The longer couples wait to have sex the more likely they are to last, concludes a new study from Bringham Young University, a school where Mormons are taught to abstain from sex until marriage. Not that there’s a conflict of interest or anything.
Two theories exist on the nature of sexual activity before marriage, relays Live Science: waiting is better, or getting it over with is better.
Past research on sex and its link to relationship quality has revealed two different paradigms. In one, sex is considered essential to a developing relationship since it allows partners to assess their sexual compatibility. Following this line of thinking, couples who marry before testing out their sexual chemistry are at risk of marital distress and failure later on.
The opposing view posits couples who delay or abstain from sexual intimacy during the early part of their relationships allow communication and other social processes to become the foundation of their attraction to each other. Essentially, early sex could be detrimental to a relationship, skewing it away from communication, commitment and the ability to handle adversity, this thinking suggests.
Not so shockingly, BYU’s data found that compared to respondents who did not wait until marriage to have sex, those who did:
* Rated relationship stability as 22 percent higher
* Rated relationship satisfaction as 20 percent higher
* Rated sexual quality as 15 percent better
* Rated communication as 12 percent better
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Luckily, since most of us gays can never get married, the study is moot, and I’ll advise you to continue having sex before exchanging last names.
Daez
Define sex. If it includes oral intercourse, than I think I actually did have it with my partner of four months before I knew his actual first name. Of course, we met at a no holds barred gay campground.
dk
If both parties are open, (emotionally), honest about what they want and what they can offer and able to communicate well with each other, they will have a good shot at a decent relationship regardless of when they have sex. Being so hot for each other that you have to have them is a better start than being mildly attracted IMO. Getting to know someone sexually is just as important as getting to know them as a person.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@Daez: Wasn’t his name “Hey” :p
I have had two LTRs one we had mad monkey sex the first night, other we waited ’bout two months. I definatley reccomend the waiting thing. To go thru all the dorky adorable dating things prior to hitting the sheets made it feel really special, and the anticipation and awkardness was actually kinda cool ………..
Rick Gold
This is a silly question asked by emotionally and psychologically immature people who are unable to enjoy sex without attaching some form of guilt to it.
Bboater
I did everything…EVERYTHING the first date. We are still together, since 1994. We were both 19 years old. Good communication is the key.
randy
Bullshit. Brigham Young U is a Mormon school that teaches no sex before marriage under any circumstances. You think any student or person who is Mormon is going to admit that the relationship is no better or worse? Like hell they will.
This was a push survey to “prove” to the young ‘uns that they should obstain.
Tallskin
oh god this is christians trying to find/twist evidence to suit their ideological agenda
Total bollocks.
stevenelliot
ALWAYS sample the milk before you buy the cow…..always
dvlaries
Well, just as there’s no marriage for us there’s no divorce, so me and my guy had to wait one month before he could get away from the bad (and increasingly sexless) relationship he was in. I had to say so long to a pair of friends with benefits, but there were no sore feelings.
We’re still together, February will be 35 years.
Charlie
Well the Mormons do have a very high divorce rate…. so let’s take that into consideration.
However I do know that if I sleep with someone right away I’m more likely to lose interest. Your mileage may vary.
Jack
God, gays are just as stupid as straights. These results just make sense and it has nothing to do with morals or religious values. If you have sex first, you’re pretty normal. If you wait until marriage, you clearly value the emotional over the physical so of course your relationship will be happier and the sex that comes from that relationship will be better. The reason is simply that the person is more stimulated by emotional relationships. If it’s a more physically-oriented person, he or she would obviously be less happy in a relationship that lacked those elements. It’s just common sense and I don’t need a study to prove it. Emotional people like emotional relationships. Physical people like physical relationships. Ah duh.
Daez
@Jack: You could not be more clueless. For started, where the bloody hell do you get the idea that sex in a LTR is physical. It absolutely is not physical, in a successful LTR your sex life changes from what pleases you to what pleases your partner. It is completely ruled by your feelings (emotions) for your partner.
Plus you get to feel those emotions on a constant basis. Four months into my relationship, and the very presence of my man still makes me hard even if we are not touching. Emotional attraction is a very powerful sexual stimulant.
Spike
Why would any gay care about a sex survey that comes out of BYU?!!? Talk about a bunch of effed up fools.
Oh please, ALWAYS have sex on the first date. If it’s hot, great, stick around and have some more and decide if you like the guy. If that’s not the case, at least you had sex and didn’t resort to jacking off, again.
The whole ‘don’t have sex for two months’ is buying into the chick mentality who do that because they have hormones that kick into gear that make em start to bond every time they have sex (or breast feed). Guys don’t have those hormones, so don’t pretend like you do!
Sean
“Well the Mormons do have a very high divorce rate.” Only when marrying non-Mormons. When marrying other Mormons, they have a much more modest divorce rate (according to http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm at least).
As for the study itself, there are a few flaws. For one: “They recruited 2,035 heterosexual individuals who had an average age of 36 and were in their first marriages.”
