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PetraG
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Well, that and the charitable works you devote yourself to because you aren’t responsible for supporting a family, of course.At this point, I can’t imagine spending time and money on anybody but myself
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F_Marturana
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Couldn’t someone who thought that there was one special person out there feel that they ended up with the wrong one?
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PetraG
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A feeling of regret does not mean someone has taken the wrong path any more than a feeling of guilt does. Those feelings are given to us as signals to re-examine our actions, a way to know that perhaps we need to repent and amend our lives, not as infallible judges of our actions.
Yes, of course we will feel regret when we realize we chose lesser things and lost a greater thing because of it. Sometimes, though, the faithful choice will not relieve us of the lesser desire that we had to forego in order to choose the greater good. We are weak creatures; we are capable of regretting the path that required a sacrifice. We are even capable of neglecting the legitimate pleasures we could be having in life because we are too obsessed with choices and events that we are powerless to change.
Of course you can feel you failed to marry the person who would have been the best choice you had. When you say “ended up with the wrong one,” though, that suggests that there is a serious lack of appreciation for the actual person you are with. If you are dating them, you either need to appreciate them fully or else allow them to find someone who will. If you married them, well, you promised that you would always make them your right one and make yourself the right one for them. As long as you are capable of the common conjugal life, it is your duty to do that to the best of your ability. Allowing yourself to covet someone else is not how that is done.
When we talk about the “wrong one,” then, we have to remember we are not talking about a job or a coat. We are talking about a person we have lead to trust in our loyalty to and affection for them. They deserve to be treated as the single human person most worthy of our fidelity, a person we are faithful to out of our fidelity to vows made to them before the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit even when we do not “feel like” being faithful, and not treated as “bad choices” that we judge only by how happy we are made to feel by consorting with them.
If we are going to believe there is “one special person out there,” we have to realize that by making marriage vows we choose who we will spend the rest of our lives considering to be that very person…for better or worse. That is what “forsaking all others” means, after all.
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PetraG
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That depends on whether you let it do that or whether you rely on God to help you to be faithful to the person with whom you have chosen to live out your baptismal vows and the state in life you share.
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PetraG
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Yes. The virtue of virginity is valuable because it is a virtue. It has nothing to do with marriage statistics.
Virginity is something maintained in order to keep our bodies appropriate for our state as a servant of God and a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, not something maintained to give ourselves a “better chance” to keep our marriage vows, as if we were spinning a roulette wheel and needed every “edge” we could get.
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Xantippe
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It must vary according to sex, but most of the age gaps are probably older husband/younger wife. (The US median is a 2 year gap between spouses, with the husband being older.)
My take on the high divorce rate for big age gaps is that an age gap may introduce an artificial teacher-student element into the relationship, which will work organically for a while, but as the younger spouse “grows up” they will be less and less happy about being the older spouse’s pupil or the assumption being made that they always know less. Whereas, when you’re the same age, you can "“grow up” together.
It’s like new wine and new wineskins versus new wine and old wineskins.
There are also some generational differences that might be an obstacle. For example, we’ve all seen articles on the theme, “Millennials are the worst!” written by Generation Xers and Boomers. It’s easy to seem shallow and callow to an older person–whereas the younger person may just be at a normal stage of development…for their age.
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anon64350612
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And women prefer this. (I just couldn’t resist.)
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PetraG
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Yes. I’m married to someone a good deal older, but I was also older when we married. We have done fine.
I kind of wonder if much of the age gap issue is older partner actively looking for a much-younger spouse, finding someone who will do what they want rather than thinking for themselves, and then finding either (a) they married someone who wasn’t mature enough to marry, which is why she let him dominate her or (b) when the younger partner gets more life experience, the person expects to be given some credit for it and the spouse who wanted to dominate balks at that reasonable expectation.
The other possibility, of course, is that the older partner married the younger because what the older partners were really attracted to was youth. That, as we know, is fleeting. When the younger spouse no longer has it, it is time to trade that spouse (usually that would be “her”) in for a “new model.” Arm candy does not have an infinite shelf life.
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PetraG
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Often this is true, but a woman cannot marry her horse. (I couldn’t resist, either!)
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DisorientingSneeze
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That makes a lot of sense. We have a 7 year gap and there was a lot of frustration on his part over things I hadn’t learned yet that I probably would have known if left to cook as a single for a few more years. And then a funk when I caught up and the dynamic needed to change.
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PetraG
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Yep. I didn’t marry until my late 20’s, so I wasn’t denied that experience prior to marriage.
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DisorientingSneeze
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You might be right. The God has one person for you narrative becomes possibly more distressing in dark times if you are pondering did I miss the only boat compared to the many suitable matches belief.
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DisorientingSneeze
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Mostly there was just a lot of…“How have you never seen the Karate Kid?” that went on and occasionally still does. 
Edit: this refers to the age gap talk not the do you have only one great match talk.
Edit: this refers to the age gap talk not the do you have only one great match talk.
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Zzyzx_Road
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The male preference for virgins isn’t just a Christian convention. It stems from the fact that while maternity is always known, paternity has not always been certain and it wasn’t until quite recently that paternity could be verified via DNA testing. But for many millennia, men needed some certainty of their paternity in order to know that their resources were really going to children who were actually theirs. Hence virginity was highly prized because it was the only way for men to guarantee that paternity.
In modern times, maybe virginity doesn’t matter so much when children can be tested. But it’s hard to dump our biology just because of the changes in society and technology of the last 70 years or so. If I’m going to support another man’s child if I marry a divorced mother, that’s one thing, I know the situation going in and I can accept that. But if I marry and she sleeps around behind my back and has a child she’s passing off as mine in order to get my time and resources for that child, I’ll hit the roof.
