Americans who have only ever slept with their spouses are most likely to report being in a “very happy” marriage, a sociologist at the University of Utah in the US has found. Meanwhile, the lowest odds of marital happiness—about 13 percentage points lower than the one-partner women—belong to women who have had six to 10 sexual partners in their lives. For men, there’s also a dip in marital satisfaction after one partner, according to Nicholas Wolfinger of the Institute for Family Studies.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. In an earlier analysis, Wolfinger found that women with zero or one previous sex partners before marriage were also least likely to divorce, while those with 10 or more were most likely.