That’s a decent sample size, but it the fact that it only selected never-divorced, married people is pretty limiting, and I’d bet 100 to 1 odds that their methods of selection also skewed towards Mormons or traditional Christians. Just to show how little this study demonstrates, here are a bunch of possible explanations of the results.
-Waiting to have sex improves marriage quality, which could be tested with more controls and long-term studies that followed relationships from the beginning.
-People who tend to have sex early also tend to have worse relationships, not because of the sex but because they are more impulsive. This effect would go away after controlling for impulsiveness or other personality type.
-People who have sex early are less likely to be looking for long-term relationships, and have less interest in them total. Could possibly test with longer-term studies, questions about overall values tracked over time.
-People who wait to have sex are more likely to divorce as soon as the going gets tough. Therefore the only people who wait to have sex and don’t quickly divorce are the ones with really good marriages. This effect could be detected with long-term studies that followed relationships from the beginning.
-Men who cheat or have lower libidos, and thus are less sexually demanding, have better marriages. Hard to test; could check whether sexual frustration is a major point of conflict.
-Women who cheat or have lower libidos, and thus are less sexually demanding, have better marriages. Hard to test; could check whether sexual frustration is a major point of conflict.
-People who have better marriages are more likely to lie about whether or not they had sex before marriage. Could be discovered with longer-term studies.
-People who wait until marriage to have sex are more likely to lie and claim that their marriages are just fine. Could be tested using measurement tools that invoke less pressure to exaggerate happiness, seeing if the effect shrinks.
-People who have sex right away are more likely to get married right away. People who get married when they are younger have worse marriages, because a) young lovers who rush into things are often being stupid, and b) those marriages are more likely to be pregnancy-related/shotgun weddings. If so, the results would go away after controlling for age at marriage.
-Christians, particularly Mormons, who have sex only within marriage take actions which are more in tune with their personal beliefs, and thus have better overall well-being than guilty hypocrites who have sex before marriage but then talk about how evil that is. We would not see a similar pattern among irreligious people or members of religions that don’t stigmatize pre-marital sex (if we could find many).
So yeah, that study doesn’t explain much without further testing. Plus, whatever comes out of these religious universities, I’m always skeptical that it hasn’t been outright doctored up or cherry-picked.
Sean
“they have hormones that kick into gear that make em start to bond every time they have sex (or breast feed). Guys don’t have those hormones, so don’t pretend like you do!”
It’s called oxytocin, and men do have it. It’s just that not everyone responds the same, and women’s reactions on average are stronger. If you think guys *in general* don’t feel differently about their partners after having sex, um…, well you’re substantially wrong? Just because on average the effect is weaker, doesn’t make it not there.
randy
@Sean: After I have sex and cum, I just want the other person to disappear.
Sean
“After I have sex and cum, I just want the other person to disappear.”
Right, which presumably means you have some more compelling motivation that overcomes the feeling I was mentioning. Or you don’t have enough positive social feeling for the other person that there’s anything there to be enhanced (oxytocin apparently works by intensifying the effects of social emotions over more primitive ones such as fear/stress). Or you could be part of the minority population which does not respond to oxytocin at all. This is why particular anecdotes are not enough to disprove a general trend, m’K?
mdthom
My partner and I had sex the first night we met. That was almost 32 years ago. Just saying.
Daez
@randy: I feel so horribly bad for you if that is honestly the life you live.
randy
@Daez: No need to feel sorry for me. I do just fine. Not everybody wants a relationship.
justiceontherocks
Wait?? For what??
Not sure I need relationship advice from people who wear underwear with patches over the nipples because that’s where sin enteres the body the easiest.
Daez
@randy: I think that is completely bogus. It’s the people that couldn’t have a relationship if they tried that convince themselves of this fantasy, but in the end, it is much nicer to go through life knowing someone or something has your back besides your pets.
Jaroslaw
#14 Sean gave a great analysis, but even if they selected everyone, the fact is a large segment of our society says sex should be regulated (meaning within marriage) and probably every society on earth has had some restrictions on sexual activity.
I don’t know if one of the most important, emotionally charged things that humans do could ever be evaluated in a completely neutral way as no one grows up in a vacuum.
I always thought waiting for love was the best, but since I never found it and am older and on too many pills, I wish I’d been busier in my youth! Just something to think about.
paulD
@justiceontherocks: I agree, why wait?! If you are attracted to someone you gotta kick the tires, look under the hood, and check how it performs on the open road!
Merlyn
I think that is up to each couple. We didn’t wait and we are still happily married after almost three-and-a-half years.
B
No. 6 · randy wrote, “Bullshit. Brigham Young U is a Mormon school that teaches no sex before marriage under any circumstances. You think any student or person who is Mormon is going to admit that the relationship is no better or worse? Like hell they will. This was a push survey to “prove” to the young ‘uns that they should obstain.”
If you are going to accuse the authors of cooking results, you should be able to back that up – it is a libelous statement on your part otherwise.
