Does Having More Sexual Partners Lower Your Chance of a Happy Marriage?

I recently saw this video come across my TikTok FYP:

She makes the bold claim:

“if you sleep with more than five guys your chance of a happy marriage after 10 years goes from 80 percent to 25 percent”

That video has over 5 MILLION views!

She goes on to explain the scientific reason:

because the more men you sleep with you lose your ability to bond with each one… …yeah it’s “Pair Bonding”

Pair bonding eh? That sounds like a science term! She must know what she’s talking about.

so if you sleep with one guy, you’re gonna compare the next guy to him. If you sleep with 10 guys, you compare all 10…

Sounds reasonable? Sensational? Controversial?

Perfect for going viral.

But is it true?

Welcome back to What The Science: Sex Edition, where I do deep dives into the science behind viral videos. Or lack thereof.

(Her original, full-length YouTube Video can be found here)

Breaking Down Her Claim

To start, let’s separate out the 4 components of her claim.

Let’s go from the specific to the general.

1. Specificity

Right off the bat she opens herself up for trouble. She uses extremely specific numbers, which makes it more likely for the audience to believe her, because such specific numbers obviously must have come form a legitimate source. But they’re also easier to fact check.

2. Only Women

She says “If you sleep with more than five guys…” You could say that she meant women, but her whole conversation was focused around that specific dynamic. Later, she states “men value purity, so they don’t want a girl that’s slept with a lot of guys.”

3. More Partners → (causes) a Less Happy Marriage

Even if the 55% drop in #1 proves to be incorrect, perhaps there does still exist a causal relationship between sexual partners and marital happiness.

4. Specific Reasons (e.g. “Pairbonding”)

If any part of her claim turns out to be true, is it for the reason that she said? That women won’t be able to properly form an emotional attachment to a husband due to constantly comparing him with a previous partner?

Claim #1 – Specificity

When examining these claims, we need to ask four questions:

1. Does it make initial sense?
2. Where did these numbers come from?
3. Is it a reliable source?
4. What do other sources say?

A. DOES IT MAKE SENSE?

My entire reason for delving into this topic was that this highly specific claim failed my Fermi Estimate.

So when I saw this (show quote again), my first thought was that if the current divorce rate is between 40-50%, and the average number of women’s sexual partners is around 4, these numbers are technically possible, but it would require some very weird graphs. It’s a massive jump.

B. Where did these numbers come from?

I spent two days searching everywhere for her source. Those number were SO specific, that they HAD to come from SOMEWHERE! She of course never cites anything, and my guess was that she probably heard that stat from some random interview or magazine (cosmo perhaps?) and the ballpark numbers stuck in her head, but if they’re not exact then it’s hard to find via search.

But–halfway through my filming and writing process–I finally struck gold. And then had to scrap it all and start over. Her “scientific” source isn’t Nature, or Science, or the Lancet, or any other peer-reviewed paper. Instead it’s this. Probably.

Specifically, Chart 15:

Ok, there is a LOT to unpack here.

At first glance, it seems like she might have a a legit case!

Women who had more partners are less likely to have stable marriages. There’s that 80% number for NO non-marital sexual partners, and if you average all of the 6 and up numbers you get something close to 25%.

But we are SCIENTISTS! We take many glances. And there are so many ways that this falls apart.

First, she made a clear distinction for below and above 5 guys. As you can see, there’s a sharp jump after ZERO, but then a pretty gradual decline. 2 and 4 are almost the same. There’s no magic number.

Second, she said “your chance of a HAPPY marriage,” not “STABLE marriage.”

“Stable” is an interesting word.

Let’s look at what it means here.

• women aged 30+
• been married for 5 or more years

That’s very different. Because with this definiitions, NOT being in a Stable Marriage DOES NOT MEAN that your marriage isn’t going well. (B-ROLL: MR & MRS Smith fight scene)

So let’s think about how they got these numbers.

Presumably, that first number is:

Number of Women who are:

• Over 30
• In Stable Marriages
• Have had 0 non-marital partners

Let’s call that X.

Now divided the number of women who are

• Over 30
• Have had 0 non-marital partners

Excluding from both sides, of course, the number of women married but for less than 5 years. Which is a LOT, given that the median marriage age for women in the US is 28. (And that already skews the numbers)

Are you starting to see the problem here?

