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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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