As much as most women absolutely hate it, the evidence that there is a statistical correlation between past and future behavior is remorseless. The Audacious Epigone goes through the GSS and uncovers the following data related to the number of men with whom a woman reports she has had sex and the percentage of married women who admit that they have been unfaithful:
00.0% 1 (by definition)
10.4% 2
14.9% 3
17.7% 4
21.6% 5
26.0% 6-10
36.7% 11-20
46.8% 21+
It’s interesting to see that most married women still do not report cheating regardless of their personal history; one might have imagined the 21+ crowd to surpass 50%. Some of the other interesting data derived from the GSS data is that male atheists are the most likely to be unfaithful (30.2%) while women who are vaguely spiritual and believe in Some Higher Power are the worst risk (25%). And only 2.6% of Slim women report cheating while married versus 15.7% of Stocky ones.
On a related note is what young women tend to deprioritize in terms of what they want in a man. And unsurprisingly, it isn’t what they will later prioritize in a marriage.
“A second measure is the number of sex partners that “sub-optimal men” have had. I define that group as men who are 22 years old, dropped out of high school and don’t have a full-time job — men who don’t have a lot going for them. We compare the number of partners they’ve had with the number of partners of a male college graduate who is employed full-time. Theoretically, if sex is valuable to her then she’s not going to trade it away to just some crummy man, and when we look at the data, we find that those sub-optimal men report a lot more partners than men who actually have a lot going for them.”
As with most things, it all comes down to economics in the end.