What this first number is asking is as follows: “IF you are a woman OVER 30, and there are ONLY 2 OPTIONS–Either having NEVER SLEPT WITH ANYBODY, or having ONLY SLEPT WITH THE PERSON YOU HAVE BEEN MARRIED TO FOR OVER 5 YEARS, surprise surprise, it’s more likely that you’re NOT a virgin. (how divorce fits into this is unclear)

Similarly, these are just saying that, if you’ve slept with more than 5 people outside of marriage, over the course of many years, “you’re less likely to have found the right guy yet”

But she didn’t SAY stable Marriage. She said “Happy Marriage”

This same document does have a related graph of non-marital sexual partners and women’s happiness. But, as before, if more partners means “less likely to have happily settled down,” then… you get the point.

C. This whole document is from The Heritage Foundation. But IS that a reliable source?

They got their raw data form the CDC’s 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, which included 10,000 women aged 15-44.

You wanna know some things that have changed since 1995??

More couples living together (and i’d guess doing other things) before marriage.

And more widespread usage of contraception, especially in forms like IUDs

So what is The Heritage Foundation? It’s definitely not a peer-reviewed journal, but do they have any sort of agenda to spin the data in any particular way?

Here’s a random article from their website.

And also this:

Mooooving on. Let’s look at some other sources.

D. Other Sources

In my initial search, I kept getting articles like this Atlantic piece citing a blog post from the Institute for Family Studies, which analyzed data from the CDC’s General Social Survey

Yes, it’s another CDC survey, but in this case it’s through 2016 instead of just 1995, and the analysis is more even-keeled.

At first glance, it did find that more premarital sexual partners are linked to lower martial satisfaction (here they actually asked about happiness in marriage).

But let’s look at the actual numbers.

Do you see any 80% to 25% drop going above 5 partners? I don’t.

Instead it seems like there’s roughly a 10% drop in happy marriage reports going from 1 partner to 21 partners, with some interesting bumps in between. Of women with more than 11 partners, 57% reported “very happy” marriages, compared to 52 percent from the 6-10 range.

And note that, if a trend does exist, it’s pretty similar for men as well. (CROSS OFF #2) Some researchers posit that men are worse at picking up on social cues, so they just don’t realize when a relationship is turning bad. This study (https://doi.org/10.2307/353949) argued that this is why women are more likely to initiate a breakup or divorce.

And yet, you’ll still here some crazy misogynistic claims, like this guy:

who starts similarly:

“There are actual facts and statistics on it… the more sexual partners a woman has had, the less able she is to pair-bond, long term, with a man”

And goes to:

she will not be able to function in a healthy, monogamous relationship with just one guy, because she’s used to roaming around out there and spreading her legs for multiple guys”

This is coming from a guy who sells a course on dating beautiful women. I’m sure he’s a real paragon of monogamy.

“I’ve been doin game and pickup long enough … these girls who already had like a dozen sexual partners, 99.9% of those girls, if not 100% of them, are still single, still unmarried”

Quick sixth grade math! How many girls would he have had to have slept with to get an accurate distinction between 99.9% and 100%? 1,000. Somehow I doubt that my guy.

But I felt icky just watching this video. And NO, he never cites a source, other than his own experience.

And boy did that comment section not pass the vibe check!

Ok, calm down. Where were we. Right, back to the survey!

Buut back to the survey.

Of the TOTAL sample, only 3% reported being unhappily married. 5.3% of the “more than 20” partners group reported this, compared to 2.8% of the “less than 20” group. Yes, that’s almost double, but the absolute numbers are pretty small.

And all this is missing the biggest problem.

When it comes to observational surveys like this, you can never just assume causation!

Let’s talk Confounding Variables.

The claim here is that:

“sleeping around ruins a woman’s ability to bond with future partners, so don’t do it.” This claim is supposedly supported by data.

But just showing that people who had more sexual partners tend to have less happy marriages DOES NOT MEAN that the one causes the other. Just like the dropping divorce rate in Maine is probably not caused by the decrease in margin consumption.

What if some folks have more sexual partners they’re charming jerks who have a hard time forming stable relationships and so keep bouncing around? The multiple prior partners probably wouldn’t be the root cause of any marital unhappiness.

What if the ones with only a single partner weren’t actually super happy, but they stayed together because they were terrified of going back to dating–which they have basically no experience with?

And what about religion

To give you an idea of just how important this is, let’s look at a nice little graph comparing church attendance and number of sexual partners.

Another mere correlation, but let’s think about the different ways it could play out.

Imagine a hypothetical woman. Let’s call her Jane. Jane grew up in a nice Christian home in Mississippi, attending Church every Sunday. But when she left for college she started to have some questions about her faith. She spent a few years exploring her wild side and ended up sleeping with more than 10 guys. Maybe even a girl or two?

