Sexually Experienced Women Are Less Likely To Happily Marry (Study From Totally Biased Conservative Religious Group Finds)
The IFS is slut-shaming yet again. Here's what the real data says about premarital sex and happy marriages.
A recent New York Post article had a splashy, double-entendre headline — "Promiscuous singles are screwing their odds of a happy marriage: study."
According to the study's co-author, "sexually inexperienced dating couples are two to three times more likely to be in a highly stable marriage," and those who had sex with only one partner before marriage were less likely to divorce.
The "study" further claimed, "Women who wait until they are married to have sex have only a 5% chance of divorce."
Maybe these virginal women are not divorcing because they are not allowed to leave the house after their purity ball. (Btw, the researchers failed to examine if men who are virgins on their wedding night have lower divorce rates. Shocker.)
Whenever I read this conservative slut-shaming tripe, my eyes roll so far back in my head that my brain does a facepalm. But if you read the article's comments section, most people assumed the usual false equivalencies…See, sex education is bad. The less we know, the better. And those sluts should keep their pants on if they want to be viewed as "wife material." (Yes, that was one comment.)
Imagine if we applied the same squirrelly logic to men's careers instead of marriage. The headline would read:
Men Without an Education or Job Experience Are More Likely To Find A Lucrative Career: Study Finds
Even worse, no one bothered to question the source of this study. So let's unpack this 1950s purity nonsense.
The study was from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS). Media Bias has placed IFS firmly far, far right for good reason—the conservative religious group, The Bradley Foundation, funds IFS.
Since the IFS is not a credible science journal subject to peer review, they do not have to disclose their data sets. The study was based on a survey of porn users and was conducted by The Wheatley Institute — otherwise known as the "disciples of Jesus Christ."
Religious wackadoodles do not fund The Journal of Social Science. Unsurprisingly, they found a longer sexual resume does not affect marriage or divorce rates.
Feeeeeeeeew. We can all stop clutching our rosaries and hiding the notches on our bedposts. Praise the Lord!
The IFS's intent is obvious. With more women pursuing careers and delaying marriage and children, religious conservatives worry that men's role as king of the manor will be displaced. Times were much simpler when hubby brought the bacon home, and the misses fried it up. Now, many couples are choosing to delay having children or terminating pregnancies they cannot afford.
Unfortunately, marriage today is very different from your grandmother's marriage. And while religious conservatives try to turn back the clock with draconian abortion laws, taking away women's bodily autonomy is still deeply unpopular with secular America. Religion and privacy have always made strange bedfellows.
If you want a happy marriage, let's leave the bible thumpers to their sermonizing and examine the real marriage and divorce statistics.
Marriage rates are lower, and divorce rates are higher in the uneducated.
Those that have at least a B.A. are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce.
Of course, the IFS will claim marriage rates are declining solely because couples marry later in life, and many choose never to marry because they would rather engage in “hook-up culture.” But a 2017 Pew Research Center study dove deeper. The researchers found that declining marriage rates were moving in lockstep with lower education.
So much for the IFS's ignorance is bliss theory.
The statistics are irrefutable. In 2015, 65% of adults aged 25 and older with a four-year college degree were married, while only 50% of adults without education beyond high school were married. Twenty-five years earlier, the marriage rate was the same for both groups — 60%.
Unfortunately, the education gap has created a hypergamous mess. Today, more women than men have college degrees, and many educated women prefer to marry someone with an equal education.
The result is that uneducated men are being pushed out of the marriage market, and for the first time in history, more men are single than women. More alarmingly, a recent 2022 Pew Research Center study found that among young adults, only 34 percent of women are single, compared to a whopping 63 percent of single young men.
If you are rich, you are more likely to marry.
The Pew Research Center found that never-married adults with incomes under $75,000 were more likely to forgo marriage due to financial reasons.
And roughly half of people ages 18–29 reported not wanting to settle down until they felt financially secure.
Poverty is the biggest predictor of divorce.
While in the past, only the rich could afford to divorce, now you are more likely to divorce if you are poor.
The most common theory for this cultural shift is that poorer people have less time and resources to invest in their marriage. And probably one of the most vital marital investments is intimacy.
In other words, having money in the bank gives you more time for sex.
In contrast, if you are a couple working two jobs and struggling to buy diapers or put food on the table, sex isn't a priority. Instead, you are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid, trying to get your basic needs met. And no, sexy time isn't one of them.
More women than men ask for a divorce.
Women initiate a staggering 70% of all divorces. Psychologists are torn on why. The most commonly cited reason is that as women entered the workforce, they gained the economic freedom to leave unhappy relationships.
Obviously, it's hard to leave a marriage if you can't support yourself financially. Before 1973, a divorced woman could not get a credit card in her name.
But ask any exhausted married woman, and you will find a different (and so preventable) reason why most women leave their marriages — lost labor hours in household chores and child-rearing. One study found that married women do significantly more household chores than single and divorced women.
Imagine if divorce cut your daily tedium down. Sadly, it's often the small daily stressors that make people miserable.
The IFS is wrong. A dirty floor predicts divorce more than a woman's so-called dirty sexual past.
As someone playing hard for team monogamy, I had to learn not to force my sexual proclivities onto consensually non-monogamous folks. We are all guilty of this implicit bias.
Sexuality should never be a one-size fits all approach. Some people are happier with one partner. Others need variety and adventure.
In the middle are conservative religious groups who want to keep people in the dark for one reason —the fewer facts people have, the more they can be controlled by faith. Throughout history, when religion got in bed with science, sex was equated with sin from the first forbidden bite.
But a sexually knowledgeable person, whether through experience or sex education, is also a person who can communicate their needs.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is also the path to pleasure.
As I keep repeating…all great sex begins in the brain. Let's feed our brains instead of our biases.
