How Many Sexual Partners Should We Have Before Marriage?

Anyone who grew up in a Roman Catholic family knows that pre-marital sex is a no-go in the cultural ethos. Having one sexual partner is the prescription of most major religions and a major part of the cultural narrative around sex.

And yet, these boundaries around sexuality don’t tend to hold for the majority of us. The median number of sexual partners is 6.3 for men and 4.3 for women in the U.S. (ages 25-49).

In a country where the average age of first marriage is 28-29, remaining a virgin until marriage appears a tall order.

Even so, people do it. A current example of this in popular media is Nicola and Meisha’s relationship on 90-Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days. The 90-Day series and its spin-offs reach millions of viewers weekly.

Nicola is a 46-year-old virgin from Israel who recently got engaged to his long-time girlfriend, Meisha, a 43-year-old mom of two from Minnesota.

The couple have openly talked about Nicola’s inexperience with sensuality and sexual intimacy. Their relationship, and any relationship where one partner is more experienced, could benefit from that experience.

Here are three benefits to having multiple sexual partners before making a lifelong commitment like marriage

• The diversity of experiences will help you understand your own sexual love map and be able to share what you like with a committed partner.
• Encountering different partners with different libidos will help you clarify your own level of desire and preferred frequency. Desire discrepancies are the norm and being able to navigate those differences is an important skill.
• Having novel sexual experiences will clarify what brings you the most amount of pleasure, experiences you can then foster with a future spouse.

All of these experiences would also shape one’s view of compatibility and likely help daters interested in marriage make better decisions.

So should we have sex with at least two people in our lifetime? Four?

Informal survey data suggests opinions vary about the ideal number of lifetime sexual partners, with preferences ranging from two to seven.

Ostensibly, having just one sexual partner who was open to learning new things, communicative, and curious could lead to a sexually satisfying long-term relationship or marriage.

An analysis by sociologist Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger of General Social Survey data from 1989-2016 appears to affirm this possibility. He found that those who had just one sexual partner also reported being happiest in their marriages.

Despite this, there is clear evidence that most long-term sexual relationships wane in satisfaction regardless of how many partners came beforehand (Schmiedeberg, 2016).

If you’re dating with the intention of meeting a long-term partner, pay attention to their openness to novelty and growing deeper in sexual attunement.

Beyond initial sexual compatibility, sustaining a healthy sex life is about updating each other’s sexual love maps often. It’s about investing time and energy into romance and all forms of intimacy. It’s about experimenting with different ways of experiencing pleasure.

How many sexual partners should you have before getting married? In the end, there’s no magic number. Intentionally dating individuals we’re sexually compatible with and who show openness and effort is the better bet.