Fast forward a few years, she’s returned home to be close to her family and found a guy to settle down with who grew up in the same neighborhood. They go to Church every Sunday, because that’s just what you do in Yalobusha. But she finds herself not as happy as she would like. Perhaps because:

ENDING #1

The questions about her faith never really went away, and she feels like she doesn’t fit in. And so she’s unhappy.

OR maybe:

ENDING #2

All her doubts have been settled. She loves her husband. But her husband and neighbors are constantly making judgmental comments about her past actions.

I could go on. But in both cases the problem is NOT some sort of inability to connect with her husband due to comparing him to past men.

GIVE ME MORE DATA

Let’s look at some of the other variables that were studied with regards to marital happiness, and in the same survey no less:

Overall, the total difference between one or multiple lifetime sexual partners was a 7% effect on likelihood of marital happiness. That’s only 1% more than the effect of religion, 2% more than income, and less than that of ethnicity. Think about how this small effect size would compare to something like “actually working hard on your relationship”!

Or don’t just think of it, and instead look at this 2013 study from Brigham Young University, which did showed a correlation between # of sexual partners and decreased relationship stability and satisfaction, BUT that effect was more than 3 times smaller than that of good communication!

So. This and several other studies have shown a small correlation between increased sexual partners and worse marital outcomes. We’ve discussed some of the confounding variables, but let’s talk a bit more about why this association may exist. Don’t worry, we’re almost done!

Pair Bonding? Comparing new guys to past ones?

In that initial video, she stated:

”The more men you sleep with, you lose your ability to bond with each one… yeah it’s pair-bonding.

…is that what pair bonding is? Throwing out scientific-sounding terms doesn’t really help your credibility if you don’t use them properly.

Pair bonding is usually used in the context of animals. Here’s an excerpt from a 2021 review paper on the topic:

“You couldn’t even stay with me for a single reproductive cycle? I thought we were pair bonded?”

So if it’s not Pair Bonding, why is there any effect at all?

Even this more elaborate model was unable to examine many potential confounding variables. The authors suggested that:

1) People who have gone through previous breakups are less likely to be scared of going through another, and so are more likely to end it when necessary

2) Those who are better at making relationships work from the beginning are more likely to stay in relationship

3) The adultery effect. Assuming truthful answers (big assumption, I know), only one partner means no cheating.

Finally, many studies have found that, if you live together before you’re at least engaged, you’re more likely to end up divorced. A recent, 2021 study found a 31.4% divorce rate among those who had lived together before marriage compared to a 25.9% rate among those who had not.

Why is this relevant?

Because people who have multiple premarital sexual partners are more likely to the end up living together before marriage. This is largely due to the momentum effect; couples that are living together are more likely to just get married by default rather than due to a very strong, well-thought out reason for doing so. But they’re also more likely to have done so due to an unexpected pregnancy, or financial concerns. All of which can lead to a less happy marriage, but not because you lose the ability to form a new emotional bond.

Conclusion

So. Let’s recap by reviewing her 4 claims.

1. Specificity

Was there any evidence that going above a magic “5 partners” number drops your chance of a happy marriage from 80% to 25%?

Definitely not. But it is true that people currently in long-term marriages are less likely to have had multiple partners than people who are above 30 and still unmarried.

2. The Gender Gap

Is it true that sleeping around will be more likely to affect a woman’s later marital happiness than a man’s?

Definitely not. All of the available observational data shows the same trend for men as for women. But some research does show that men “tend to prefer women with less sexual experience as marital partners.” Because double standards are a thing.

3. and 4. – The Causal Relationship

Is there is evidence that proves that the very act of sleeping with more men makes women less likely to “pair bond” and form a strong relationship with a future husband.

No, that’s not a thing.

But even if there’s no 80% to 25% drop, is there any solid evidence or reason that your mother could use to say “if you want a husband, don’t do that!”?

And the effect of things like good communication and sexual quality matter way more than the number of previous partners!

So treat your partners well and be conscientious about everything involving your serious relationships!

Alright guys, this was my first long-form article + video for the channel, but I’ll be doing plenty more of these deep dives going forward, covering topics ranging from psychology to productivity to exercise and nutrition, all focused on applying the latest science to improve your life and help you make science-backed decisions. Share this with a friend if you found it to be useful, and subscribe to my newsletter for periodic useful dumps of fun sciency goodness!

About Me

I’m Avisha, aka DistilledScience, and I’m a scientist that loves doing deep dives into scientific literature that we can apply to improve our own lives. Especially to debunk people who give science a bad name.