Views on casual sex may negatively impact your marriage

New York: According to a new study, an individual’s premarital views on uncommitted sex, such as one-night stands or casual sex, may make it more difficult to remain blissfully married.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, outlines several factors that can contribute to a marriage’s long-term happiness or dissolution, including one major red flag: an individual’s behaviour and attitude toward uncommitted sexual relationships prior to marriage.

“Marital satisfaction generally declines over time, but what we’ve discovered is that when one or both spouses hold generalised beliefs that uncommitted sex is OK prior to marriage, that can contribute to marriage failure,” said the study’s first author Juliana French from Florida State University.

The research team collected and analysed data from 204 heterosexual newly married couples for the study.

They gathered data on their prior behaviours and attitudes, as well as a variety of factors related to their new marriages, such as marital satisfaction.

Researchers followed up with couples over several years to collect information about their marital satisfaction and data on which couples separated or filed for divorce.

The researchers focused on the extent to which people expressed “unrestricted sociosexual” behaviours, desires, and attitudes prior to marriage, indicating that they were more likely to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships such as one-night stands and generally believed that sex without love was acceptable.

People who were relatively unrestricted in the study’s couples were less satisfied at the start of their marriages.

Furthermore, people who had relatively unrestricted partners experienced faster declines in satisfaction during the first few years of marriage, which predicted dissolution.

“What surprised us the most about these findings was that both couple members’ sociosexuality plays an important role in long-term marital outcomes,” French said.

“We discovered evidence that couples who maintain a consistent, satisfying sexual relationship or couples who maintain low levels of stress are buffered against these negative outcomes,” French continued.