I think general numbers are important. There’s no great difference between saying, “I’ve slept with five people before you,” and “I’ve slept with six people before you.”
But I’d argue there’s a world of difference between “I’ve slept with five people before you,” and “I’ve slept with six hundred people before you.”
It’s hard for me to work up much sympathy for a girl who doesn’t require a condom because “the guy said he was clean.”
Learning the hard way about listening to a guy who says he’s clean when he has so many casual acquaintances that they know each other…blech.
Never listen to anyone who says that, and always use a condom, even if you’re on the pill. Someone gave me cervical warts and the doctor found I was 3rd level pre-cancerous. I had to go get a surgery done, and now have to go back to the doc for a pap every 6 months.
I’m lucky it wasn’t HIV!
If a guy doesn’t like condoms he’ll lie, no problem!
My then husband to be knew about my history of this ‘VD’ before we got intimate, and we used condoms until the doctor told me I wasn’t contagious. I’m lucky I don’t have herpes or anything else to worry aobut on top of that.
There are medications people can take now to help prevent herpes outbreaks, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something else to spread around!
otherwise I tell my SO whatever he wants to know about my history, and he doesn’t seem to want to know much. Makes him uncomfortable.
Even with the meds, you can still be spreading herpes between outbreaks. Icky-poo.
I’d want to know at least ballpark estimates as to number of previous partners, too. There’s kind of a difference between 1 and 5, not to mention between 5 and 15. If nothing else, it gives you a feel for their risk of disease exposure and how seriously they take sex. Frankly, a 27 year old man who’s had sex with 15 people probably has a far more casual attitude towards sex than I’d feel comfortable with.
As for the situations outlined in the OP, I don’t really think either of these guys has much of a leg to stand on. I think we all agree about the herpes thing, so I won’t rehash that. No, the first guy doesn’t owe her an exact accounting of everything he’s ever done, complete with mugshots and current addresses. He does, however, owe his girlfriend the courtesy and respect to be honest when she asks him a question. She asked him about his relationship with her friend, and he left out a big honkin’ chunk of the story. That would piss me off a lot more than the fact that he’d slept with a friend of mine before we met, but ymmv.
Barring recent risky activity, I see no obligation to give detailed sexual history. I personally don’t want to hear about someone’s past lovers, and I hate the numbers game. If the other person wants to know, and you’re comfortable telling, go ahead.
Since I think you should just assume everyone is potentially infected and use protection accordingly, knowing if someone has had ten lovers or a thousand doesn’t really make a difference. Once you’ve been dating for a while, if you trust each other not to cheat and want to have skin-to-skin sex, then both get tested for everything first.
I think numbers are a very, very bad idea. I don’t want to know how many people you’ve slept with and I’m 99.9% certain you really, really don’t want to know how many I’ve slept with.
Talking (or disclosing) about having unprotected sex with prior partners combined with no STD test should be pretty much standard behaviour imho.
Also, after the particularly disturbing month or so I’ve just had, disclosure regarding use of, or more pertinently not use of, the pill should be mandatory imho :rolleyes:
Generally I think if the woman has been tested & can prove it & she is clean, I don’t need to listen to her previous history, it would be pointless. Same for me.
I’ve decided that as far as numbers go, all I want to know is if my partner is a virgin or not.
I was involved with a guy around the end of last year that gave me a rather high number when I asked about how many women he’d been with. Seeing as how I’d only been with 2, it really made me uncomfortable.
It wasn’t so much that he had a casual view of sex, which he does, but his experience compared to my lack of… well, it just made me self conscious and wondering if I’d be anywhere near good enough.
We never got serious enough to have sex together, but still…
After him… I just don’t want to know.
Yes, you should discuss anything that may have health implications. You should discuss whether you’re looking for a short-term or long-term relationship. And I’ve even discussed attitudes towards sex (e.g. is it a casual thing for you or something you take very seriously).
However, I’m not interested in hearing a number and don’t want to give a number. I don’t think that number can accurately tell you anything about me.
These days, I’m extremely selective and, frankly, pretty prudish. My college days were another story! However, college was more than 14 years ago. I don’t believe a number that may be inflated by those college experiences accurately describes the current me or my attitudes towards sex.
Another consideration (beyond the health issue), in my opinion, is this: if my partner is still friendly with someone they’ve been to bed with, I wouldn’t mind knowing. I don’t need to know the name of every single partner he’s had, or details, but I wouldn’t mind knowing if he used to have a sexual relationship with someone he spends his free time with now. It’s a nice thing to know, even though it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
She was well within her rights to flip out.
Isn’t it true that herpes can often be spread by people who don’t show any symptoms?
If a guy doesn’t ask a new woman sexual partner to prove that she doesn’t have any STDs does that mean he didn’t ask any of his previous women partners to prove that too?
*We (Gina, this guy, and I) got into a discussion about this. He says this girl didn’t need to know about him and Gina, since it was once, a year ago. Gina said that her friend felt deceived by him and was offended that he would say he hardly knew a woman he “knew” Biblically. He responded that she was just being high-strung and melodramatic, that he didn’t have to give her a full list of every woman he’s ever slept with, as that is insensitive and unnecessary.
