Sorry, you can’t just blame the drop in marriage rates on people sleeping around in their younger years.
Researchers have got reassuring news for everyone currently in their “slut era”: it won’t stop you from getting married.
Although…maybe it’s less reassuring, and more ominous.
Marriage rates have been declining in countries like the US and Australia, suggesting the institution just doesn’t have the same appeal it once did.
And some have blamed it on the existence of too much free love and too little wifey material.
“In a world where one can have casual sex with little to no commitment, the argument goes that some men and women will simply have one less traditional incentive to get married, as well as less incentive to become the kind of person who is “marriage material” (as evidenced either by superior economic prospects or chaste reputation),” the US authors wrote in Social Science Research.
After all, “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” some argue.
But rather than taking this idea at face value and creating an enormously lucrative dating advice Twitch stream about it, the researchers decided to first see whether there was any empirical data backing it.
They analysed data from two national databases covering almost 40,000 people in their teens to adulthood to find out whether the number of notches on your belt affected your chance of getting a ring.
And it actually did have an effect – at least in the short term.
People who were sleeping around got married just a few years later, on average, compared with those with fewer partners.
“Ninety-five percent of women reporting one non-marital sex partner are married by age 40,” they found.
“Somewhat fewer (87%) women who had not yet had sex eventually got married. Otherwise, the differences in marriage rates are small for women who report five or fewer non-marital sexual partners.”
Three in four women with more than five partners still married by age 40, dropping to two in three for women with 10 or more partners before marriage.
“This represents a substantial difference in marriage rates compared to women with one non-marital sex partner: 67% vs. 95%, almost a 30-percentage point gap.”
The researchers also found that for women in their 20s, those with six or more non-marital sex partners had much lower marriage rates.
“At age 25, for instance, 69% of women reporting a single non-marital sex partner have entered marriage, while less than 30% of those with six or more partners have married. Women with four or five non- marital sex partners have substantially lower early marriage rates than those with fewer partners, but by their mid 30s, their marriage rates are more comparable. Four or five partners may mean four or five long-term relationships, thereby delaying marriage.”
“Finally, women in their teens or early twenties who have had more than five non-marital sex partners already have lower marriage rates.”
Still, women who had 30 or more partners still had a 30% likelihood of getting married by 40.
And the least likely? Men and women with zero sexual partners.
“Our findings cast doubt on the implication that the rise of casual sex has caused a retreat from marriage,” lead author Nicholas H Wolfinger, from the University of Utah, said in a statement.
“There is little evidence to suggest that the sexual activity of single women deters their long-term interest in marriage or makes them ‘undesirable’ as marriage partners.”
If you have an intriguing proposal, let penny@medicalrepublic.com.au know.
