(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

U. TEXAS-AUSTIN (US) — People who have their first sexual experience [with intercourse, specifically] later than average are likely to  have more satisfying romantic relationships as adults, research suggests.

A new study used data from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health to look at 1,659 same-sex sibling pairs who were followed from adolescence (around age 16) to young adulthood (around 29). Each sibling was classified as having an early (younger than 15), on-time (age 15-19), or late (older than 19) first experience with sexual intercourse.

Among the participants who were married or living with a partner, people with later sexual initiation were more likely to say that they were happy with the way they and their partners handled conflict, that their partners showed them love and affection, and that they enjoyed doing day-to-day things with their partners.

The association held up even after taking genetic and environmental factors into account and could not be explained by differences in adult educational attainment, income, or religiousness, or by adolescent differences in dating involvement, body mass index, or attractiveness.

“Most people experience their first intimate relationships when they are teenagers, but few studies have examined how these adolescent experiences are related to marital relationships in adulthood,” says Paige Harden, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the study published in the journal Psychological Science.

Although research has often focused on the consequences of early sexual activity, the “early” and “on-time” participants in the current study were largely indistinguishable, suggesting that early initiation is not a “risk” factor so much as late initiation is a “protective” factor in shaping romantic outcomes.

Read the rest here. (And in case anyone doesn’t know this about us already, we don’t have any agenda around waiting or not waiting, or about if people ever have this kind of sex at all.  We support the range of choices people make about consensual sex, and our aim is to just give people information and support to best make whatever those choices are.)

Read the original study (DOI: 10.1177/0956797612442550)