I’d laugh. After all, after sampling all the goods, guess who he picked?
Well, certainly both sexes can be jealous, insecure and uptight. Does that mean we should encourage it?
She made a big mistake. She lied. And it frustrates the hell out of me when I hear/read people recommending that people lie about their prior sexual lives. (Excuse me: “refrain from telling the whole truth”.) Oh yeah, THAT’S a healthy relationship. Bah.
And there’s a difference between having a healthy, mature attitude about the fact that the person you love has a past and actively seeking out people with such a past.
We all do things in our youth that we might not have if given the chance to do over. When I fell in love with my hunny, it wasn’t for his past, it was for his NOW, for who he is, for what his past has made him. I don’t care if he screwed his way across America and a few cocker spaniels besides, as long as he is faithful to me now that’s all that matters.
I would agree that a persons past (barring a history of manipulation and immorality that would fortell future actions) is unimportant. But that does not mean that I want to know all about it. In fact, I really don’t want to know any of it. Please don’t tell me about the time you (insert something unsavory here.)
Nor do I care to bare my past in its gruesome entirety to my spouse. Some things are just better left unsaid. If you are surrounded by others who were part of these events, you may find that you have no choice but to hear about them, embellished and enriched.
You are getting dangerously close to a kind of moral relativism here. Your argument could easily be used to support open marriage. After all, if I am totally secure. As long as my wife comes home to me, doesn’t that mean that she is choosing me over them? In fact, it should boost my ego if my wife continues to sleep with other men.
THe truth is we are emotional creatures and sex is charged with emotional power. We can’t treat it like a bike ride in the park.
I do not necesarily want a virginal wife. But you have to understand something about guys: they will use the fact that they slept with your wife against you. “Oh, yeah, I fucked her.” they will say. This would hurt me if I had to face it. I believe that it would hurt most guys…and most women.
Sure, we should all be self actualized beings who can rise above our emotions, who can laugh heartily in the face of the harshest criticism and walk away completely unaffected. We should never worry about our weight, body image or self worth.
But until we all reach this point, wouldn’t it be wise to recognize some of our weaknesses and lead a life that respects them?
Stoidela said “Well, certainly both sexes can be jealous, insecure and uptight. Does that mean we should encourage it?”
No, but we should understand that not everyone is 100% free from these things. YOu called me a neanderthal and suggested that I was sexist because of my post. My point was that it goes both ways. In College a lot of women who wanted a serious relationship wouldn’t date me because of my rrputation. My point was not sexist.
Also said" And there’s a difference between having a healthy, mature attitude about the fact that the person you love has a past and actively seeking out people with such a past."
Seeking them out would be VERY unhealthy and twisted. I am not talking about seeking them out. I am talking about having them thrust on you.
Well, I guess I’m a little bit Neanderthal, too. My SO is not a virgin, in fact she was married. This doesn’t bother me. I’ve never asked her about other partners, but she probably had some. That’s okay. But if she had, say, 200 or something like that, I admit it would give me pause. And if I had to live in a small town where the ex-partners amounted to a significant proportion of the population, even if they were all discreet about it, I have to admit it would still bug me. That’s how I feel.
So far people have said"yeah, it would bother me", but no one has explained WHY. What is the underlying assumption/feeling/logic that says “my beloved having many previous partners will bother me…BECAUSE…”??
Never had a one nighter, but I did have a six-month-stand. We had nothing in common, nothing to talk about, so we just humped like rabbits. I moved away, we never spoke to each other again. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Ever heard the quote: “The unexamined life is not worth living”
You just bop through life without ever looking at why you feel the things you do, make the choices you make? More power to you, I guess, but that wouldn’t be much of a life to me. How do you grow?
Thanks, Stoidela, that’s very understanding of you.
But it can actually make one’s life fuller when they accept that they don’t have to always feel the way some philosophy says they SHOULD feel. It’s those differences people spend their time analyzing, trying to reason their way to a change of heart. Sometimes it can work, I guess, though I haven’t seen it happen very often. More often it just makes people lie to themselves about who they are and what they are feeling. I’m not saying you’re such a one, but I don’t feel like I have to defend MY every emotional sensation with a syllogism, either.
That said, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think LESS of any woman (or man) for having lots of partners; I’ve had a few myself. I wouldn’t rule out a relationship with them either (uh, the women I mean). But if I had to live in a place where I knew that a “large” proportion of the men of appropriate age (large depending on what the absolute numbers are - see brackets below) had had sex with the lady, it would make me uncomfortable.
[Take a town of 32,000. That’s 16,000 men. Assume the average age is eighty and that the population is distributed equally over all age groups. Within the ten year bracket around a woman’s age are 16,000/8 = 2,000 men. Ten percent of this is 200 partners in the social group I’d be interacting with in that town if I’m around the same age as the woman. Yes I’d be uncomfortable.
