This. There are advantages to having your list of partners also be your marriage certificate.
About 4 hours on Tinder in London 
Okay, to the old marrieds out there - sometimes partners develop mismatched sets of drives along the way. So if you were wanting sex and there was no health or travel reason for it how long would you wait within the context of a marriage before a spouse’s declination was a marriage ender?
I’m not a woman.
Can anyone who is either prove or disprove a running hypothesis which I’m formulating that this might make him quite a prize?
If they die first, you’ve waited too land. If you’ve sex from before you’re dating then chances are you won’t wait very long
Between those extreme points then it depends on the culture and the people.
Typically for me by the third date, I guess.
My fiancée and I wanted until the sixth date. Frankly, we wanted to from Dates 3 to 5, but holding off just built up the tension.
I don’t think things would have turned out differently if we’d had sex on Date 4.
Conversely, I have a friend who has been happily married for ten years; they waited like six weeks to KISS, and months and months to have sex. Could have been six months, maybe more, I don’t know. I thought it was weird, and told him so, and he told me “no, not in this case. It’s right. Trust me.” The evidence would strongly suggest he was correct.
I suppose it depends on how good the rest of the marriage is. And how important sex is.
Recognizing that for most male individuals the importance of sex in the generic peaks at age 18 (?), declines slowly until age 60 (?) then declines more steeply. I don’t know enough to offer the corresponding curve for women. But clearly there is one.
When any individual’s *I want sex *curve gets far enough above their I enjoy this marriage curve minus the divorce costs this much curve they’ll go.
Some people bail early, while others wait out their inevitable decline in the I want sex factor.
After that outline I expect it’s all anecdote. I’ve read various sources indicating a hefty percentage of the married populace is/are in sexless cheatless marriages. I’ve read numbers like 20-25%. And again you’d expect to find this more in 50-somethings than in 20-somethings.
In Christian circles, many Christians won’t have sex until marriage.
So at the same time that many Dopers here in this thread have said that holding out until the 3rd or 4th date to have sex is already taking too long, there are many Christians who will hold out for years until sex. So it is interesting to note the two drastically opposite ends of the spectrum.
You are so right. I didn’t have sex until my wedding night. Let’s just say, it was worth waiting for. It doesn’t matter that I’m not married now. One thing I will say for my ex is that he was patient and understanding, and respected my choice.
From 75% on up of Americans identify as Christians. Only a small percent of these won’t have sex until marriage.
Many of those that “identify” only do it for lip service, so other people won’t look at them like they have lobsters crawling out of their ears.
Not that there aren’t actual pious Christians who slip at times, but just claiming your a Christian doesn’t mean you live or have faith as a Christian.
This whole ‘waiting months, even years’ for sex in a relationship is so utterly foreign to me, I simply do not understand it. IME, the first few months of dating someone is when the sex is the most exciting and fun. To intentionally abstain from sex during the “honeymoon” phase of a relationship seems, well, unfortunate. “Let’s wait until we are both comfortable shitting in the same room as one another before we do it”…seems unappealing to me. 
Don’t forget that you’re useless baggage, in return.
My first wife and I had sex on our first date. We had been friends for quite a while though.
Current wife and I waited till our 4th date.
If she doesn’t want to sleep with after 4 dates, I have to think she’s just not that in to me.
I realize I’m participating in a zombie thread but here’s my two cents.
I don’t feel there is any reasonable objective standard. It’s a compatibility issue. If two people are both comfortable going to orgies and then picking the best lovers to ask out on a date, then that works for them. If two other people want to wait until they’re married before engaging in any sexual activity, then that’s fine for them. As long as both people agree on the amount of sex that is reasonable, they’ll be okay regardless of what that amount is.
The problem is when two people don’t agree. If one person thinks a couple should have sex by the third date and the other person thinks a couple should be engaged before having sex, those two people are not going to have a good relationship. It’s not that one is right and one is wrong; it’s just that they hold incompatible views on an important issue.
It’s like if one person wants to have children and the other one doesn’t; these two people should not get married.
I wouldn’t put any limit to how long I was willing to wait as long as the rest of the relationship was still rewarding, but there is a certain point at which lack of sex probably indicates other problems in the relationship. Even if my wife discovered that she was now asexual, wouldn’t cooperative problem-solving in a healthy relationship mean that she agrees to meet my needs at least half way?
Returning to the original dating question: To me, sex is something I want to add to a relationship. My wife is the only person I’ve sex with, and we knew each other for more than a year before turning it romantic. We did have sex on the third “date,” I suppose, but there’s no way I would have wanted to do that without the shared history behind us.
If my wife died and I was ready to move on, it seems obvious that I’d want to get more involved in hobbies and social groups and see who I got along well with. I want to make sure we can communicate effectively, solve problems, trust each other - that kind of thing, which doesn’t come out of three dates.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I have a particularly low libido or anything. If I’m not getting any with another person at least a few times a week, I can take care of myself. I just don’t see why I would involve another person in that until we have a solid relationship.
As **TBG **said, many people call themselves ‘Christians,’ but don’t actually follow the faith.
Many people who abstain from sex in a relationship until marriage (to use that example) aren’t doing so from a pleasure standpoint (i.e., “It’ll be more fun after we’ve waited for months or years.”)
I suspect a lot of the people who wait for marriage don’t wait all THAT long to get married.
A man could say the woman is not much better. Always on her phone, cheating and thinking nothing of it. Flaking for no good reason.
You’d be surprised. A lot of “wait for marriage” Christians don’t get married until their 30s or 40s.