Generally speaking, major social and demographic differences between survey respondents explain only a small portion of the relationship between numbers of sex partners and marital stability. At best, these differences account for about one quarter of the observed association between sex partners and divorce. At worst, they make essentially no difference. Due to the design of the NSFG, a limited number of socio-demographic variables were amenable to analysis, including race, family structure of origin, urban vs. rural residence, age at marriage, and church attendance.
It won’t be surprising to most readers that people with more premarital sex partners have higher divorce rates, broadly speaking
Caucasian and African American women had similar premarital sexual behavior, but Latinas and members of the “Other” population group had notably fewer sex partners and lower divorce rates than either whites or blacks. Similarly, people who grew up without both parents had more partners and divorced more. Detailed psychometric data would be necessary to further explain the relationship between numbers of sex partners and marital stability.
That said, this research brief paints a fairly complicated picture of the association between sex and marital stability that ultimately raises more questions than it answers.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and ericans and Latinos, coauthored with W. Bradford Wilcox (Oxford University Press, 2016). Continue lendo “Finally, I sought to explain the relationship between premarital sexuality and marital stability via multivariate analysis”