the reason that men generally would prefer to marry women with a low-to-zero “body-count” is that the women tend to adjust their set-points to the best of each trait for the men they have slept with.
So to have a good chance at a long-lasting marriage, you have to be as nice as her first, as well-hung as her 5th, as long-lasting as her 8th, as rich as her 15th, as handsome as her 23rd, have as much free time as her 30th, be as ambitious as her 32nd, etc., etc., etc. That’s an impossible standard to meet, so they become bored / dissatisfied. If you are the only one she’s been with, then… you are the best of each of those things, and the odds of staying together are much better. If you point this out, high-body-count women will just slam you as “insecure,” of course.
…
Women control access to sex.
Men control access to commitment.A key that opens nearly any lock is a rare and valued item.
A lock that can be opened by nearly any key is worthless.We are not the same.
Citations? Just look at the research relating to divorce rates and number of partners the woman has before marriage. “Alpha widow” is a very real thing.
This just did not sound right to me from my recollection of the literature. I did not recall ever reading anything like this. I went searching for “What is the divorce rate for women versus the number of sex partners before marriage?”
Nearly all results ultimately lead back to the same 2016 study by Nicholas H. Wolfinger.
I’ll save you the reading time and just give you his graphs:
Probably the most interesting data in Figure 1. is from prior to the year 2000. Women with just two partners prior to marriage had higher divorce rates than any other groups!
And note that 10+ category included those with 100+ partners!
The lowest divorce rate in all years is those with zero partners prior to marriage. But from Figure 2, we see they are also the highest percentage of women who attend church weekly. This leads us to ask, “Which is causation, if any, and what is merely correlation?” An alternate hypothesis to the number sex partners causing divorce could be in play. For example, “Church going women are less likely to divorce and have fewer partners due to social pressure.”
In any case that the data for two to nine partners is negatively correlated with the divorce rate! Also of important note, it is only for marriages in the 2000s that the 10+ group makes an obvious jump.
Some analysts of the study point out there may be other causative factors for divorces in high count marriages:
- The presence of children from a previous marriage/relationship causes extra stress on the most recent marriage.
- “Excess baggage” (mental/physical health issues, financial issues, family relationships, etc.) resulted in many broken previous non-marriage relationships.
- Age at time of marriage.
I did another search on something somewhat related, “What is the divorce rate for U.S. swingers?” I found only one number for this question, 2.8%. There was no citation given for this number and I don’t believe it.
There were studies that looked at martial and sexual satisfaction of swingers versus monogamous marriages. These tended to show the swingers scoring higher (no pun intended) than monogamous couples. But the studies had potential issues with selection bias. Hence, I don’t take those studies as definitive.
There was one other thing that I found extremely interesting about my searches. There apparently has been little or no interest in looking at the divorce rates versus partner counts for men. I do not have a decent hypothesis for this.
Getting back to the Rolf’s assertion and his model for divorce rates versus premarital partners…
I also found a study which directly addresses Rolf’s claims about desirability of virgins (or the original paper):
In 2017, Steve Stewart-Williams and I asked 188 participants from the U.K. to tell us how willing they would be to have a long-term relationship with someone based on their previous number of sexual partners. We started low: What if the person was a virgin? What about if they had just one previous partner? What about 19-22? What about more than 60? The participants rated 16 different histories in total, each time indicating their willingness on a nine-point scale from very willing to very unwilling.
Virgins, for both men and women, are not highly desired. And high counts were viewed harshly by people with low counts and low counts were viewed harshly by high counts:
The aim of this study was to explore how people’s sexual history affects their attractiveness. Using an Internet survey, 188 participants rated their willingness to engage in a relationship with a hypothetical individual with a specified number of past sexual partners, ranging from 0 to 60+. The effect of past partner number was very large. Average willingness ratings initially rose as past partner number rose, but then fell dramatically. For short-term relationships, men were more willing than women to get involved (although the difference was not large). For long-term relationships, in contrast, there was virtually no sex difference. Thus, contrary to the idea that male promiscuity is tolerated but female promiscuity is not, both sexes expressed equal reluctance to get involved with someone with an overly extensive sexual history. Finally, participants with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation (high SO participants) were more tolerant than low SO participants of prospective mates with higher numbers of past sexual partners but were also less tolerant of prospective mates with low numbers of past sexual partners.
