31–40 of 44 posts
Great, can we get an article from the Family Research Council next? https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Family_S... This is a right-wing think tank that's promoting barely-disguised "traditional values." The quality of their "research" is garbage.
Wow. Not a word about the man's number of sexual partners in the marriages that stayed together or divorced. On the other hand, it's apparently very interesting if the woman is a virgin or not when married.
End of 5th paragraph: >"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"
Great, can we get an article from the Family Research Council next? https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Family_S... This is a right-wing think tank that's promoting barely-disguised "traditional values." The quality of their "research" is garbage.
I had the same initial reaction when I saw this. But the article appears to be pretty reasonable actually. I didn't catch strong hints of an agenda.
In terms of premarital sexual partners, the given chart shows divorce rates after five years of marriage. It doesn't tell me much - I would think if one were going to divorce, the best time to do so would be within the first few years, before having children. There are many studies of divorce rates after 15 or 20 years, that is what I would be curious to see.
I really hope I'm not a crackpot, and would love to get my view changed.
I've been thinking that marriage and relationship-seeking as a man is just a bad bet if you aren't a "top tier" man in terms of looks, income, charisma - the "full package". I'm objectively at the middle of the bell curve (run-of-the-mill software engineer, got good grades at an average school, not short but not tall, not fat but not fit, face a "6") but with a hint of (diagnosed as a child) Aspergers that dings my "full package" rating, and I've only had one good relationship.
Statistics like this show that premarital sex and divorce are correlated.
Anecdotally, it seems the U.S. judicial system heavily favors the woman in a man-woman divorce. My father, my uncle, 2 of my coworkers - much of their assets completely wiped. I have read research indicating that this is true in general i.e. divorces tend to be a greater loss for the man.
I believe premarital (and extramarital) sex is far more easily found in these times due to the profileration of dating apps, and as a consequence of internet-scale, the sheer number of options for women (who are typically the ones with choice) are exponentially greater than any other time before this.
As another commenter mentioned, people are only as faithful as their knowledge of their options. It's now common knowledge that you have an INCREDIBLE amount of options, if you're desired.
So, with the onus of choice and the economy of scale, it seems like a woman will always be able to find a superior replacement to an average or below-average man - even if only for one night.
I can't make myself smarter or more beautiful (I can and do work out, but those improvements only do so much). I already have enough problems socially that dating is an uphill battle. Why should I try when there is a charismatic 9/10 a "swipe" away?
Cards on the table - after finally seeing romantic success after 20 years of life, saving my paychecks for a ring and marriage, and then having it all come crashing down early this year really broke me, and I found myself easily trapped into reading and studying "incel" and "red pill" ideologies to try and provide the right model to be viewing the world of human romantic relationships, and it was a good deal of work to rise out of that trap, but I'm left with wondering what parts of "the black pill" are very real and what parts are useless. It really seems like given the premises 1) as a living organism, I should be in the business of making my species survive another generation and 2) Others in my species deem me unfit to reproduce, then I can only accomplish (1) by increasing the amount of resources in the world available to those who ARE fit to reproduce, which can be done in 2 different ways...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
End of 5th paragraph: >"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"
Men can't remember if they had sex?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same initial reaction when I saw this. But the article appears to be pretty reasonable actually. I didn't catch strong hints of an agenda.
The best sort of agenda-driven study is one that doesn't openly look that way, though. Lots of ways to subtly mislead with cherry-picked stats or the "men don't report reliably anyways, so we can't consider that" hand-waving this article does.
Yikes, let's not be misleading in turn. That's not why they don't have those stats. Here's the actual reason and context you conveniently left out:
"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"
Demonstrate why they are incorrect or misleading as opposed to setting up a strawman.
The author is a professor of Family and Consumer Studies at University of Utah. That discipline is usually denoted Family and Consumer Sciences or domestic science. The same discipline being split between researchers favoring either a studies or science name is nothing new. But almost all examples I can think of involves a dispute between a hard/soft approach.[0] Which is not really the case here. So in my opinion would a generalist be excused from presuming that this institute is rooted in the liberal goals of critical social theory, instead of what it really is.
I have no evidence that professor Wolfinger is nothing but a serious scholar. But it still smells a little like scholarly black hat SEO'ing to me.
[0] Crudely said a soft approach involves a focus on theory, relativizing empirical evidence, and activism.
In the USA, there are a number of factors which lead to marriage stability. One is education - high school dropouts have a high divorce rate, college graduates have a lower divorce rate. Another is age at marriage - people who marry before the age of 23 tend to have a higher divorce rate than those who marry at or after 23. Income factors in as well - those with a good income tend to have more stable marriages ( http…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_seven-year_itch
(sorry for a tertiary source)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
End of 5th paragraph: >"unfortunately, the NSFG doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women)"
Men can't remember if they had sex?