From Family Studies.

Excerpt:

New research on the marital prospects of single mothers published in the August issue of the journal Demography has good and bad news… The good news is that biological father marriages are more enduring than stepfather marriages. In other words, saying yes to her daughter’s father means that she is more likely to stay married than if she had said yes to someone else. The bad news is that even though she opted for the better bet, the odds are still stacked against her marriage lasting.

[…]“Among marriages that involved a black mother and a biological father,” she found, “20% had dissolved within five years, and 47% had dissolved within 10 years.”

Age and education of the mother did not do much to improve those odds.

More:

[…][V]ery few personal characteristics affected the divorce risk of women of any race in the study. Their husbands’ characteristics didn’t matter, either. Even though factors like age and education have been shown to matter quite a bit for ten-year divorce rates overall, they didn’t make a difference among the women that Gibson-Davis studied: those who gave birth outside of marriage.

[…]By showing that a single mother is most likely to marry her child’s biological father shortly after giving birth, and that such a marriage is less likely to end in divorce than marriage to another man, Gibson-Davis has provided some limited, encouraging evidence to those championing marriage promotion programs. Nevertheless, she correctly stresses that much work remains for those seeking to encourage single mothers to marry because enduring unions are relatively rare, even among biological parents. I have one window showing me why that is true. There are many others. The bottom line is that post-birth marriages are likely to be more difficult and less stable than others, and strengthening them is indeed an uphill battle.

If you’re like me, and you’re not having sex until you get married, now you know why. The old ways are best. Besides, when you take sex off the table, how the heck do you get a woman to like you? How does a woman get a man to like her? Oh, I have an idea. Men and women could think about how to show love for each other and how to help each other. Imagine that. That’s the way people used to have relationships. You actually had to put the work in then, and talk about things, instead of just jumping into bed after getting drunk with someone “hawt” that you just met at a party.