The link between premarital sex and marriage stability | Hacker News Reader

The link between premarital sex and marriage stability

ifstudies.org

60 pointsmgh239 comments

At university I took a class about this sort of stuff and one of the eye opening things was the studies about how the couples with the best sex life were actually old, married, religious couples. If you want great sex, then going to church and having a lifelong, selfless, loving commitment to your partner seems to help a lot; but that sure makes sense anyways...

There are a lot of studies about how pornography and such also makes it hard to have healthy, connected relationships. Church-going folks probably avoid quite a bit of those pitfalls as well, which helps in the longrun.

Also, if anyone is looking for world class research on family/couple stuff, Gottman institute is awesome: https://www.gottman.com/

> [...] the couples with the best sex life were actually old, married, religious couples.

How did the measure the quality of the sex in religious couples to compare it with the quality of sex in non religious couples? Self report? Gesell chamber? Videos? Some attached sensors?

Are all religions equal?

The odds of divorce are lowest with zero or one premarital partners.

Makes sense to me. Those people are either the least interested in pursuing sexual relationships solely for pleasure or the least able to do so, so might feel more compelled to stick with a marriage that isn't 100% as they either won't be doing it for sex or might feel unable to find someone else.

However, I think the more interesting thing to research would be links between perimarital sex and marriage stability :-D

This is mostly because low divorce rates as well as virgin marriages are both highly correlated with religion, which is explained in the article.

How do you explain then the increase of premarital sexual encounters over time?

This guy mentions and then dismisses without rationale the idea that women who have ten partners might have other life experiences that make them less likely to stay married. He doesn't even consider the notion that a woman who has zero partners is damaged in ways that make her unable to leave a bad relationship.

That he is does not even mention the effects of the man's sexuality (or the nature of a man who would choose a virgin or a woman who had ten or more partners) tells me that this is polemic.

This IFS is a conservative organization working to convince us that 'traditional' families are the bedrock of society. This article is manipulation.

Keep stuff like this in mind when reading all social science papers. In softer sciences the bias of the researchers seems to have a very strong effect on the outcome.

Wow. Not a word about the man's number of sexual partners in the marriages that stayed together or divorced.

On the other hand, it's apparently very interesting if the woman is a virgin or not when married.

End of 5th paragraph:

>"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"

Men can't remember if they had sex?

I believe they tend to over-remember, if anything.

The claim is less reliably, not that they can't remember.

From the article: unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women

> unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women

How was this validated? It seems the groups surveyed during each period were completely different, so they were just asking people if they remembered how many people they'd had sex with. That doesn't seem like methodology that would produce very accurate data, so I'd be skeptical of reading too much into this.

You might expect that people would be able to remember basic things and give consistent answers to questions like whether they've ever used marijuana or had sex or been the victim of a violent crime, but in reality people's answers might as well depend on what they had for breakfast that day.

In the USA, there are a number of factors which lead to marriage stability. One is education - high school dropouts have a high divorce rate, college graduates have a lower divorce rate. Another is age at marriage - people who marry before the age of 23 tend to have a higher divorce rate than those who marry at or after 23. Income factors in as well - those with a good income tend to have more stable marriages ( https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor... ).

In terms of premarital sexual partners, the given chart shows divorce rates after five years of marriage. It doesn't tell me much - I would think if one were going to divorce, the best time to do so would be within the first few years, before having children. There are many studies of divorce rates after 15 or 20 years, that is what I would be curious to see.

>Divorce rates show a trend in couples that, on average, divorce around seven years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_seven-year_itch

(sorry for a tertiary source)

So much about quantity and nothing about quality? How about If women had better premarital sex they were more likely to get a divorce?

Sure, but the author is really just trying to explain the data that is available.

Doesn't mention much about how Men's relationship between divorce and the number of sexual partners influence in those cases of divorce.

The article mentions that this data is not available (and that men are also less reliable w.r.t. accuracy)

I have issues with this study but this is definitely flagging abuse. Mods need to clarify that flagging is for spam, trolling, and ads, not disagreement.

Usually, I just read HN, but I signed up to ask HN about this.

I really hope I'm not a crackpot, and would love to get my view changed.

I've been thinking that marriage and relationship-seeking as a man is just a bad bet if you aren't a "top tier" man in terms of looks, income, charisma - the "full package". I'm objectively at the middle of the bell curve (run-of-the-mill software engineer, got good grades at an average school, not short but not tall, not fat but not fit, face a "6") but with a hint of (diagnosed as a child) Aspergers that dings my "full package" rating, and I've only had one good relationship.

Statistics like this show that premarital sex and divorce are correlated.

Anecdotally, it seems the U.S. judicial system heavily favors the woman in a man-woman divorce. My father, my uncle, 2 of my coworkers - much of their assets completely wiped. I have read research indicating that this is true in general i.e. divorces tend to be a greater loss for the man.

I believe premarital (and extramarital) sex is far more easily found in these times due to the profileration of dating apps, and as a consequence of internet-scale, the sheer number of options for women (who are typically the ones with choice) are exponentially greater than any other time before this.

As another commenter mentioned, people are only as faithful as their knowledge of their options. It's now common knowledge that you have an INCREDIBLE amount of options, if you're desired.

