Why is casual sex and high partner count more damaging to women as opposed to men? Also, what is the link between casual sex and marriage?

(Photo found online )
(Photo found online )

For a long time, there has been speculations over the effects of casual sex and partner count on both the sexes. Speculations included a higher risk of substance dependence disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. It seems as if these speculations haven’t been exactly true, perhaps half-truths or correlational at best. However, research shows interesting findings on this issue, specifically pointing to the fact that casual sex and high partner count has a MORE NEGATIVE impact for women’s wellbeing and emotions as opposed to men. I will present a few points of facts that include the following:

• Women who have slept with only their spouses are 65% more likely to report happy marriages. Although this percentage declines as the # of partners a woman has made, there are gradations (https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness)

• Most Americans reporting one lifetime partner report the happiest marriages, although past one partner there are gradations that can be interpreted as trivial or nontrivial(https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness

•“although having multiple sex partners was followed by substance dependence disorders for both genders, men were more likely than women to have a disorder when they had no or few sex partners whereas women who had more than approximately 10 sex partners in the same time period were much more likely to have a disorder than men.”

•“Women reporting more than 2.5 partners per year had much greater odds of being diagnosed with a substance dependence disorder than those with only one or no partners

My goal is not to provide an exhaustive exorcism on this issue, rather, provide some of my opinions and facts related to this topic. As I learn more, I intend to change my opinion or beliefs on this issue of course, but I shall up it up with the following.

I do not know why we have been saying that “women love sex just as much as men” like this is some parallel or proxy for the idea that women are like men in this regard. This is obviously not true and I believe can hurt women AND men when it comes to future intimacy. Decision-making and responsibility are important topics to talk about as well, so where high sexual partner count and casual sex are to be found, other negative issues dwell as well, that can affect men and women.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201304/the-lingering-psychological-effects-multiple-sex-partners%3famp

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3752789/

https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness

http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2003/pdf/Bookofcharts.pdf

2 7

Most Helpful Guys

  • Because sex for women is far more dangerous then sex for men. For men the worse case scenario is getting a sexually transmited disease, which men are less likely to get then women (due to the nature of sex as you can probably figure out), best case they reproduce. For women worse case scenarios are sexually transmitted diseases but also pregnancy i. e. their is no upside for her EXCEPT for when the man she reproduces with stays with her to provide for her and the child. So for men their is no real downside for women their is a substantial downside. The reason why pregnancy is a down side for women is that she is slowly incapacitated (for all intense and purposes).

    Life was hard historically, women where already not strong enough to do farming so they had to scavenge for food and with an ever growing child in them that also increased the demand of food on them (as their are now two to feed) she is also becoming less flexible, agile and becoming slower as the baby gets bigger. This would increase her risk of starving as well as risk of death from a predator as escaping or fighting were both highly unlikely. That's before you even get to the fact that after birth the baby is dependent on her for years to come as well. For the man again, the time he invested in having sex is the amount of time and resources he invests. So its only natural she would evolve a different reproductive strategy, one that deterred her from casual sex by making her less happy with it (as studies also show they are more likely to develop depression and anxiety from casual sex).

    They also are more likely to have a specialized bonding system through sex because once the man commits her having sex with him increases the bond, for him sex doesn't do that because again, for him sex isn't the greatest point in investment for him. Along that note its also interesting to see that a man is twice as likely to commit suicide after divorce then a man who isn't yet for women the ending of the relationship does not increase rates of suicide. This could be in a way, the same mechanism that women have with sex, for him the investment is within the relationship and so that is how he bonds while she bonds with sex because that is the thing that has the highest risk and investment for her.

    • Contraceptions can protect you from pregnancy and shit.

    • @kim45456 Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah it can. So what? Did we have contraceptives 2 million years ago when humans first showed up on the planet? No. Did we have them 1 million years ago? No. Did we have them 500,000 years ago? No. Did we have them 5,000 years ago? No. Did we have them 2,000 years ago? No. Did we have them 1,000 years ago? Yes but they where incredibly uncommon. Did we have them 500 years ago? Not really, again, they existed but where uncommon. So when did we get widespread contraception's? about sixty years ago. Does evolution only exist when we want it to? No. So we can safely assume that we evolved sexual differences because over the course of millions of years we evolved and changed to adapt to the best situations we had. Again, this is really really straightforward. I'm sorry that you don't like the idea that we are different, but we are. You arguing that because we have contraceptives and therefore evolution didn't take place over the millions of years without it is just insane to be perfectly honest. Yeah I get it you want to know that you are completely free from biology, that you can do what ever you want when ever you want free of consequences. That's great, I want to believe I can eat what ever I want without my body storing it as fat because of the millions of years of evolution causing my body to store it away because starvation was the biggest threat for most of human existence. I also want to believe that I will live way longer then I will and pretend like women don't have longer life spans because that's pretty sexist that women get to outlive men simply because they are women. Is that how reality works though? No. So your comment is meaningless, what you want and what is are two different things, ignoring the impact of evolution because incredibly recently something changed is just willfully ignorance.

