Promiscuity and Depression

American social conservatives are touting new studies that suggest a connection between promiscuity and depression, especially but not entirely in women. Ross Douthat:

there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

I think this has the causality backward. First, although these correlations are robust across several studies they are not all that large; the studies I have seen suggest a 10 or 20 percent increase in depression among very promiscuous people. In my experience, promiscuity correlates with depression because depressed people are desperately seeking things that might make them feel better. After all, smoking and heavy drinking also correlate strongly with depression. It is certainly possible that promiscuity, like heavy drinking, may come to contribute to its own causes, that is, people may sleep around because they are depressed and needy and then become more depressed because their love lives are a mess. But nothing in these studies proves that promiscuity is damaging to mentally healthy people.

I think luck might also play a big part. Having a good marriage shows up in every study as one of the biggest contributors to happiness, and maybe people who have had only a few partners in their lives got lucky early on, finding someone they could be happy with without decades of searching. And maybe not being able to find such a person is depressing and leads to years of dating and lots of sexual partners. But I would not use this to argue for settling on a less than ideal mate, because having a bad marriage is really bad for your happiness, and divorce makes people miserable.