According to http://apaauthor.com/byu-study-says-delaying-sex-may-promote-better-marriage-salt-lake-tribune/ : “We went with open mind,” Busby, a professor at the BYU School of Family Life. “They do not tell me what to study and what not to study . I worked at three other universities, and saw no difference in terms of what to study. ”
Also: “The team selected the responses of 2,035 couples in an attempt to obtain a sample demographically reflects American marriages. About 94 percent had attended college and almost two-thirds had a college degree. The average age was 36. More than half the survey found on a course instructor or an advisor relationship. Most identified themselves as members of a religious faith, but only 6 percent said they were Mormon.”
(This is a bit garbled – probably related to how they lifted the article from the Salt Lake Tribune.)
I doubt if they cooked the results. Without seeing the actual paper, however, I wouldn’t assume the claims in the press accurately reflect their results, nor would I assume the authors got everything right.
B
No. 18 · mdthom wrote, “My partner and I had sex the first night we met. That was almost 32 years ago. Just saying.”
But their results reflect an average over the sample. One hypothesis that might explain their results: people who jump into bed at the first opportunity are, on the average, more impulsive than those who wait longer, and more impulsive people have lower levels of relationship stability, satisfaction, sexual quality, and communication.
So the obvious question is whether their data is sufficient for testing that hypothesis. You won’t know without reading the actual paper, not some press release.
It’s conceivable that mdthom and his partner are not impulsive, but were so compatible and so attracted to each other that they had sex on “the first night” because they were a perfect match. That’s great for them, but not necessarily typical of most couples.
Just a thought...
@Rick Gold: Unless, of course, it is you who is psychologically and emotionally immature! Do you ever wonder whether you’re wrong? You ought to.
David
Some people don’t know how to fuck…. or they make really ugly faces or ugly noises when they cum. I’d like to know that from the very beginning.
Alex
@Daez: woahhh. Where’s that campground?
lfivepoints69
Actually, legitimate studies have consistently shown that couples who make love before getting married have much more stable and successful marriages. It is irresponsible and immoral not to get to know your fiancee in such an important way in advance of making a lifetime commitment. BYU is a cult with no legitimacy – no more, no less.
lfivepoints69
@Charlie: Given that Mormons have among the highest rates of domestic abuse, suicide, mental depression, unhappy marriages, and divorce, they are hardly a legitimate source.
B
No. 31 · lfivepoints69 wrote, “BYU is a cult with no legitimacy – no more, no less.”
Really? You can say that about the Mormon church if you like, but BYU does seem to be a real university. Here’s a list of its undergraduate programs: http://saas.byu.edu/catalog/2010-2011ucat/Advisement/MajorList.php
Also http://news.byu.edu/archive10-mar-lephartequol.aspx which describes some research at BYU (its a press release, not a technical article) that hardly sounds cult-like.
The study QUEERTY’s article described used a sample of which 6% were Mormon. While Mormons make up less than 2% of the U.S. population, you can use statistical techniques to compensate for the excess (perhaps they also wanted to measure how Mormons differed from the rest of the population).
Obama DID say DADT would happen on his watch... (John From England)
@Alex:
Lol! Yeah?!
Disgusted Gay American
The ONLY way this question would make any sense..is IF, Every LGBT American HAD the RIGHT to Marry – where-ever they lived in this country……then,and ONLY then..would that question be one Iota Relevant!
a
Did this study go over a correlation between disappointment in a relationship with disappointment during sex?
If not, this study doesn’t hold much water.
B
No. 36 · A asked, “Did this study go over a correlation between disappointment in a relationship with disappointment during sex?”
That’s why you want links to the actual article they published (which QUEERTY didn’t provide and which I had no luck finding).
Of course, if you refrain from sex before marriage, the “disappointment during sex” with a poor sex partner may be less obvious due to the lack of anything to compare it to.
STEVEmd2
The best sex before marriage is to screw a hater who is secretly gay. and post it on youtube after editing out the sex organs.
Brentinpdx
This study is complete bullshit! Why do I need some study to base what I have known all along… you are infatuated with that person and they are with you.. have sex, it will make the bond tighter.
* Rated sexual quality as 15 percent better- Duh! cuz its at least 15% better than spanking your monkey alone!
kae
There is a grain of truth in this but to wait until marriage is totally unrealistic. Nobody except religious fanatics would advocate such nonsense.
Bascially, we are well evolved chimps; sex is a reward which has to be “earned” through good behaviour. If your date puts out on the first night, there is no reason for you to make much of an effort to win them over; to laugh them into bed, to demonstrate your smarts or whatever. Men tend to value what they have to earn rather more than what’s handed to them on a plate and are therefore keener to look after it once they’ve got it. This I think is truer of straight men (in this context) who view a woman who puts out on the first date as an easy lay and therefore less “valuable” than a woman he has to woo. Secretly, men want to be kept waiting for a little while at least.
Obviously a lot of this does not play out in the same way for gay men since there are social and biological pressures on women to “protect” their fertility and not give it up to the first man who wants to poke her. And straight men looking for a wife don’t expect their date to have sex on the first night. This is not to say that we can’t all indulge in casual sex but that when it comes to selecting a long term mate, we instinctively tend to employ a different strategy in order to secure the best long term outcome. It all depends what you’re after 🙂
Not many of us are lucky enough to get hot sex with the same person for 30 years…