CMW-WB-CH08

Surveys done by the National Survey of Family Growth (a part of
the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics)
in 2002, 2006–2010, and 2011–2013 show that the more premarital sexual
partners a person has, the more unhappy he or she will be in marriage,
and the more likely the marriage will end up in divorce. And like
many trends begun by the sexual revolution, women and children are
those harmed, as divorce leaves them economically, psychologically,
and socially worse off. 4
These surveys correlated the number of women’s premarital sexual
partners with the divorce rate of their marriages within five years. Of
women who married after the year 2000, 95% who did not have sex
before marriage were still married five years later — the lowest divorce
rate by far. One in five women who had one premarital sexual partner
were divorced within five years of marriage; an average of one in three
women with two-to-three premarital sexual partners were divorced
within five years; and those with ten or more premarital sexual partners
had the highest divorce rate of all, nearing 35%. 5 Furthermore, according
to surveys done by the National Marriage Project, individuals having
premarital sexual relationships experienced less marital satisfaction
than those who did not. Though it is difficult to control for all other factors
leading to marital dissatisfaction, in general the more premarital
partners people have, the less marital satisfaction they experience. 6
Let us now turn to cohabitation, which has increased enormously
between 1960 and today, from 450,000 to 20.6 million couples (or 8%
of adults ages 18 and older as of 2020). 7 The two primary reasons for
this dramatic increase are 1) the almost universal belief in the cultural
myth that cohabitation is a good way to prepare for marriage and 2)
the compounding effects of social norming. Unfortunately, this popular
cultural myth is false. As a matter of fact, couples who had lived together
before marriage experienced less marital satisfaction and had a
higher divorce rate than those who did not. 8 Even more, recent surveys
by the Center for Disease Control as well as by Michael Rosenfeld and
Katharina Roesler show precisely the opposite of what the cultural myth
suggests, namely, that the longer couples cohabitate, the more likely
they are to divorce. 9 Some researchers have attempted to explain away
this correlation by hypothesizing that couples who are likely to cohabitate
are also more likely to divorce, whether or not they lived together
first (in other words, the cause of divorce is supposedly the couple
themselves — not the cohabitation experience). Stanley and Rhoades
indicate that, though the couple’s predispositions may influence future
Surveys show
that the more
premarital
sexual partners
a person
has, the more
unhappy he or
she will be in
marriage, and
the more likely
the marriage
will end up in
divorce.
© Sophia Institute for Teachers Unit 3, Chapter 8: Premarital Sex and Cohabitation
159