New research from the University of Utah suggests that there is a potential link between a woman’s sexual number and the possibility that she will experience divorce; however, it’s not what you think.
While the study did find that women who married as virgins are most likely to still be married five years from their wedding day, researchers made similar findings when it came to women who had three to nine partners before saying “I do.” However, there was a sharp contrast between brides who had zero to one premarital sex partner and those who had two. Brides who only had two premarital sex partners the second most likely group to end up divorced.
“In short, if you’re going to have comparisons to your [future] husband, it’s best to have more than one,” explained Nicholas H. Wolfinger, University of Utah department of family and consumer studies professor.
The study also found that women who had 10 more partners were the most likely to end their marriages.
“This is the result most readers of this brief expected: A lot of partners mean a lot of baggage, which makes a stable marriage less tenable. It’s also entirely likely that the correlation is spurious, the product of certain personal characteristics,” Wolfinger wrote.
Wolfinger set out to explore the developing relationship between premarital sex and divorce over the years. To do so, he reviewed results from the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth conducted between the 1970s and the 2010s. As for why the premarital sex habits of men were not included in the study, Wolfinger had this to say:
“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.”
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