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And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later. You've kind of underscored how simple it would be for a woman, starting at 16, to rack up comically large numbers, and there is almost ZERO external pressure to NOT sleep around.
And it didn't used to be this way, women are just sleeping around more on average. We went from about 64% of women having 0-1 partners by marriage... to 27%. So hey, you've got about 1 in 4 shot if you get married. But your granddad had a 2/3 shot.
Unless you think this is a good thing the best you can argue is that its neutral and can be ignored.
Sure thing.
But men don't have to bear kids.
And men can make up for this issue in a lot of other ways.
I do hope that Ozempic comes to help out with this.
Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.
So the problem is, ONCE AGAIN, that men are told to 'get better' but women aren't pressured to settle for the so-called 'looksmatch.'
Not precisely. This is my point about competition.
Any attractive women are a target for men of virtually all ages.
The sheer amount of choice she'll have, thanks to this competition, makes her less likely to settle.
Add in the effects of hypergamy and this explains almost ALL of the current strife in the dating market: Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.
Every single major cultural institution, Hollywood, Academia, Tikok/social media, dating apps(!) and every U.S. Corporation is telling them to never settle, never compromise, and they should delay marriage and kids so they can have money/career/travel etc.
Aside from the Catholic Church there are zero large cultural institutions sending the message “you should settle for a man who is decent and forgo other opportunities to bear children."
Not a huge surprise that the former message is internalized.
That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...
Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.
And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).
And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.
There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.
Your link isn't about sleeping around, and even if you want to try and infer that the numbers aren't broken out by gender
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The Catholic Church does not advise its female membership to settle for a man who is ‘decent’. Factually the preference of the Catholic Church is for unmarried laywomen to become nuns, but for those who don’t have a vocation the idea of ‘settling’ is not much pushed.
The Catholic Church raises the marriage rate by having a theoretically hard ban on cohabitation, not by reducing standards for men.
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Look at the graph in the link you shared that shows divorce rate by number of premarital partners. It shows that the divorce rate for women who had 2 partners exceeds that of women had 6-9!
There is a 10 percentage point difference for the arbitrary cut off of 4-5 and the maximum at 10+ partners. The difference between 4-5 and 6-9 is negligible, maybe 1 PP.
This makes the choice of 4-5 very hard to justify. After all, you should also rule out women who have had precisely 2 partners by the same logic.
Note that you also need to account for the fact that a minority of people divorce multiple times and drive up the average.
I've linked the image in question here.
/images/1748284134725351.webp
This in particular was addressed here for example:
https://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2016/06/n-matters-lot.html
The images in the post are no longer available as it's from 2016 but it doesn't matter much.
There's food for thought in the comments as well such as:
The odds doubling for the 10+ set likely is due to a woman who has that many partners has some other mental short circuit that causes her to either seek personal validation through sex, daddy issues, follow and unquestioningly accept some nonsensical ideology like slut feminism, is bipolar, or has some other issue not listed here. Where the n=2 may be a relatively normal woman who has a basis of comparison, the n=10+ is a strong indicator of some kind of mental/emotional instability.
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I wonder if "2 prior partners" is the sexual equivalent of "just 2 beers".
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Two theories:
1) Those may be fairly conservative religious girls who were brought up being told premarital sex and divorce was bad and held off sex to an extent, but went nuts with the divorce as an adult. But they didn't have enough time to accumulate 4-5 partners like the secular women did.
2) Women with 4-5 partners are less likely to get married AT ALL than those with 2 partners, choosing cohabitation instead. If marriage and cohabitation are considered together, those with 4-5 partners are still higher breakup risks than those with 2.
Here you go.
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I'm actually wondering how different the statistics are between "had 5 boyfriends for 2 years each, with almost no gaps of singleness" (the well-known "serial monogamy") and "had 5 one-night-stands with no relationships inbetween". Intuitively, it feels like one could argue either way - "she wanted to keep a man but can't" vs. "she had NSA sex".
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