What do you think? How much of your sexual history do you reveal at the beginning of a relationship? When, if ever, is it appropriate to reveal all about your sexual history? Personally, the less I know (as long as it doesn’t pose a health risk), the better, but…it’s hard to trust people.
*
There’s truth in both positions here. I think in general when the subject comes up, (and it usually does) one needs to be honest. Though how much one volunteers beyond the minimum necessary to ensure they’re getting all the facts they need would need to depend on how uptight and/or insecure ones partner is.
My last extended date (I can’t really call her a girlfriend) was terribly insecure about my even mentioning my previous girlfriend in passing once in a while. So obviously when discussing this issue I’m not going to tell her “yes, we fucked like rabbits and I made sure she got off three of four times every time she slept over, which was about twice a week.”
I shouldn’t be too hard on her I guess, since I have my moments like that too. Usually I find I’m usually happier not knowing things except in a general way. “X number of guys before you, one for a couple of years, the others for a couple of months” is about all I want to hear, really. If I want to know more, I’ll ask - but I generally don’t. It’s enough for me that things are good in the here and now and everyone’s happy. The past is pretty much irrelevant so long as the present is all good.
Now, I do tend to assume that anyone I like enough to date is a responsible adult and if they have any kind of STD they’re going to tell me. I would of course certanly tell them LONG before I slept with them if I had anything. Same goes for any kind of sexual abuse or anything - if they feel it might mess with the relationship, then they should probably tell me about it so we can be aware of it and make sure things work out okay.
Kevin Smith had a nice little line of dialog at the end of Chasing Amy about this subject. Silent Bob is explaining how he lost Amy…
*So there’s me an Amy, and we’re all inseparable, right? Just big time in love. And then about four months in, I ask about the ex-boyfriend. Dumb move, I know, but you know how it is - you don’t really want to know, but you just have to. Stupid guy bullshit. Anyway she starts telling me all about him - how they dated for years, lived together, her mother likes me better, blah, blah, blah - and I’m okay. But then she tells me that a couple times, he brought other people to bed with them - menage a tois, I believe it’s called. Now this just blows my mind. I mean, I’m not used to that sort of thing, right? I was raised Catholic.
So I get weirded out, and just start blasting her, right? This is the
only way I can deal with it - by calling her a slut, and telling her that she was used - I mean, I’m out for blood I want to hurt her - because I don’t know how to deal with what I’m feeling. And I’m like “What the fuck is wrong with you?” and she’s telling me that it was that time, in that place, and she didn’t do anything wrong, so she’s not gonna apologize. So I tell her it’s over, and I walk.
It was a mistake. I wasn’t disgusted with her, I was afraid. At that moment, I felt small - like I’d lacked experience, like I’d never be on her level or never be enough for her or something. And what I didn’t get was that she didn’t care. She wasn’t looking for that guy anymore. She was looking for me, Bob. But by the time I realized this, it was too late, you know. She’d moved on, and all I had to show for it was some foolish pride, which then gave way to regret. She was the girl, I know that now. But I pushed her away…
*
It’s a difficult question. In general I would say that it requires a lot of self-knowledge to deal with the issue. Or to put it more bluntly, “Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers too.” Unfortunately too often people are like Silent Bob: “you don’t want to know, you just have to…”
Which brings me to another fun scenario (yes, I have messed up friends): another friend of mine, Pam, had a month-long affair with this guy. They didn’t use condoms b/c she’s on the Pill, and he told her he was “clean.” She found out recently that he, in fact, had unprotected sex with a girl who has genital herpes (the girl with the herpes told her). Pam flipped, talked to this guy, who said, “It was 6 months ago, and I haven’t had any sign of herpes, so I figured you didn’t need to know about it.”
Was Pam right to flip out? Or was she overreacting? Apparently the chick with herpes told the guy that “she wasn’t having an outbreak at that time,” which, I don’t know, man… you can have herpes on your cervix and not feel it until you’re well into an outbreak (I asked the health teacher at my school).
*
I think the guy is clearly in the wrong here. I admit I’m paranoid, but if it were me I would not sleep with someone with herpes, and anyone with exposure had better tell me. Herpes is not curable - once you’ve got it you’re infected for life. It won’t kill you like AIDS, but it’s not going to go away with a penicillin injection like syphillis or gonorrhea either.
After every time I end a relationship where I sleep with someone, I wait three months, and then I hit the clinic and get a full-spectrum test. It can be a bit embarassing, but it’s worth it to me. I want to be absolutely sure I’m clean. “Well it has been 6 months and no symptoms had appeared” is all well and good, but wouldn’t you rather have a test sheet in hand and know for sure? I would. Particularly because so few people seem to ever get tested in this fashion, so it’s a pretty good be that there are people out there with stuff they don’t know about. We’re in the middle of an epidemic of the Human Pampiloma Virus (HPV, not to be confused with HIV) and nobody knows about it!
I’m also rather careful about protection. I mean, STDs quite aside, I’m nowhere near ready to be daddy yet, and not all women want to take the pill. (Which is cool with me - birth control is as much my responsibility as it is hers.)