Only 188 self-selected participants is a significant warning about limitations. But, my guess is the results point in the correct direction.
Pending review of new data, I do not believe Rolf’s model, or his conclusion are valid. Unless he is claiming this is only recent phenomena, the numbers prior to 2000 conclusively shoot down his model.
Rolf?
One can bandy about statistics forever. But ask yourself a simple question. Given the choice which type of woman would you bet your future….and ALL YOUR WEALTH on marrying.
From the available data, previous partner count should not be the determining factor in making that decision. My first marriage would essentially be Rolf’s ideal situation. But there were warning signs of mental health issues in her entire family that I did not recognize.
My second marriage is incredible by comparison, and nearly any measure i know of, after nearly 13 years together. The partner count was greater than two.
Mental health, intelligence, financial health, and family history are much better indicators than partner counts.
As they say, anecdote isn’t data. Your first situation was… unfortunate. And I’m very happy for you that your current situation is a vast improvement. But that is just two datapoints, very hard to make a generalization from.
As I’ve frequently tried to stress, better or worse odds are just that, they are not guarantees.
There is the data above in the post, which, at best, shows little better outcomes from two to a category that includes 100s. If the partner count was significant, then I would expect the inclusion of marriges with previous partner counts in dozens and hundreds to show up as a huge warning flag in the graph. It doesn’t. Hence, partner counts are not the driving factor in divorce rates.
You don’t consider a 2X to 6x increase in the 5-year divorce rate to be significant?
The difference between two and 10+ is not anywhere near 2X, and depending on the year 10+, it can show better outcomes.
Hence, partner count is very unlikely to be the causative factor.
Why are you focusing on the two-partner peak? The chance of divorce for all three cohorts with zero prior partners varies from 5% to 11%. Being optimistic and looking at the 4-5 partner percentages as a comparison, it looks like 18%-24% for the three cohorts. The smallest change there is 11% to 21%, roughly doubling the chance of divorce. The largest is 5% to 24%, nearly 5x the odds. Using a “worst-case” recent cohort numbers, it looks like 5% increases to about 34% at 10+ partners, or a nearly 7x rise in the chances. That’s not nothing.
The change between zero and two, compared to the rest, is odd. How many people are in each partner-number bucket? Is that a particularly “popular” bucket with lots of or women in it, or a very rare and anomalous one? As I said, I’ve seen discussions on that peak, but nothing like hard data or a convincing explanation for it. The drop after two partners isn’t what I’d focus on, as that’s the near-worse case divorce chance, rather than best-outcome-odds position. If anything, it implies something about pair-bonding trauma happening in that window, and people either recover from it and move on to other relatively healthy relations, or they don’t and crater.
But, again, five years is a woefully short time to study for an institution that should last a lifetime.
I’m not focusing on the two-partner peak. I’m trying to bring you back to your model where you claim:
The available data says any effect shows up by partner two and does not significantly, if at all, increase with increasing number of partners. Yet, your model requires increasing effect with increasing numbers. Therefore, your model is incorrect. Any effect of more than zero or one partners after marriage must be due so something other than what you claim it to be. Or, almost for certain, unrelated to the number of partners. The divorce rate is more likely only correlated with having had, or not, premarital sex with more than one person rather than being caused by the binary premarital sex with more than one person.
Furthermore, you claimed, “Just look at the research relating to divorce rates and number of partners the woman has before marriage.” And now you claim, “I do not have what I’d consider reliable and robust hard data. It would be fair to consider it an observationally supported.”
You also moved the goal posts by suggesting one could obtain the data by asking men what their preference for the sexual experience of their potential marriage partner is. That is, at best, only tangentially related to divorce rates many years after marriage.
