Much to the chagrin of those on the Left who routinely mock genuinely religious people as closed-minded bigots and prudes who hinder others from pursuing their hedonistic predilections, a new study has bolstered the case for people abstaining from sex until marriage.
As The Atlantic reluctantly reports, at the Institute for Family Studies, Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, concluded in his study that Americans who remained celibate until they were married were quite likely to say they were in a “very happy” marriage. Conversely, women with the lowest odds of marital happiness were those with six to 10 sexual partners in their lives. Men with various sexual partners before they were married were also less happy than those who had only slept with their wives, although the plunge in marital satisfaction was less steep than it was for women who had numerous sexual partners.
The study found that women who had only slept with their spouses were roughly five percentage points happier in their marriages. The Atlantic, apparently disturbed by that supposition, quickly added, “This analysis merely suggests that sleeping with fewer people is correlated with marital happiness; it doesn’t say one thing predicts the other. Even people who have slept with the entire Polyphonic Spree could go on to live in blissful matrimony.”
The Atlantic quoted an earlier analysis from Wolfinger, which found that women who had only slept with their husbands or at most one other man were least likely to divorce, while those with 10 or more were most likely. Wolfinger added that by the 2010s, only 5% of new brides were virgins, and only 6% of them went through a divorce within five years. Most other new brides suffered a 20% rate of divorce.
A 2003 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family buttressed the claim that abstinence before marriage bodes well for marriages; it stated:
Marriages preceded by a spell of cohabitation are as much as 50% more likely to end in divorce at any marital duration than marriages not preceded by cohabitation … premarital sex and, increasingly, premarital cohabitation have become a normal and accepted part of the courtship process in the contemporary United States, for at least some couples, one might expect little association between the risk of subsequent marital dissolution if it is limited to one’s eventual marital partner. However, an intimate premarital relationship with someone other than one’s marital partner may indicate increased risk to subsequent marital disruption. Multiple premarital sexual partners may indicate less commitment to the idea of a permanent relationship with one individual. Multiple sexual partners may also weaken the marital bond by heightening awareness of alternatives to one’s marital partner as sources of sexual intimacy and fulfillment.
Another study, this one sponsored by The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, stated, “In our sample, only 23 percent of the individuals who got married over the course of the study had had sex solely with the person they married. That minority of men and women reported higher marital quality than those who had had sex with other partners prior to marriage. We further found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be.”
After offering a multitude of other reasons why women who abstained from sex before marriage might be happier than other married women (perish the thought that virginity might have something to do with it), The Atlantic offered this comfort for sexually profligate women:
Of course, all these data points might also start to imply that a happy marriage is life’s ultimate goal for everyone, which it might not be. Perhaps all the premarital sex you had was satisfying enough to make up for even the dreariest of unions. Maybe for you, it’s all about the journey, not the destination, bro.