    • Were are talking about todays world. I dont understand why a womsn should be slut shamed but not men

    • Show All
  • One poster said:
    "People Who've had casual sex will be less happy in marriage as they can't properly bond with their partner'
    Sexist as this sounds, my unscientific perception is that men can "get their fill" and then become Mitt Romney's who UNhypocritically (!) warn their daughters against guys like they were. Women, by contrast, who gave it up easily and often dismantle their capacity to ever be faithful wives and mothers and become manipulative and predatory over time.
    But it's number of partners, not number of sessions. 2 partners, 300 sessions total. No problem. 15 partners, 150 sessions total, big problem.

    • I can agree with all that

    • WE ALSO DONT LIKE MAN WHORES. GET IT?

    • @kim45456 Them stop giving it up to them like it is a stick of chewing gum.

Most Helpful Girl

  • People Who've had casual sex will be less happy in marriage as they can't properly bond with their partner

    • Agreed.

    • somewhere there is a lucky man

Scroll Down to Read Other Opinions

What's Your Opinion? Sign Up Now!

What Girls & Guys Said

13 23
  • Ig cause they consider women “hoes” for it but consider men “experienced” for it. I consider em all hoes if the numbers too high so i ain't worried 🤷‍♀️ Ill never get how someone can want to sleep with so many people. Just seems unsanitary. I feel more than a handful is too much. I personally am never going over 3 and i hate i ever went over 1

  • Men and women are different. As much as the women here are trying to pin the blame for this on insecure sexist men, as per usual, there's more to it.

    A person asks another person for just sex. The other person enthusiastically says yes.
    A person asks another person for just sex. The other person calls that person an asshole.
    A person lies to another person and pretends to want a serious relationship with that person, when really they only want casual sex. Then they leave the other person, and the other person is heartbroken because they only have sex with people they feel emotionally connected to.

    You already know who the girls and guys are most likely to be in either situation because you know that when it comes to sex men and women think and act completely differently most of the time. Sure there are some outliers, and these things do happen to either gender sometimes, but in each case unless you're being dishonest you know how this usually happens.

    People today are obsessed with equality in absolutely everything. They want to pretend that men and women are the same. That's why the explanation is almost always something to do with society or "insecure men" and not just our nature. That's also why they'll ignore any evidence that contradicts their message while they do mental gymnastics to try to explain it in a way that doesn't.

    • Yes, women and men are not same but dont fuckimg justify that men can be whores. Can you explain me what has that to do with slutshaming women but not men?

    • You are just proving you are jelous of women having the power to have sex

    • @kim45456 Well slut-shaming is for a different reason, and comes from the past when our culture was more Christian. This idea that there was a time when men would go around having sex with loads of women, "sow their wild oats" and then marry a virgin is really inaccurate. At that time most people were virgins, and they had to marry in order to have sex. What slut-shaming was really about was paternity. In the past of course they didn't have birth control, so there was always a high risk of pregnancy along with sex. They also didn't have DNA tests. Therefore the only way a man could be sure that the children were his would be if she was a virgin. So there were all of these social pressures put in place to prevent women from having casual or pre-marital sex and also huge stigma around having children out of wedlock. Slut-shaming today really comes from that time. And since most women would avoid that because of the huge stigma, it would be impossible for most men to sleep around the way they do today because they couldn't find women willing to do that. None of this is about justifying men being "whores", it's just an analysis of the differences between men and women. I don't think that sleeping around is a good thing for anybody, but it definitely has more of a negative effect on women for these reasons. As for the accusation of being jealous of women having the power - that's laughable, and it's also a projection of your own insecurities. You'd like that to be the case but you know that it isn't, that's why you whine a lot about men not wanting older women.

    • Show All
  • 1. I have met women who seemed to enjoy sex just as much as men enjoy sex. However, that fact alone does not mean hat sex is the same for women as it is for men. I think many men regard sex as a recreational activity for fun and they do not equate it with love and long term commitment. However, men who are more introspective (which has a rough correlation with being more intelligent) tend to regard sex as a concomitant of love and a stable relationship.

    2. If a person senses a societal pressure to seek sex only in a long term relationship but readily violates that rule, it is an indication that the person is willing to be a social rebel. Such an attitude seems like it would dispose a person to also violate societal norms about alcohol and drugs. It is the flip side of the old expression that "if she smokes, she pokes."

