.com/TD8LjrS.jpg

Kanazawa, S. (2008). The 50-0-50 rule in action: Sociosexual orientation and risk of divorce. Psychology Today. Retrieved 23 December 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/the-50-0-50-rule-in-action-sociosexual-orientation-and (https://archive.md/dPUZ3)