It would be more pronounced, I am sure, if broken down along ideological lines.
Republicans are more likely to be married, less likely to divorce, and are more likely to be happy in their marriage than Democrats, sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger have discovered.
Politics is merely reproductive strategies, producing an urge to mold the environment so it matches the strategy imbued in the mind. It has quirks at the individual level, like any personal characteristic, but as you zoom out, you see r/K. There is a reason those monogamists prefer free competition, own guns, and want to vote Republican. Likewise there is a reason those Democrats aren’t as likely to embrace permanent marriage.
The article features a liberal manboob later on spinning his hamster to argue their facts must be wrong, because he, like, just knows it must be.
Smith argued that the sexual permissiveness and non-traditional gender roles of liberals made marriages stronger.
“… If you wait until marriage to have sex, you’re taking an enormous risk. What if you’re not compatible? Or what if you regret not having shopped around?
Even as studies show increased numbers of sexual partners in females prior to marriage makes for a higher divorce rate.
“Feminism may be even more important for families…
“In other words, maybe liberal morality is simply better adapted for creating stable two-parent families in a post-industrialized world. Maybe conservative family values are hard but brittle, like diamond, while liberal family values are strong like titanium — able to bend without breaking,” he wrote.
You can’t even try to follow rabbit logic without experiencing brain pain. So by his logic, the women with the happiest, longest lasting marriages will be bitchy feminists who fell off the cock carousel when they hit the wall, and then immediately tied down the first manboob they saw, lest they keel over as a lonely spinster by choking to death on a cat-hairball. Sarah Palin, eat your heart out.
This type of delusion is culled rigorously by Darwin under every circumstance, except r-selection. It can only arise, exist, and even thrive if resources are so prolific that nobody will die due to deprivation. Once the bodies start dropping, only those with a fierce grasp of truth will survive.
Unfortunately for the manboob, Deprivation Cometh™
The guy argued that leftists make for good spouses? Heck, they don’t even make decent neighbors.
So a man (or a woman) plays the field for a number of years, bedding quite a swath of availables.
The time arrives to settle down with a rest-of-life mate, someone with whom to raise kids, go on family vacations, wipe noses when ill and promise mutual care for whomever begins wearing out first.
What ingredients are there for good partners? Trustworthiness. Kindness. Good sense of humor. Bring some skills to the table (cooking, handy with tools, etc.). Oh, and for a little spice, fun in bed.
What are the odds that the someone who satisfies the former attributes (which tend to assort together) is also anywhere near the top of the sex-skill list? Recall that this person has bedded lots of people and recalls quite well who was best at this or that.
Casual sex, even if it does not predispose a person to shallow emotional relationships (due to breaking the bond between physical and emotional intimacy, which I think it does), almost guarantees that instead of being happy with learning about sexual fun together, the sexually experienced will inevitably be thinking “wow, this isn’t half as much fun as that other person, even if that other person was an a-hole.” Or, “Wow, I recall 15 years ago that the (man, woman) I was bedding was HOT! My spouse is sagging more than a little, and it’s making me sad.”
Casual sex, especially recreational sex with multiple people, is a vice. In the short term it yields happiness (a shallow sort) but in the long run it can ruin a person’s odds of finding Happiness Path. This is quite predictable.