Premarital sex predicts a lower quality marriage

Every enlightened person knows you need to live like a married couple to know if a marriage is going to work. At least so says the liberal. Research has actually shown many times over that people who cohabit before marriage are more likely to subsequently get divorced. 

Now we the same kind of phenomenon with sexual intercourse. According to this study of 2,035 married people, waiting until after the wedding to have sex the first time is associated with greater subsequent communication, sexual quality, marital satisfaction, and perceived stability--see the above table for means. This was found after controlling for religiosity, race, income, education, and length of relationship.

It's funny how "scientific" liberals keep getting wrong and "superstitious" priests keep getting it right.

This study was conducted by BYU researchers. While the university has traditionally focused on undergraduate education (the average student has an impressive SAT), over the years I've noticed that it cranks out high-quality empirical research on family and religion. Good quantitative people, those Mormons.  

(H/T to Jason Malloy)

Don't postpone marriage beyond mid-20s

From a study of one of the country's leading family researchers (and colleagues):

The research reported here used measures of marital success based on both marital survival and marital quality to assess how well first marriages entered at relatively late ages fare in comparison with those entered younger. Analysis of data from five American data sets indicated that the later marriages fare very well in survival but rather poorly in quality. The greatest indicated likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at ages 22–25, net of the estimated effects of time since first marriage and several variables that might commonly affect age at marriage and marital outcomes. The negative relationship beyond the early to mid-twenties between age at marriage and marital success is likely to be at least partially spurious, and thus it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22–25. However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties.