It sounds like we agree then. As I’ve already said: the only winning move is not to play.

Yes, holding out for sex until you’ve secured commitment clearly works best if both partners never had sex.

However, the basic problem remains that there is and always will be a certain amount of fundamental asymmetry between sexes: it’s (relatively) easy to check if a woman has never had sex, but its nearly impossible do to so for a man. Even if she remains a virgin until marriage, a woman will have to take a man’s word that he is, or accept that there is a possibility that she is not his first conquest even if he is hers.

On the other hand, if both of them DO have other sexual partners beforehand, it cuts the other way around, because now the man has to take the woman by her word about the number of sexual partners she’s had, and everybody knows that it’s very likely to be more than him and equally impossible to conclusively prove, which makes lying about it not only easy but desirable, since there’s a good chance that the truth may drive him off.

So for women, the dilemma is between either waiting until marriage and accepting that he might be lying (in which case he may end up cheating on her), or not waiting until then and dealing with the fact that he’ll be constantly suspicious about her past and/or potentially accuse her of cheating.

Meanwhile for men, it’s between choosing a woman with no past who might be more faithful but also suspicious of him, and one whom he’ll have to trust about having learned her lessons from her past, but while he might be suspicious of from time to time.

So for men, it’s generally advantageous to look for the lowest number of sexual partners in a woman, while for a woman, it actually makes some sense to preload the cheating, so to say, in order to understand her power and acquiesce her latent insecurities about cheating, but the price she’ll pay is having a far more difficult time finding a partner that’ll actually want to stay.