    3. Does living life in compliance with societal norms equate with happiness? Is it reasonable to rely on someone's self-report of happiness to determine that fewer sexual partners means a woman is happier with her life?

  • Because insecure men.

    • Exactly! Men (especially the ones on here and the one who wrote this question) are always (if not usually) looking for excuses to degrade women! To insult and offend them! They don't want to admit that we are equal but in different ways!

  • It's bad for both women and men. Men need to keep their legs closed too

  • I feel like this might be true, but from a different angle. You're first and only sex partner can never do wrong in bed because you have nothing else to compare it to. You don't know what you like and don't like yet so you assume "ah THIS is what sex is". However after having a few partners, I've realized that men hardly focus on a womans orgasm. Not until my recent boyfriend did a guy ever make me cum. But now he's getting lazy and I don't want to settle for the one sided sex I've had in the past. Needless to say, having great sex once and bad sex a whole bunch of times, makes you really picky. Which might be a bad thing. I could've been blindly happy with one sided sex if I had stuck with my first partner because I wouldn't have known any better

    • I think you are on to something with this. I also think women not only become picky with sex but less loving with one man as they see him as easily replaceable once other expectations are not fully met as it is easy to find a (temporary) mate for her. She does lose innocence and becomes more cold and ridged which is not alluring, warm of feminine which has the affect of keeping her from then getting a stable long term mate.

    • Lol actually my point was men don't really care about a women enjoying herself so she can either settle with bad sex or trying finding a guy that will get her off. A guy giving in sex, however, is difficult to find and often leads down roads of disappointment and resentment in women. Thus, women "want less sex"

    • And I am saying that it begins to affect her in other ways as well. Biologically, men have to get off first so that he impregnates her. If you want a guy to give you better sex it is best to help teach him as we do suck at it in general. Once we orgasm nature also releases chemicals to make us sleepy and tired so that we stay with the woman and it allows for bonding time which increases the chances of the newborn having two parents around. I get off, I get tired and sleep. All is good unless you help make them understand how to have better sex. Young men don’t get it. It’s easier to teach them a bit than find one that hits all the points for you in a mate.

    • Show All
  • I prefer formal sex over casual sex.

    Why is casual sex and high partner count more damaging to women as opposed to men? Also, what is the link between casual sex and marriage?
  • I'll start by saying that I don't engage in casual sex but that's my personal choice and those that do are free to make their own decisions for themselves. (And I've struggled with both anxiety and depression in my life.)

    I hate statistical data. "This percent of people SURVEYED" does not equate to every person in the world. Why? Who is doing the surveys for this data? More likely unhappy people because the happy ones are living the good life and not worried about reporting their sex to happiness ratio on a sex inventory. (Aside from on Gag, has anyone you know ACTUALLY completed a "sex survey" for clinical research?) Let's also consider the percentage of outliers in a set of data that's conducted on everyone in the world who is having sex.

    "I personally don't like the idea of my woman being with many men before me because... she will always be remembering back to her previous experiences even if she doesn't want to."
    If after sexual assault I can engage in a healthy sexual relationship (within a relationship) and not recall that, I think it's safe to say that NOT everyone is thinking about their previous experiences. And what of men who may be recalling their experiences from their sexual past because they've engaged in casual sex?

    "... my woman to be MY own and special in that way..." Do you not think women want this of their man as well? I certainly don't want to be "next in line" to have him but it's still a double standard that men have casual sex while women don't.

    I think casual sex can be detrimental to any person who wants a longterm relationship/marriage, not just women.

    • Actually i have been part of sex research and in college I've done my own studies and they were not on this exact thing but something similar that id say coincided with these results. And we know in class that sex positive people complete sex surveys and other people do not so we actually were allowed to compel a portion of the student body to answer to get results from our schools student body. We only studied that small group however the meta analysis of all studies related to ours plus some of these plus others all start to paint a single picture when they all coincide.

  • Im not trying to be a jerk but lets consider it like this , Women are Locks and Men are keys

    A key that opens many locks is a master key,

    A lock that is opened by many keys is a shitty lock

    • And novody want a lollipop which is sucked by everyone

    • I was meaning, thats the mentality of it for a lot of people

    • As if? That is surely a joke for most people?

    • Show All
  • I believe it is because of our natural instincts. Pregnancy is a huge risk for a woman (this is why we have periods, to shed off what might potentially not result in a healthy offspring). This is why women are also wired to have sex with a man who has her back and she can trust him and have an emotional attachment. Casual sex lacks that part that's why women feel lack of fulfillment if they have too many sexual partners. I firmly believe lack of fulfillment leads to depression. Happiness and fulfillment aren't the same time, by the way. We have birth control to prevent pregnancy, but we have hardly any control over our natural instincts.

    • Women are hypergamy by nature.

