Associations Between Premarital Factors and First-Married, Heterosexual Newlywed Couples’ Frequency of Sex and Sexual Satisfaction Trajectories

ABSTRACT

Sex is a defining feature of marriage with important implications for marital success. Nevertheless, frequency and quality of sex decline across the early years of marriage. Given many modern-day couples in the U.S. are delaying marriage and thus experiencing many traditional aspects of marriage before their nuptials, the current research explored the extent to which premarital factors such as courtship duration, cohabitation, and children are associated with trajectories of couples’ sexual relationships during the early years of marriage. Using a 4-year longitudinal study of newlywed couples, results demonstrated that couples with longer (versus shorter) courtships or who did (versus did not) cohabit engaged in less frequent sex at the start of marriage; interestingly, couples with longer (versus shorter) courtships or with (versus without) children prior to marriage experienced less steep declines in frequency of sex over time. Couples who did (versus did not) cohabit were less sexually satisfied initially and over time; couples with longer (versus shorter) courtships experienced less steep declines in sexual satisfaction over time. Notably, each of these associations emerged independent of related individual differences and marital quality. These findings highlight the notion that premarital factors can explain, at least in part, differences in newlywed couples’ sexual relationships.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Laura Acosta, Marisa Boccabella, Kaitlinh Cai, Claire Dawson, Julianna Fischer, Juliana French, Kelsey Jiang, Danielle Harrison, Kristyn Jones, Kaitlyn Kaiser, Haley Manley, Victoria McKay, Marisela Munoz, Justin Stafford, and Avery Trent for their assistance in data collection and data entry.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ When grand-mean-centering variables, the Intercept estimate represents those who score at the sample mean of those variables.

² An early exploratory analysis revealed that premarital factors were not significantly associated with quadratic changes in frequency of sex and thus we excluded these estimates from the level-2 Time² parameters in our final model.

³ An early exploratory analysis revealed that premarital factors were not significantly associated with quadratic changes in sexual satisfaction and thus we removed these estimates from the level-2 Time² parameters in our final model.

⁴ An identical pattern of results emerged when we excluded couples who completed only one follow-up assessment; results of this analysis are provided in the SOM.

⁵ An identical pattern of results emerged when we excluded individuals who completed only one follow-up assessment; results of this analysis are provided in the SOM.