If you are going to get married after sex with two partners, think again and go for more---or none! Sex with just two before marriage may be a threat to your marriage and lead to divorce.
There are some strange discoveries from new research indicating that women with exactly two sexual partners, including her husband as well as one other person, are more open to divorce than others who have had just one partner, or much more than two! This seems to be proved by some studies conducted through the 1980s and 1990s.
The math does add up to strange numbers. Women who have entered marriage as virgins, or after sex with just one partner---a phenomenon that has become extremely rare----are less likely to divorce. Similarly, women with three or upto nine partners are also not likely to divorce.
But amazingly, women with two partners tend to divorce, and sex with 10 or more partners can also lead to divorce (if the women are able to live through them all, that is!) although this is a recent trend.
Two heads then do not seem to be better than one. The experts suggest that a woman with only two partners seems to compare her husband with past lovers, though it is puzzling to understand why.
"In short: If you're going to have comparisons to your husband, it's best to have more than one," study author Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah Department of Family and Consumer Studies and an adjunct professor in the university's Department of Sociology said.
Earlier, multiple sexual partners before marriage tended to lead to divorce, thought experts. However, sexual mores seem to have changed in the last century.
Wolfinger examined information from three waves of the National Survey of Family Growth, a survey on marriage and sexual behavior. He gathered data in 2002, between 2006 and 2010, and between 2011 and 2013.
He found that women nowadays are more likely to have sex before marriage, as compared to 50 years ago. This, of course, is a known fact.
"Today's young adults do have lengthier sexual biographies than do people born prior to 1950," Wolfinger said. "Still, the extent of hooking up has been exaggerated by a prurient and overheated media, and sometimes by young people themselves."
The study found that women who married as virgins were not so likely to divorce in five years across the three waves of the study. Just 11 percent of marriages in the 1980s and 6 percent in the 2010s ended in divorce.
However, the study also found that women with two sexual partners recorded the highest divorce rates in the 1980s and 1990s. Hence, in the 1980s, about 28 percent of these marriages ended in divorce. But just 18 percent of them split up when the women got more than 10 premarital sexual partners.
"Perhaps it is not unexpected that having many partners increases the odds of divorce. The greater surprise is that this only holds true in recent years. Previously, women with two partners prior to marriage had the highest divorce rates," Wolfinger said.