Fine. It’s anecdotal, and correlational rather than causational, the summary of stories and events I’ve seen or heard over the years, superimposed on the data. I’d still never recommend anyone I care about marry a barracks bunny or other promiscuous woman, as past behavior is highly correlated with future behavior, barring major mitigating circumstances or details, as it appears to be a good basic heuristic in risk-assessment, even if not definitive.
I wasn’t moving the goalposts with the polling data item, it was a tangential thought. People base their recommendations on what they know, feel, have experienced. Yes, feelings can be subjective or wrong, but they are also often rooted in reality and things noticed but nor consciously thought about.
There is a dearth of really good published research on the topic. It is an important topic. So I have to wonder why that is, and strongly suspect that it’s much like other non-PC subjects. The dog that didn’t bark sort of thing.
I mostly agree. But I’m certain the answer is different from what you think.
After talking/emailing/etc. to dozens of people, mostly women, and related reading on the subject it appears there are two types of people. I have written about this before and so have others. See Quote of the day—Wednesday Martin, Quote of the day—Dr. Justin J Lehmiller, Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat read the articles and books I linked to in those posts. See also this book. I know both women and men who divorced from what most people would have thought were great marriages because they could not tolerate monogamy. There are other people, men and women, who cannot tolerate non-monogamy. And this is the really interesting (crazy?) part. There are some people, far more men than women, who have a strong desire for their spouses to have multiple partners but don’t have that same urge for themselves. Read the previous book on Amazon.
One woman I have talked to extensively about related topics is married to a man who after a few years became psychologically unable to have sex with her. Viagra, etc. did not help. Yet, he loved taking nude pictures of her and posting them on the Internet for others to see and discuss about how wonderful she is. After a while he started discussing what it would be like for them to go to a sex party and she had sex with all the men at the party. She was confused about this. I gave her that book. It explains him.
My hypothesis is that two different successful evolutionary solutions developed. One solution is monogamy. The other is non-monogamy. They both have advantages and disadvantages. And from my talking to people from both “camps”, there is a tendency to believe their camp is the one true way and the other is denying their true nature or has suffered some sort of “damage”. As near as I can tell there has not been any sort of childhood/young adult trauma. I think different people are just wired different, probably from birth. And we get people who have a handful, at most, of partners in their life even when they have opportunities for more. And others, even when facing social (and in some cultures criminal and death) sanctions for their behavior still engage in extramarital sex and even have hundreds of partners in a year. There is evidence supporting this hypothesis.
Your “two types” above sound like a variation of AC’s “r” vs “K” reproductive strategy. Or else simply a demonstration that demonic possession / oppression and mental illness exist, but we already knew that.
Any idea what the ratio is of the two types are in the wider population? If I had to guess, the percentage of guys who’d want to see their wife get plowed by other men is single-digit-percentages small, OTOH the number of women who would love to have Chad or Tyrone plow them while their loyal simp Delta worker-bee pays the bills is much higher than that. And that’s a mismatch that will cause problems.
One major problem is that if you tell the “fool around w/o mental hangups” crowd to follow a trad morality path of monogamy, they can change course with few consequences. OTOH, if you tell the more trad-minded women they can fool around and have a “hoe phase” and hook up a lot while young, you ruin them for life as wife material, and make a lot of would-be-productive young men just give up, because why try if all you get is overweight, bitter, leftovers? Society can tolerate some deviants and fools, but it depends on a large core of solid families to raise the next generation and continue the civilization. We are nearing the collapse phase now if things don’t start getting straightened out soon.
Not a rigorous data-analysis, just one guys opinion based on observation and reading history.
How many people have you actually talked to who engaged in these sorts of activities?
Your opinion is as off base as someone who claims gun owners fantasize about mass shootings. Perhaps searching the Internet for the demographics would help…
I’ll make a blog post sometime this weekend.
TO be honest, that’s not the typical crowd I hang with, so “very few.” But as that’s contrary to pretty much every major religion on the world (adultery has been an executable offence in many times and places), and would be heavily selected against if you believe in standard Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection (TENS), I can’t see a way for it to become a large percentage for men. OTOH, women sneaking out-of-marriage sex from a “more fit” partner would appear to be a common thing in many times and places, even if the formal penalties against it are harsh.
