RP male here.

The fact that CC riders make worse long term partners seems to be one of the basic principles of RP, and yet from what I can tell it is rather weakly supported. I know about the Teachman study, but I don't find it sufficient:

  • it is just one study

  • it shows a correlation between partner count and divorce rate, but it could be attributed to may other factors like religion and culture

  • most importantly, it's not really useful because its stronger correlation is for women with zero or one previous partners, which is not really realistic nowadays. Take this away and the remaining correlation is even less than what common sense would dictate: sluts make worse wives.

I realized I'm not convinced by it by trying to think about my own behavior. My choice to stay away from LTRs is mostly conscious and dictated by experience. I don't feel like my pair bonding ability is seriously diminished by time - on the contrary I have to use willpower and logic to stop myself from making mistakes. I don't think I'm unique in this, and I don't really see why women would be fundamentally different.

There's also the case of sex workers. While they have different romantic lives, the differences aren't by far as big or as universal as you'd expect if pair bonding would be an expendable resource.


To clarify: I'm not saying marrying a CC rider or ex-sex worker is just as good as marrying a virgin, so please don't answer this (rather obvious) question. I'm pointing out that one of the biggest sticking points between RP and feminist ideologies, the fact that women tend to "explore their sexuality" in their 20s has much more weight in TRP than hard evidence supporting it.