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“We asked ourselves, what is helping determine whether people are married or not?” said Michael Malcolm, a professor at the University of West Chester, Pa., and one of the study’s authors. “One of those things, we thought, could be the use of pornography.”

To test the hypothesis, Malcolm adjusted for a number of variables, including age, income, education, religiosity and employment, all of which have been shown to correlate with marriage. He also adjusted for the possibility marriage has an impact on pornography use, and never the other way around.

He then measured the correlation between pornography use and marriage rates among the more than 1,500 participants studied.

Broadly, higher Internet usage was associated with lower marriage rates. But pornography use in particular was more closely linked to those participants who were not married than any other form of Internet use, including regular use of financial websites, news websites, sports websites, and several others. The opposite, for comparison, was true for religious website use, which was positively correlated with marriage.

The natural reaction might be to dismiss the findings as confirmations of an obviousness: that men who are married tend to look at porn less frequently precisely because they are married. While that might very well be true, and likely helps explain some of the relationship, it doesn’t explain all of it.

The researchers, while careful to say that their findings fall short of being conclusive, insist that the relationship between the two also “likely runs in the direction that we assert.”