It might seem ridiculous to most of us, but some people are of the archaic notion that the more sexual partners one has had before marriage the more likely you are to end up divorced.
While personally we’re of the belief that you do whatever makes you happy between the sheets, a new study out of the US has rated the likelihood of divorce against the number of sexual partners a woman has had before marriage.
The study, which used data from the National Survey of Family Growth looking at premarital sex and divorce trends for women in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and found that women who do not have sex before marriage are most likely to remain married after five years.
The rate of divorce for women who’ve had 0-1 sexual partners before marriage has fallen from 64% in the 1970s to 27% since 2010.
However women who have had two sex partners before marriage have higher divorce rates, but divorce is less likely when a woman has had sex with between three and nine men before her wedding day.
“If you’re going to have comparisons to your [future] husband,” Wolfinger said in a statement, “it’s best to have more than one,” said University of Utah professor Nicholas Wolfinger.
However, now here’s where it starts to lose us, the study then looked at women who married in the 2000s having had 10 or more sexual partners and found they divorced after five years at a rate of 33%.
“Perhaps it is not unexpected that having many partners increases the odds of divorce,” Wolfinger said. “The greatest surprise is that this only holds true in recent years. Previously, women with two partners prior to marriage had the highest divorce rates.”
There are so many other factors not accounted for in this study when it comes to reasons for divorce, so we’re taking this study with a grain of salt.
According to the Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR) the average number of sexual partners in a lifetime for an Aussie woman is eight, whereas a man’s is 18. But why should the men have all the fun, go out there and sow your wild oats ladies and do whatever feels right for you.