So, with the onus of choice and the economy of scale, it seems like a woman will always be able to find a superior replacement to an average or below-average man - even if only for one night.

I can't make myself smarter or more beautiful (I can and do work out, but those improvements only do so much). I already have enough problems socially that dating is an uphill battle. Why should I try when there is a charismatic 9/10 a "swipe" away?

Cards on the table - after finally seeing romantic success after 20 years of life, saving my paychecks for a ring and marriage, and then having it all come crashing down early this year really broke me, and I found myself easily trapped into reading and studying "incel" and "red pill" ideologies to try and provide the right model to be viewing the world of human romantic relationships, and it was a good deal of work to rise out of that trap, but I'm left with wondering what parts of "the black pill" are very real and what parts are useless. It really seems like given the premises 1) as a living organism, I should be in the business of making my species survive another generation and 2) Others in my species deem me unfit to reproduce, then I can only accomplish (1) by increasing the amount of resources in the world available to those who ARE fit to reproduce, which can be done in 2 different ways...

Correlation is not causation.

I think it is interesting that a conservative think-tank uses the term 'studies' in their name. Disciplines with a <object of interest> studies title usually denotes a theoretical kinship with Critical theory or generally adhering to a postmodern humanistic philosophy of science.

The author is a professor of Family and Consumer Studies at University of Utah. That discipline is usually denoted Family and Consumer Sciences or domestic science. The same discipline being split between researchers favoring either a studies or science name is nothing new. But almost all examples I can think of involves a dispute between a hard/soft approach.[0] Which is not really the case here. So in my opinion would a generalist be excused from presuming that this institute is rooted in the liberal goals of critical social theory, instead of what it really is.

I have no evidence that professor Wolfinger is nothing but a serious scholar. But it still smells a little like scholarly black hat SEO'ing to me.

[0] Crudely said a soft approach involves a focus on theory, relativizing empirical evidence, and activism.

Reinforcing that people are as faithful as [their knowledge of] options.

This is a study about women, it applies to men as well.

The remaining question would be the utility of marriage stability. As in, this study and most responses to this would be about a desired outcome, about premarital sex or marital stability being "good" or "bad".

There are lots of examples of problems people and families have outside of wedlock, or in unstable marriages, but I would say that is a societal fault for not providing additional frameworks to follow, leaving people to guess and fail at it.

> The remaining question would be the utility of marriage stability.

Completely agree. Context about specifics of marriage matter. There isn't even a single notion of utility.

Perhaps another way to drive the point home is to enumerate possible (immediate) causes of divorce:

infidelity, money, poor communication, frequent arguments, weight gain, unrealistic expectations, lack of intimacy, lack of equality, lack of preparation for marriage, abuse. +

In many cases, ending an existing marriage is going to be a much better outcome then alternatives for at least one of the partners involved.

Cherry-picking a more extreme example: what's the utility of a stable abusive marriage to the person getting abused?

+ 10 most common reasons for divorce, Marriage.com . Who knows if this data is any good, but it's enough to start taking

Why does the article's title say this is "counter-intuitive"? If anything, it seems completely intuitive to me; promiscuous people, regardless of sex, are most likely to cheat and not want to stay married.

I can only assume it's because of the "have fun first, settle down later" mindset many people tend to have with regards to sex and relationships. I agree, though, it's not a great title.

Because 2018 sexual dogma is quite firm on the position that "N count" is entirely irrelevant when selecting a partner and that you are either a pig, a slut-shamer, or a misogynist bigot for even inquiring.

Any evidence that "N count" is, in fact, relevant would be regarded by modern sociologists as counterintuitive.

You should read the article. The interesting parts involve a discrepancy observed for people with two premarital partners in particular.

Great, can we get an article from the Family Research Council next?

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Family_S...

This is a right-wing think tank that's promoting barely-disguised "traditional values." The quality of their "research" is garbage.

I had the same initial reaction when I saw this. But the article appears to be pretty reasonable actually. I didn't catch strong hints of an agenda.

The best sort of agenda-driven study is one that doesn't openly look that way, though. Lots of ways to subtly mislead with cherry-picked stats or the "men don't report reliably anyways, so we can't consider that" hand-waving this article does.

> Lots of ways to subtly mislead with cherry-picked stats or the "men don't report reliably anyways, so we can't consider that" hand-waving this article does.

Yikes, let's not be misleading in turn. That's not why they don't have those stats. Here's the actual reason and context you conveniently left out:

"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"

Demonstrate why they are incorrect or misleading as opposed to setting up a strawman.

Is this a joke?

Hey men, thinking of putting a ring on it? Better find out how many guys she's fucked before you showed up.

Never mind how many women you've slept with. That's not part of our study, Because Sluts. Amirite?!

Yes, that's exactly how it works. This is nothing particularly new.

Great research, next up, a more granular look: what specific types of sex increase stability the most? Oral? Anal? Role play?

"Honey we need to purchase this anal training kit with matching strap on. For the marriage. I read it on Hacker News!"

The best type of sex to have a stable marriage is the loving, selfless type where you are actively trying to promote the well-being and happiness of your partner. That sort comes from a relationship where you are actively trying to promote the happiness and interests of your partner in all parts of your relationship, which is the most stable anyways.

There was a directly linked article on HN about sneaking cell phones into prisons up your ass, with an aside on fisting. So there is precedence.

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