Arguably, one of the reasons Western Civ was so successful was the Christian Church enforcing monogamous marriage. Men will do great things for their family and kids, so ensuring that most men have a fair shot at a sex life and some kids of their own makes them far more productive. If the top 10%-20 of men get virtually all the chicks, then the bottom 80-90% check out (e.g., the Muslim middle east, much of America today).
I look forward to your post.
With blog recovery taking several hours on Saturday and all of Sunday being Boomershoot prep I was not able to work on the blog post. It will have to wait until after Boomershoot.
I would like my partner’s number to be roughly similar to my own. Which is not zero.
Also, at anywhere near my age, virginity is not reasonable to ask for and might even be a red flag in a potential partner.
Dan (above) makes a quite valid point, one to be strongly considered.
Not unrelated, are there any definitive studies about how sex – physically, psychologically and emotionally – is regarded by men, and how, using the same criteria, it is regarded by women? The multitudinous differences between “men” and “women” are neither small nor insignificant.
Some years back a woman of my acquaintance remarked that “sex was part of the relationship evaluation women perform.” Which does not sound unreasonable, at least on its face; if one intends to sign up for a long term contract it is not unreasonable to examine amd evaluate all facets of the arrangement before committing. Which does not preclude activities, of any type, performed solely for pleasure (or personal advancement, as the case may be).
I suspect that men, however, particularly regard sex somewhat differently from women, and that difference very much affects how men approach relationships, especially those that may portend such long term agreement, an agreement with potentially substantial financial consequences in either direction.
Women have long regarded men as inferior, a necessary evil, however minor or major, one must suffer on the way to the nirvana of family, children, economic stability, and, sometimes, public recognition and approval; it seems that such disregard for men has increased over the past few decades, coincidentally with women’s ability to become partially or completely financially independent of men’s role of provider and the pivotal decline of societal disdain for both out-of-wedlock births and single motherhood in general.
So, where, and what, are the accurate (and verifiable) metrics for comparison?
Well, graph 1 shows us the ability of culture/government to erode “commitment”, by giving everyone a fantasy for “fulfillment”.
We’re living in a false society. That’s being actively destroyed by evil.
Graph 2 show us that hookers and sluts figure out it’s better to settle on someone than die alone. Besides, you can always fool around when they ain’t looking. Right?
The best sex you will ever have is when the man and woman love each other.
Cause love comes not just through sex. But a multitude of activities outside the bedroom.
Sex is the PTSD that creates a strong bond. And cements us in a relationship necessary for the propagation of humanity.
But love is what makes the relationship work through the hard times.
That’s the disconnect. Evil is destroying our bond of natural love one for another.
Replacing it with ignorant fantasy. It will not end well. Which of course is intended outcome.
Destruction of humanity is satan’s last move. It’s all he’s got left.
You need to explain your interpretation of the two graphs to me. I’m just not following you.
I did miss my read the 2nd graph. Didn’t catch the church part. No matter.
My wife and I ARE the second graph. (She was never a hooker, but I would have been a gigolo in a heartbeat had some woman offered. But sluts? Ya, pretty much.)
We knew each other at 14 years for her, and 18 years for me. But never got together.
Now throw in 15 years+ of doing drugs, alcohol, and F’ing around.
Both looking for something that we could have had all along.
Plus, all the things we missed out on from having a solid love and bond to someone that would never quit or back away from a hard time.
Fidelity and friendship through a bond of sex creates the most fearsome creature God ever created.
Did we finally just settle on each other? Yes.
But we also FAFO literally, what God and our lord and savior had planned for us all along we would but listened to them. And not the world.
We pay the price for that ignorance daily.
Do women that have had 10+ partner and attend church weekly divorce less?
I should hope.
But maybe they do because they finally figured out life is more than a gut-tickle.
It’s a sacrifice, as is life in general.
And that having someone beside you till the day you die is what’s truly good and proper.
God in the Bible isn’t making suggestions. He tells us how it is.
You do what you want with it today.
He will judge you how he wants tomorrow.
Several things pop to mind right off the bat.
