Sex in relationships

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It’s worth noting, the latest generation to come of age is rejecting premarital sex at a much higher rate than many of the previous generations. I think kids today have seen the way premarital sex has been a plague on relationships and especially marriage for the last 50 years and want no part of it. There can be no doubt about the correlation between premarital sex and divorce, cheating, and unhappiness.

Or it could be kids these days spend all their time alone in their rooms watching online cat videos instead of having social lives. It’s hard to say.
 
Just in case they never think to thank you, I want to thank you for your decision on behalf of any future children you might have with this Catholic man.

I grew up in a house with a Catholic father and a non-Catholic mother. It was confusing, to say the least. As per the agreement of my parents, and under the urging of the Church prior to their wedding, my sister and I were raised Catholic, but my mother never converted and never really hesitated to express her disagreement with aspects of Catholic Church teaching. My sister eventually left the Church unfortunately, and has since gone full pagan. I struggled a lot with Catechism because I really got very little in the way of religious instruction at home, and it never really seemed like a high priority for my parents. My dad was (and is) not the most devout, and my mother really had no answers for me on theological matters even if she enjoyed a lot of the Catholic traditions like Advent candles. My dad taught me the basic prayers, my mom in her own way made me into a believer, but it’s really only been in my adulthood that I’ve come to understand a lot of the Church’s teachings. It’s really caused me a lot of difficulties, and led to a lot of bad habits.

As a result of my childhood, I will never marry anyone who is not a Catholic. I just think it’s a bad environment to raise a kid in a mixed-faith home. You’re a good woman for converting, especially if your future husband isn’t pushing you into it.
 
Believe it or not, the best place to start is probably the CDC. I frequently see them cited on divorce-related infographics. There may be some social conservative groups that keep track of data but you may not like their methodologies for scientific rigor, or have a harder time figuring out what those methodologies are.

The CDC keeps track of things like STDs and depression. STDs of course are usually a result of people having multiple sexual partners, so they do studies on how many sexual partners people have, age of first sexual experience, infidelity, and stuff of that nature. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some studies out of the CDC that also correlated this data with divorce (divorce being a risk factor in other self-destructive behaviors, and consequences for children’s health), but it may have been another organization. They certainly track data over time, so you can find out things like sexual promiscuity by decade, and compare that yourself to divorce rates.
 
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The thing is that you made a big claim that you can’t really support with data. It’s a very complicated subject and you’re missing a lot of nuances in your analysis. Your conclusions are wrong as a result. People who believe divorce is wrong (e.g. Catholics) are less likely to divorce than people who don’t have any stigma attached to it. So that contributes to a macro correlation that less sexual partners appears to have less risk of divorce. However correlation is not causation, since the Catholic Church teaches against sex before marriage then you might actually be seeing the effect of the Catholic stance on divorce, not the effect of virginity at marriage. In other words, just because people who have less sexual partners are less likely to divorce, it doesn’t follow that a Catholic who has 2 sexual partners is less likely to divorce than a Catholic who only has sex with their spouse. We also know that marrying young has a much bigger effect on the risk of divorce, so if you’re getting married in a rush because you can’t hold out the chaste living then you are actually increasing your risk of divorce, not reducing it.

Some STDs are broadly proportional to number of partners because they are spread by skin to skin contact. But they aren’t the life threatening ones. Actually there are many scenarios where there is an inverse relationship between the number of partners and risk of STDs. For example, prostitutes have a very high number of partners and are therefore obsessive about condom use and reducing risk. Cheating married men are much less likely to use condoms and even though they might only have one affair, they are much higher risk because of the lack of condom use.
 
Sex is the foundation of the family (in most cases.)
Family is the building block of society.
As sex goes, so goes the family, society, and then the world.
If sex becomes perverse, the family begins to collapse.
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
Excellent, which study should I look at for the evidence please?
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There’s not much on that topic but this is one of the very few:


Link to the study in the article:
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-25811-011
About marrying ‘younger’:
The greatest indicated likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at ages 22-25, net of the estimated effects of time since first marriage and several variables that might commonly affect age at marriage and marital outcomes. The negative relationship beyond the early to mid-twenties between age at marriage and marital success is likely to be at least partially spurious, and thus it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25. However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties.
Later first marriage and marital success - ScienceDirect
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Just something worth considering:
I pose this question to the students in my Human Sexuality course every semester and invariably get the same response: “Isn’t that kind of obvious? Single people, of course!” My students are not alone in thinking this either—it is a pretty widely held belief that singles are always getting it on, and that sex after marriage is, well, improbable (to say the least).
[…]
Research shows that married couples actually have sex with much greater frequency than single people. For instance, just consider single guys between ages 18-24. What percentage of them report having sex more than 2 times per week? Just over ten percent. How about married guys in the same age range? A full two-thirds (just over 66%)! In fact, over 20% of married guys in this age group report doing it four or more times per week! As you can see, single and married guys aren’t even in the same ballpark. The numbers for women tell a very similar story. Across all ages and genders, married people typically have more sexual contact than their single counterparts.

