Women who remain virgins before marriage less likely to divorce, new study claims

Women who abstained from sex before getting married are least likely to end up in divorce five years after marriage, according to a recent study.

The study, titled "Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability," was released Monday, June 6 by the Institute of Family Studies. It was conducted by Nicholas H. Wolfinger, professor of family and consumer studies at University of Utah and co-author of "Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos," together with W. Bradford Wilcox.

"The odds of divorce are lowest with zero or one premarital partners, but otherwise sowing one's oats seems compatible with having a lasting marriage," wrote Wolfinger in his findings.

He noted that most of these women did not engage in premarital sex because of their religion. They also regularly attend church at least once a week.

"People who attend church frequently have lower divorce rates than do non-participants," observed Wolfinger.

On the other hand, women who had two sexual partners before marriage are just as likely to end up in divorce as women who had ten.

Wolfinger's best guess as to why this is so is "the notion of over-emphasized comparisons" where these women's husbands are included in their tally of two premarital sex partners. The academic suggested that having the second premarital sex partner gave the women a notion of sexual alternative.

"These sexual experiences convince women that sex outside of wedlock is indeed a possibility. The man involved was likely to have become a partner in the course of a serious relationship — women inclined to hook up will have had more than two premarital partners — thereby emphasizing the seriousness of the alternative," explained Wolfinger.

The study also indicated that Caucasian and African-American women had more premarital sexual partners than Latinas and those in the "other" category.

Furthermore, those who grew up without either of their parents also had more sexual partners.

Wolfinger concluded that the research "paints a fairly complicated picture of the association between sex and marital stability that ultimately raises more questions than it answers."

The research used data gathered by the National Survey of Family Growth in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013.