1) The social science are famous for unreproducible or unreliable results, and this is a sensitive subject fraught with deep emotions, stigma, social norms and pressures, etc. In light of this, the above studies and data should be considered very minimal given their sample size and lack of rob. However, because it aligns well with anecdotal information, it is reasonable to call the studies generally “directionally true”.
2) Five years is a laughably short period of time to consider when looking at an institution historically meant and legally designed to last a lifetime, or at least kids are produced, grown and trained up, and sent off as functional adults. But even within that timeframe, going from zero previous partners to one increases the odds of divorce from 2X to 4X depending on which cohort you look at. That is very NOT good. Going to two partners increases the odds as much as 6x.
3) Yes, there is likely a fair bit of correlation vs causation complications. The sort of person and culture that leads to virgin marriage likely is highly correlated with other personality traits and social norms and situations that would lead to to a stable longer marriage. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As a man potentially making the most important decision of your life, who to marry, a simple heuristic that cuts through a lot of complicating factors is incredibly useful. Sexual purity is a signifier of many other pro-marriage “good attributes.” This is a feature, not a bug.
4) The two-body peak is something that many have commented on, and I’ve seen a lot of reasonable speculation on, but have not seen anything like a definitive explanation of that is generally accepted (see item 1). But the fact remains that all available formal data, as dubious as it may be, is that a pre-marital body count above zero is significantly correlated with increased odds of divorce.
5) Part of the reason that the marriage rate is crashing across the west is that men are looking at the not just the legal and financial incentives but also the quality of woman available to wife up (with the attendant risks) and they are seeing a really bad risk/reward matrix, so are opting out. Divorce risk is a major part of that calculation. Do some guys want to marry a tatted-up, heavily-pierced slut with lots of experience and various fetishes to have kids and raise a family with (which is the primary purpose of marriage)? Of course. Most do not.
I think that this is an important area of study, as society writ large has a great interest in forming strong, stable families. I think the main reason that it is not properly / formally studied more (and it would be easy to do if they really wanted to, just require all people filing for divorce to take a survey) is they know the answers and they are very politically incorrect. TPTB and feminists (who largely run the social sciences) don’t actually want the truth (they can’t handle it), they just want to have their fun and blame everyone else for the results of their poor decisions.
Lastly, it shouldn’t take a study to know that men and women are different, and as such they want different things from a marriage, and want / value different characteristics in a partner.
Soooo…. you don’t trust the data. Then, show your supporting data. Not rationale. Hard data.
If you don’t have data, then all you have are untested hypotheses.
No, I do not have what I’d consider reliable and robust hard data. It would be fair to consider it an observationally supported but not rigorously tested hypothesis.
A thought. This would be an easy area for you to do a totally non-scientific study. You have a popular blog. Ask your readers to comment (anon if they want) to list what they think are the most important attributes they’d recommend a young nephew or other family member look for in a potential spouse, or major red flags they should keep an eye out for, based on outcomes they’ve seen. Then assemble those thoughts in to a poll. Let you readers rank things from 1 to however many things you include in the poll, with one being “highly desirable items” and the bigger other end being “major red flags, DO NOT MARRY.” Collect the data and summarize it.
Make it clear that there preference can be based on personal experience, observations of those around them (friends/ family), or research they have read, but should be focused on “what works to have a long and stable marriage,” not just “what I happen to like.” An example of that difference might be that I would personally prefer a smart wife, all else being equal, but observationally that appears to me to be weakly correlated with bad outcomes. (That is, generally higher IQ leads to more likely divorce, but it doesn’t appear to me to be highly predictive, just a general trend).
Not rigorous research by any means, as I’m pretty sure your readership is not a random cross section of America, but could be interesting.
I would be less concerned about “body count” than about the reasons for it.
A woman who had an enjoyable time in her late teens and early twenties is very different from a hate filled feminist who sees sex as a weapon against society.
A valid position. Also, there is likely significant qualitative differences between six one-night stands in by a nineteen-year-old, and a similar series of one-year-long serial monogamy with a respectable break between each in a 28 year old. That said, I’d be very likely to recommend either to a son or nephew looking to marry.