These things seem very common-sense to me, but then I did grow up in a pretty liberal place and time, with pretty liberal parents who didn’t shy away from issues like this.
So I’m torn now between the Reveal All position, which allows your partner to make a more informed decision about protection, skankiness of said partner, etc., and the Need to Know Only position, which avoids a lot of hideous, unnecessary and jealousy-inducing convos. Opinions welcome.
*
Tell them what you judge they really need to know, and leave it at that. If they want to know more, assume they’re a reasonable person and will ask about it. If they ask too much and get weirded out, that’s their problem and they’re going to have to deal with it.
Don’t be like Pam’s fling who knew that he maybe had something but kept sleeping with people and didn’t go and get tested. That’s called being stupid.
My $.02.
-Ben
Bah, I should have used preview.
If a mod can change the first occurance of the i tag, right after “it’s hard to trust people”, to be a closing tag (/i) instead of an opening one (i), I’d appreciate it.
-Ben
Eve
*The $64,000 question is, when do you tell? When does a “casual boyfriend” become an SO? Third date? First night together? Moving in together? Third kid?
Tell too much too early and all there’ll be is a cloud of dust and a boyfriend-shaped hole in the door.*
I think that one’s easy. You tell them before you have sex. How long before is up to you. Could be 10 minutes, could be months. As long as everyone gets told what they need to know before sleeping together, it’s all good.
For me that time is probably right around the third date, since if things have been good up to that point, then I’m considering getting more serious. For other people, it may be sooner or later.
-Ben
I should have clarified, sorry. If a person has presented you with their “alls clear” papers and have been tested. Why do we need to know how many people they’ve slept with?
But couldn’t that be just as easily determined by asking them something like “what was your last long term relationship”? “How long were you with him/her”. “How many relationships have you had”?
So, what if your potential SO says something to the effect of “I don’t discuss my past history” or “I don’t play the numbers game”? And states that they prefer their privacy in this matter (With the proper health tests in place of course).
I think people use the “you know, with diseases today” as an excuse for making their partners spill about every past encounter, which they may or may not really want to know about. It’s like when Dear Abby tells a letter-writer to go ahead and tell her friend about some cheater because of the risk of disease. What ever happened to MYOB?
The point is, unless you’re a big whore (male or female) or unless you know you have a disease, you don’t really owe your current partner excessive explanations about your past.
Assuming that they’re male (which is about a 70% probability in my case), that doesn’t tell me anything about any gene donor incidents that might have happened. Even aside from that, any time two people share themselves that intimately, there are threads of memory and feeling that connect them for a long time afterwards. I really would prefer to know how deep, sticky, and potentially tangled a web I am weaving myself into with this person, and I feel s/he has the right to know the same about me.
What’s the difference between “how many relationships have you had” and “how many people have you had sex with”? Aren’t those both “numbers games”? Besides, I would hope that with anyone I would be getting involved enough with to have sex, the numbers would be identical or nearly so. If they’re not, I certainly need to know that - and know why. If someone had a large number of casual encounters in college due to depression and low self-esteem, that’s something I need to know - there are potential wounds on their psyche in the area of sex I’ll need to watch out for. If they had a large number of sexual encounters in their life due to poor self-control under the influence of alcohol, that’s also something I need to know - this person will never be someone I can feel safe having no-barriers sex with.
I can’t imagine someone being squeamish about who they’ve shared fluids with but not about who they’ve shared their heart with! Surely the second is far more private?
Well, I definitely need to know that, too - because that means I’m not sharing sex with them, at least not yet. If I’m not enough a part of their lives for them to share their past with, or for them to open up private parts of their lives to, then I don’t know them well enough to have sex. We’re clearly not intimate enough to be physically intimate.
YMMV, of course, but their past relationships and ships-passing-in-the-night are part of who they are. If they don’t want to share that part of themselves with me, then I have no business sharing something more private and more personal than that, like sex.
Numbers are bad.
Expect health status certs, but not actual digits.
As to when one reveals to a new SO, whenever it comes up naturally in conversation. With the above stated understanding that it’ll be about health issues and not a color commentary about the past.
You CAN have a relationship without having been sexually intimate with that person. The previous explanation to why someone needed to know “the numbers” was that if they knew how many sexual partners the person had had, that they could then know THEM better.
Those types of psychological problems can crop up in people who DON’T have large numbers of sexual partners too. And can be discussed and/or discovered without their being an accounting of partners. I just don’t see where having to know the numbers, in reality, tells you anything more about your potential love than simply in getting to know them as a person.
Sorry, I didn’t make that clear. That’s not what I meant. I was going for what I explained just above, that I disagree that what you need to know about a person needs to be provided to you via their past “numbers”.
I would refuse on the grounds that I don’t want someone judging me for my numbers, not even in a joking way “GOSH that’s a LOT”!! or “sheesh, only that many? you must be really inexperienced”. I’d rather they get to know me on my OWN merit, not by forming judgments based on some number.
No numbers. No names. No details except for relevant health info. Even if you are about to marry. Don’t lie, but you have every right to keep that information private.
The less said the better. Besides, there is something about a little mystery that is appealling…