I’ll drop another link that could make heads explode: Sexual Partner Divorce Risk. The academic paper cited by this article is no longer available at the link in the article, but a web search found it behind a subscription wall here: Premarital Sex and The Risk of Subsequent Marital Dissolution Among Women. The author is a well respected researcher with at least 100 other papers available on that research paper site.
My own conclusion: the preference for virgins is still just that: a preference, not a requirement. Don’t confuse the two. I don’t expect to find one nowadays. I still want a lower partner count, but the risk inherent even there means I must vet hard on everything else and not spend too much money on the wedding. And then pray I chose well enough. I’ve heard it said that doing a decent job picking one’s spouse is 2/3’rds of a marriage that lasts and I can definitely believe that.
In modern times, maybe virginity doesn’t matter so much when children can be tested. But it’s hard to dump our biology just because of the changes in society and technology of the last 70 years or so. If I’m going to support another man’s child if I marry a divorced mother, that’s one thing, I know the situation going in and I can accept that. But if I marry and she sleeps around behind my back and has a child she’s passing off as mine in order to get my time and resources for that child, I’ll hit the roof.
I’ll drop another link that could make heads explode: Sexual Partner Divorce Risk. The academic paper cited by this article is no longer available at the link in the article, but a web search found it behind a subscription wall here: Premarital Sex and The Risk of Subsequent Marital Dissolution Among Women. The author is a well respected researcher with at least 100 other papers available on that research paper site.
My own conclusion: the preference for virgins is still just that: a preference, not a requirement. Don’t confuse the two. I don’t expect to find one nowadays. I still want a lower partner count, but the risk inherent even there means I must vet hard on everything else and not spend too much money on the wedding. And then pray I chose well enough. I’ve heard it said that doing a decent job picking one’s spouse is 2/3’rds of a marriage that lasts and I can definitely believe that.
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Sarcelle
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This Gen Xer will not be saying “Millenials are the worst.”. In fact I am quite sympathetic to them.
I hate to generalize an entire generation. All generations have had their share of difficulties.
I hate to generalize an entire generation. All generations have had their share of difficulties.
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anon64350612
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Xantippe
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Not really. Improve chance of, yes, guarantee, no.
For a full guarantee, you need a harem guarded by eunuchs. (But come to think of it, Uriah the Hittite probably had that, and even that didn’t work out for him…)
You’re not in any position to check, though, are you? Women aren’t cars–we don’t come with odometers, so you’re always going to have to be taking a lot of this on trust.
In the end, it’s going to come back to other (more verifiable) features, either demographic or personal character traits.
Also, if we’re talking crazy expensive wedding, that’s one thing, but being unreasonably stingy is bad for one’s marriage. Make sure you understand the difference and make an effort to be flexible and learn to make compromise and don’t think that you can get your way all the time and have a great marriage.
But I have some great news for you!
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm
That’s not a huge PDF. To save you the click, I’ll pull out some interesting numbers (but it’s easier to read in table form)!
“Percentage of men and women 15-44 years of age who have had five or more opposite sex partners in the past 12 months, 2002, 2006-2010 and 2011-2015.” It’s 4.0% for men in 2011-2015 and 1.7% for women (both down a smidge). (And their definition of sex partner goes beyond intercourse.)
The manosphere believes that single women are out there having non-stop sex with random people–but that’s not really true. There aren’t a lot of men doing that, and there are even fewer women.
“Median number of opposite-sex partners in lifetime among sexually experienced men and women aged 25-44 years of age 2002, 2006-2010 and 2011-2015:” So, note that people who have not ever had sex are not figured in. And yet, the lifetime median for men was 6.7 in 2002, 6.0 in 2006-2010 and 6.1 in 2011-2015 (again, a smidge down). For women in those three time periods, it’s 3.8, 3.9, and 4.2 (up a smidge).
“Percentage of men and women aged 15-44 years of age who have had 15 or more opposite-sex sexual partners in lifetime, 2002, 2006-2010 and 2011-2015:”
The percentage in that category for 2011-2015 is 21.1% for men (down a smidge) and 10.1% for women (up a smidge).
I also need to remind you that young people today are (as a group) less promiscuous than previous generations.
If you’re operating on the assumption that all women except a tiny minority are promiscuous and that millennials are worse than previous generations, you’d be wrong.
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DisorientingSneeze
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Aside: I LOVE how historical/anthropological/sociological this thread is becoming. 
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Zzyzx_Road
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Didn’t you post above that Atlantic article about cheap weddings lead to fewer divorces? Yes, that was you. But now you have to have a dig at me for expressing cheap wedding sentiments? The irony is way richer than my coffee.
The rest I’ll have a look at. But the same token of trusting women in person on their sexuality also applies to how men and women answer these kinds of surveys and this dynamic is something I’m well aware of through personal experience. Men tend to exaggerate and women tend to minimize. Has always happened and always will happen.
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Xantippe
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As I said, I have no objection to inexpensive weddings (had a $700ish one myself back in the late 90s)–BUT everything I said about stinginess hurting marriages and families is true.
As it says in Matthew 7, “what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
I’m not concerned about inexpensive weddings, but about the possibility of lack of generosity and unwillingness to let the other person have a say in financial arrangements.
But the men’s number then has to be the top possible median for both, right? Or, alternately, that the true median is probably mid-way between the two?
Either way, you don’t get astronomical numbers–remember, by definition 50% of people are lower than the median. Also, some of those numbers were for sexually experienced people–people with zero sexual partners weren’t being figured in.
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