    • @kim45456 nope

    • Yes they are

    • Show All
  • damn this one really hit me home 😵

    • I can see why. 🤣

    • just to reply to the mytake, I feel like it's sort of right, it seems like it has no affect on guys compared to girls for some reason

    • @zaharaa Well, to be honest, it does have an effect on men, it’s just the effects are more pronounced for women. Also, some phenomenon exists on the women’s side that do not exist on the men’s and vice versa.

    • Show All
  • A guy being promiscuous is also viewed negatively by MOST women since it's assumed he won't be a loyal partner.

  • Because sex and non-monogamy are still denigrated as impure and vile by most of American society.

    As someone who's very happy in my own long-term non-monogamous relationship i have to say: if people would have been more supportive in my earlier relationships i might not have made so many mistakes.

    • I've said it already hut this is wrong. It's due to hypergamy. Men get jealous because in a world with casual sex totally a laize-fair market, the median number of all men alive would never get laid.

    • You clearly don't know a lot about women if you think that's true. There's all kinds of women out there, a lot of whom can't get laid. There's plenty of older women, plus sized women, disabled women, or just unconventionally attractive women who feel like they aren't good enough to even TRY getting a partner. a lot of women in those situations get taken advantage of by fetishists and that can turn them off to dating all-together. but most guys aren't talking about any of them when they say they aren't getting laid. Most guys who complain about sex as a 'laize-fair market' don't take into consideration the HUGE amount of girls out there who might be incredibly lonely but aren't quite attractive enough to be a viable option. If you think there's a large pool of men who can't get a date you're right. There's a lot of lonely men AND women out there. People are lonely in general but it's hard to trust people and Americans aren't typically very emotionally literate. We aren't taught how to appropriately handle emotional issues so we develop a lot of bad habits and coping mechanisms. We might lose self-awareness and become obnoxious or unpalatable, which DOESN'T help with dating. Both men AND women suffer because of this. Dating NEEDS to be an open market. There's literally no alternative that isn't fascistic. Dating isn't a fair game, but if you have the mental capability of forming coherent sentences then I'm 99.9% positive you'll get laid at some point in your life. Now, the ability to speak is only as good as the thoughts that come out of that speech. If you're an annoying asshole that's entirely on you to try and gain some awareness. TLDR: you can't regulate how people date each other so open yourself up to fat old women and stop being annoying.

    • I wasn't referring to myself but thanks for your lack of faith in me. 😒🤪 I think what I said applies to hookups and bar girls. Relationships are a completely different ball game.

    • Show All
  • Because Weman are emotionally involved.

  • imagine you grew up in poverty in an undeveloped country and you thought that having shoes would be life-changing.

    Meanwhile it is normal to wear shoes in a developed country and nobody thinks about it.

    That's your answer.

    You would simultaneously desperately want to be one of the people on the first world who has shoes and other things, but you would also hate them because they have the one thing you want and they have it easily and take it for-granted. This, you shoe-shame them for being ungrateful shoe havers.

    Same exact concept.

    • Starving kids in Ghana don't hate Americans. Most of them don't even know what America is. This is such a weird argument.

    • @Grande_Beefy_Swirl It's not really weird. Imagine something else if you want, such as the hatred of rich people. Take our current presidential election for example. Bernie Sanders wants to 'take on the billionaires.' 'You cannot have it all' is the slogan he uses. Same exact thing. You could call this 'rich shaming' or 'wealth shaming.' It's no different than the feeling of 'keeping up with the joneses.' Or feeling jealous or depressed at someone else's social media accounts if they're loves appear more happy or impressive than your own.

    • So men should stop being incesure then?

    • Show All
  • Because society still doesn’t like women who do it. And what society says inevitably affects our perceptions and feelings. That’s literally why. It’s not because men were made to fuck 100 women and women were made to only sleep with 1 dude. If anyone claims it’s more ok for men to sleep with lots of people then they’re either very ignorant or just plain sexist.

    • Men are meant to pass on their seed to as many women as possible (thus reloading on a daily) and women are meant to be impregnated by the highest quality man and have that man or another provide provisions and safety (thus having no more than one child in 9 months). Socially is another question.

    • @Naydyonov Oh shut up

    • You can deny biology if you wish. Or you accept the difference between sexes but advocate for men and women to remain in monogamous and healthy relationships.

    • Show All
  • What the heck are you talking about?

  • is it? have you tried fucking around a lot and then finding a long term relationship?

  • because men have to work for every opened hole on the belt... girls just have to say "yes"

    • Still nobody like man whores

    • nobody likes whores in general

  • I’ve only had one partner so far but I believe casual sex would be weird for me. I’d get weird about sharing myself in that way with just any man.

  • Show More (16)