More and more American women engage in pre-marital sex nowadays, which is a shame because new research has discovered that there is a counterintuitive link between pre-marital sex and marital stability.
The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) collected relationship data in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013 and discovered that women with 10 or more sexual partners before marriage were the most likely to divorce. Those with three to nine partners were less likely to divorce, and those who had no sexual partners or just one were the least likely to divorce.
"As premarital sex became more acceptable, it's reasonable to anticipate that its negative effects on marital stability waned. In general, Americans became more accepting of non-marital sex. Certainly fewer men entered marriage with the expectation of a virgin bride," writes Nicholas H. Wolfinger, author of "Understanding the Divorce Cycle."
"All of the fanfare associated with hooking up is evidence that some young people have become comfortable with the idea of sex outside of serious relationships," he adds.
In just a decade (2000-2010), the number of women who have 10 or more sexual partners jumped from 14 percent to 18 percent, while those who had remained virgins before marriage decreased significantly from 12 percent to 5 percent.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the highest five-year divorce rates were reserved for women who had two sexual partners before marriage (28 percent). In contrast, the highest five-year divorce rates for those who married in the 2000s belong to those who had 10 or more premarital sex partners (33 percent).
"How can these findings be explained?" asks Wolfinger. "It's easiest to make sense of the low divorce rates of people with minimal sexual experience prior to marriage. Obviously, one of the most common reasons for premarital abstinence is religion."
The author says that women who have multiple sex partners are less likely to be regular churchgoers, but there is "little reason to suspect that religion is an important explanation for the relationship between sex partners and divorce outside of women who marry having had one or no partners."
Wolfinger says several factors also line up in a woman's decision to engage in pre-marital sex, such as race and family of origin. They discovered that Caucasian and African American women had similar premarital sexual behaviour, while Latinas and members of the "other" population group had fewer sexual partners and lower divorce rates compared to both whites or blacks.
