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What an interesting hypothesis. It'd be a shame if someone were to... test it.
Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?
The answer may surprise you! (Lolno, it won't surprise anyone)
Without graph for hotness ... it doesn't mean much. An explanation for this graph is that the ugly and unfuckable are so out of options that divorce is pointless for them.
I don't understand your objection. If body count is correlated to divorce rate, then a high body count woman has a higher chance of divorcing you than a low body count woman, by definition.
Looking at an r=0.8 correlation and responding "Ah-ha but maybe the correlation would be r=0.9 if you control for hotness"... The fact that you can speculate on the existence of a hypothetical better study doesn't remove meaning from the existing study!
Lizzardspawn is saying that 40%~ of women polled with low body counts aren't divorcing because they can't abandon the one guy who was willing to take them. So, the common cause of low divorce rate and low body counts is desperation, rather than chastity or high relationship ethics.
I do not find this interpretation of the data convincing as, in my experience, 40% of women in their teens and twenties do not struggle to find partners willing to bed them.
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On the other hand, a lower number of lifetime partners is probably correlated with marrying younger, which we know correlates with divorce risk on its lonesome. So having that graph in that direction means the effect is strong enough to overcome the correlation between early marriage and divorce.
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Aella's recent survey showed women (and men) having many previous partners was the number 1 predictor for them cheating. Previous promiscuity is bad for the vast majority of people and their partners.
Also IIRC #previous partners is actually somewhat anticorrelated to physical attractiveness for women.
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That's not the divorce rate. That's the ratio of 30yo+ women who've had the same partner for the last five years. This is affected both by the divorce rate and the age at which they got married. Someone who has had only long-term boyfriends since she was 16 might look like this:
age: 34
number of partners: 3 (16-24, 24-31, 31-now)
in a stable relationship: no
Does this mean her current marriage will end up in a divorce? No, not really.
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Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?
Perhaps a more direct intuition pump. Let's say we have a pair of 30 year old friends. Both are newlyweds (not to each other). One of the friends had 20 sexual partners prior to getting married, which is at the 80th percentile, and the other had 8, which is the median. We should expect the friend with the median number of partners to have around the median chance of divorce within 5 years (around 20% as far as I can tell), and the one at the 80th percentile to have a higher 5-year-divorce chance (~35% if my slightly sketchy sources are right, but the exact number isn't really important).
Now take the exact same scenario, but instead of friends they're identical twins. Do you expect that the twin who had more partners is 1.5x to 2x more likely to divorce within the next five years? I personally don't particularly expect that, just because I expect that divorce rates are quite strongly driven by heritable factors rather than environmental ones.
Direct. The more pair-bonding you do with different people, the less you are capable of psychologically investing in the next one. And if you can't psychologically invest in your spouse, you're gonna have a bad time.
Still there's gonna be a bunch of cultural/behavioral confounders.
I don't doubt that there's a direct correlation effect, but I'd also be surprised if there wasn't a significant case of lower pre-marital partners amongst a plethora of cultural & religious groups who marry young and don't really divorce.
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