This is yet another example of how watching too much TV or going to the movies too frequently can give you distorted views of relationships. Although the scientific research in this area might sound counterintuitive to you, the take-home message is clear: if you don’t think you’re having enough sex, try getting married.
Who Has the Busier Bedroom: Single People or Married Couples? - Luvze
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Firstly thank you for taking the time to share these. The first one i find a bit meaningless, the problem is the sample sizes are totally different since we already know that only ~5% of couples abstain from sex before marriage. If we assume a normal distribution then the sample sizes alone could explain most of the result. Self reporting quality scores are also heavily suspect.

The second one is very interesting and i’ve printed a copy to read properly before making any comment.

The last one is again meaningless. It’s fairly obvious single people have less sex, since they have to go through an entire seduction process whereby that isn’t required in marriage. A far better comparison would be unmarried couples and married couples, but you’d also need to control for pre and post childbirth, which would be difficult. Children are the best form of contraception afterall.

The original claim was around divorce, cheating and unhappiness. I think you’ve supplied good enough evidence for the happiness part, as much as I’ve criticised the study, it is an evidence based view and since i don’t have any counter evidence then we can put that one to rest. But i didn’t see anything about divorce and cheating unless they are in the study i haven’t read yet?
 
Going to assume the unmarried couple in question has a deep, real affection for each other, that they love, respect and want the best for their future spouse.

If the doctor said “your future spouse has a serious heart condition, it is curable but the cure cannot happen for 10 months. For that time it would kill your partner if they have sex.” I’d imagine that a loving, respectful partner would not pressure their spouse for sex because “that ship has sailed”.

Well, Christ told us to fear not that which kills the body but fear that which kills the soul. The couple sinned, that is something that severs the friendship with God. If the couple knows it is a serious sin and they continue to have pre-marital sex of their own free will they are objectively committing a mortal sin. That means killing the soul.

If you can wait for the heart cure, wait for the wedding.
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
The first one i find a bit meaningless, the problem is the sample sizes are totally different since we already know that only ~5% of couples abstain from sex before marriage. If we assume a normal distribution then the sample sizes alone could explain most of the result. Self reporting quality scores are also heavily suspect.
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What else can you use? There are limits in what can be measured in such a topic. Much of the social sciences if not all are afflicted by this. I believe this is really the best any researcher can do.
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
But i didn’t see anything about divorce and cheating unless they are in the study i haven’t read yet?
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Unfortunately, studies on linking these topics to the others are not easy to find assuming they exist in the first place. One can only infer from what is available and that’s the best they could do if such a study were to be carried out. Divorce commonly occurs when there’s something wrong in a marriage and so on.
 
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ATraveller said:
What else can you use?
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That’s an excellent question. Whilst it’s not popular because of subjectivity, i think you need to create a baseline prediction of what you’d expect from the different groups based on all their factors and then compare empirical data to the baseline. What I’m saying is that different baselines for different groups gets round the sample size issues.
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
Whilst it’s not popular because of subjectivity
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It looks like solving one problem in methodology may create another.
Moving away from studies and to everyone reading, regardless of what the statistics show, let’s just assume waiting until marriage isn’t anymore advantageous than premarital sex and let’s assume there is no difference between cohabitating couples and those who wait until marriage: the fact remains, as Christians there is an obligation to obey God’s teachings. The Gospel isn’t sin once, sin again. The real Gospel is repent, there’s hope and it’s never too late to repent.
 
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ATraveller said:
It looks like solving one problem in methodology may create another.
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I disagree, some problems are more fundamental than others.

The rest of your logic holds unless is a disadvantage to waiting, then you have a lesser of two evils issue at the statistical level.
 
So I read the second study about younger marriage and very much enjoyed it.It has some limitations (e.g. 100% american sample) but it’s really well written. I think it does more to explain the complexity of marriage age as a variable, without denying the relevance. It makes some important nuances like gender differences and i enjoyed the distinction between ‘maximizers’ and ‘satisficers’ - i know several maximizers who are unmarried in their 30’s and frankly i’m glad they haven’t entered the marriage market because they would either end up divorced or make someone miserable. I very much agree with the conclusion: “it is likely that the optimal age of marriage varies widely among individuals” and that supports what i’m saying. If a person is rushing into marriage because they find being chaste too hard, then they are increasing their risk of divorce. However, I do take the point that study makes clear more people are ready for marriage as early as 22 than i initially assumed. Certainly I wasn’t and I have a certain negative preconception of the type of person that is, but that’s besides the point.

PS: thanks again for sharing it
 
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