What recent studies link number of premarital sexual partners to divorce risk in the United States (2010-2024)?

1. The strongest recent peer‑reviewed finding: tiers of risk in 2024

A nationally grounded 2024 event‑history study by Smith and Wolfinger re‑examined premarital sexual history using longitudinal data and multivariate models that include adolescent beliefs, religiosity, and personality proxies and reported that divorce risk is “highly significant and robust” to those controls; compared with people who had no premarital partners other than their eventual spouse, respondents with nine or more premarital partners had the highest divorce risk, those with one through eight partners had elevated but lower risk, and the lowest risk was among those with none — described by the authors as three “tiers” of divorce risk ^{[1] [4] [2]}.

2. National surveys and replication: corroborating patterns and limits

Multiple analyses drawing on U.S. national surveys — including waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and cohort studies cited in contemporary reviews — find that having multiple premarital partners is associated with worse marital outcomes and higher odds of dissolution, a pattern that persists across several datasets though sample composition and measurement vary by study and decade ^{[5] [6] [7]}. Reports and institute reviews echo the same direction: the Wheatley Institute’s 2023 synthesis of studies concludes that number of premarital partners is “one of the strongest predictors” of divorce in social‑science research, and Institute for Family Studies briefs highlight elevated odds for women with even a single premarital partner in some cohorts ^{[3] [5] [8]}.

3. Competing explanations: selection, causation, and changing norms

Scholars disagree on mechanism. One family‑science line argues selection — people predisposed to behaviors or attitudes that both lead to multiple partners and unstable marriages — explains the correlation, while another raises the possibility that sexual histories themselves alter attitudes, norms, or partner markets in ways that increase breakup likelihood; Smith and Wolfinger tested many selection variables (religiosity, adolescent values, personality measures) and still found robust associations, leaving causation unresolved but making pure selection less decisive in their models ^{[2] [1] [4]}. Additionally, research emphasizing shifting sexual norms notes that overall premarital experience has risen across cohorts, complicating cohort comparisons and interpretation of absolute risk ^{[6] [9]}.

4. Gender, measurement and the cautionary methodological footnotes

Recent work gives mixed signals on gender differences: Smith and Wolfinger report no evidence that the premarital‑sex/divorce relationship differs between men and women in their models, while Institute for Family Studies analyses emphasize patterns for women using NSFG data and caution about men’s recall and measurement limits; many datasets historically oversample or measure women’s sexual histories more reliably, and studies differ in whether they separate casual partners from committed premarital partners or account for premarital cohabitation and childbearing — factors known to affect marital stability ^{[1] [10] [5] [7]}.

5. What the body of recent work actually establishes — and where reporting overreaches

The collective recent literature (2010–2024) reasonably establishes a robust statistical association in U.S. survey data between greater counts of premarital partners and higher divorce risk, with at least one high‑profile 2024 peer‑reviewed study delineating a nine‑plus partners high‑risk tier and other syntheses and briefs reinforcing the pattern; however, the literature stops short of proving a uniform causal pathway, and nonacademic outlets and advocacy groups sometimes simplify or overstate causality or generalize cohort‑specific findings without noting measurement limits and changing sexual norms ^{[1] [2] [3] [5]}.