There might be a new argument to try when convincing your teen to wait to have sex. According to the a study conducted by the University of Iowa, women who lost their virginity in their young teens are more likely to divorce.
The study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, surveyed the responses of 3,793 women and found that 31 percent who lost their virginity as teens divorced within five years, and 47 percent divorced within 10 years. On the flip side, the divorce rate for women who had waited to have sex was only 15 percent at the five year mark, and 27 percent by the time 10 years rolled around.
But the study also found that a first sexual experience before the age of 16 — wanted or not — was still strongly associated with divorce.
There was a very interesting letter to the editor in the March/April 2011 Duke University Alumni Magazine which gives added perspective to both the study cited above and the recent decision by Catholic University to abandon co-ed dorms and return to single-gender housing.
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When I arrived at Duke in 1936, I was baffled by the many lectures we received against “proning,†or lying together clothed under the bushes. The campus police used their flashlights to search out couples and send them back to their dorms. It took me a while to learn what they were talking about.
We also were protected from mistakes by a house mother and a hall proctor. If for some reason a man (father, brother, or friend) was allowed off the first floor, the loud speaker would announce, “Man on second.†We had to be inside our dorms by a certain hour, I think ten o’clock, on Saturday night. If someone did not make it in, the house mother would have the campus police look for her. We had two campuses then, the Woman’s College and Trinity College for men. We took the bus to get back and forth…
But life was exciting then. A man asked me to a dance, and I wondered, “Who will I meet there?†At the dance, I danced with my date and, pretty soon, other men “cut in.†They would tap my partner on the shoulder, and I would dance away with the new man. My date would then tap some other man on the shoulder and dance away with his partner. One always went home with the man who brought you.
Men often went to the dances “stag.†It gave them a chance to observe the girls, cut in, and make dates. I would meet many new people and make a few dates with one or two. None of my friends “slept†with their dates.
The chase is the exciting part of being young. Men innately want the chase, and girls enjoy being just out of reach. We had a lot more fun then. When I watch my children and grandchildren now dating one person for a long time, then having a lonesome lull, and then finding another to date, I weep over their loss of the excitement that we had.
When people marry as virgins, they can have a long married life (I was married for sixty-two years) and neither of you worries about being compared with someone else as a lover. They are happy with the one person they fell in love with. The pill today makes sleeping with many people less of a worry about getting pregnant but the joy of the first night of marriage is gone. And the many more nights for all the years, too.
Too bad.
Elizabeth Allin Clarke, ’39
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Could it be that the “old ways” are better after all?
Barbara Gauthier