In NY, with 8,000,000 people, same assumptions, the ten year bracket has a million people in it. Having partners amounting to even 0.1% of this is an unlikely 1,000 partners. I would not have to deal with a lot of ex-partners no matter what the lady’s prior habits were, if we were in NY, unless those habits were so extreme as to indicate psychological problems anyway. Such a history would not make me as uncomfortable there.]
Stoidela, I have been giving your question some thought. There are a few ways to answer it.
we want our relationship with our partner to have a special and unique quality. We do not want a partner who says that they loved someone else more than us or had better moments. Or that they did all of the same things or felt the same way. That would just make us one of the many.
There is some competition. Your Sig Other slept with 1000 people. Had all kinds of wild times. Some probably were better than what you can provide. nobody likes to be the 2nd best. Whether this is true, the doubt can be there, especially when you know she/he slept with that specific person
Jealousy. Jealousy is healthy in the right dose. Do not tell me that we should eliminate all jealousy from our lives. If that were the case then we would not bother too much with monagamy because we just wouldn’t care. That is not to say that we should be very jealous people. It is just that it is healthy in the right measure.
Because we are societal and it does matter what others think of us to some degree. I know, Ghandi, Jesus and Buddha didn’t. WE should strive not to care. But people whispering and pointing will eventually get to you.
THis is the best answer. Because we are not machines. Why does a rainy day sometimes make us depressed. Why do I get emotional over the first snow of the year. Why do I bother to decorate my house. I mean, I really only need shelter and food. WHy would colors and paintings effect me? Why does a loud screechy voice bother me? Why am I attracted to boobs? I don’t know. I could examine why running into every person my sig other ever fucked for the rest of my life and I would probably never get the exact answer.
Once again, if you want to sleep with everyone in town, by all means, go ahead. But don’t blame ME because it borthers me. You are promiscuous and now I am the neanderthal because I don’t like it?
you should all rent ‘clerks’ very funny, and it touches nicely on the topic.
I think the point of a one nighter is to be discreet…male or female, dont boink everyone in your social circle, or it will make later serious relationships more complicated.
I know from experience.If you or your sig other has ‘done’ alot of the people you run into, you tend to wonder about …well, how good the sex was.y’know?
I have had a somewhat unconventional, somewhat conventional experience with this. I had my first time (an expression I prefer to “lost my virginity”, since i regard it as a gain) with my best friend and it was fabulous. I’ve had several one-, two-, and three-night stands, with both friends and strangers. However, I’d still have to say that the best sex I’ve had was with my best friend (whom I regard as pretty much as close as you get to a lover without being one, although we haven’t had sex since April of 1998), and the three boyfriends I’ve had who I’ve actually loved have been great in bed (a coincidence).
But, I do not denigrate the goodness of one-night stands, as long as they are safe. One guy I had three or four times, who was abut ten years older than me, was nonetheless a fabulous lover.
I dunno about the moving. I don’t really have a problem knowing that my ex knows the guy I had my first time with, or some permutation thereof. I’ve never been anything but frank when talking about my sexual history with my partners. We all prefer it that way.
This topic is so interesting to me. My husband and I have been together since our freshman year of college (15 years ago). We met as virgins, and have never been with anyone since. We weren’t virgins for any particular reason, we’re not terribly religous people. It’s just that we’d never really met anyone we’d wanted to have sex with until then!
So, the issue of previous sex partners has never come up. But about 5 years ago, I found out that he had a “fling” with a girl at the beginning of freshman year. No sex was involved, just a lot of “making out”. I had no idea of this. He’d always told me he’d “never done anything” with this girl. (Almost all the other guys on our floor had.) I took “never done anything” to mean never done anything but he seemed to mean anything involving genitals.
I was stunned.
Why was I stunned? It was 10 years ago! He hadn’t fucked her! What was my problem? I was stunned at the story and stunned by my reaction. My husband was stunned, too. In some part of my brain, it felt as though he had cheated on my. (God, this sounds so prudish. I’m really not a prude. I just happen to have been with the same guy since I was 17 and haven’t wanted to cheat on him.)
I guess the problem I have with “previous lovers” is that it somehow seems to violate the “sanctity” of relations I have with my SO. Sex to me is something really special. Sacred, actually. And to think of my SO’s heart having been that open with someone who wasn’t me makes it feel like what’s happening between us isn’t as special as I thought it was.
Does that make any sense? Ugh. I’m wishing I hadn’t “shared” so much now.
That said, I truly don’t have a problem with Stoidela’s attitude. I think she shows a REMARKABLE amount of self-assurance and I wish I could be that secure inside my head.
Besides, she’s got the coolest web site in the world. (I was just plugging it to some friends at dinner the other night, Stoidela.)
A lot of posters are talking about possible social situations with a partner’s previous “lovers”; I have a different spin–previous non-lovers. I remember being at a wedding reception arguing politics with the guy who had married the local town party girl. He was not from the area and apparently had no idea his wife used to go out about every night looking to get laid. She usually succeeded. One night, being too drunk to drive, I crashed in the guest room after a party at her house. She climbed into bed with me later wearing only a T-shirt. Guy+drunk=horny, but I couldn’t bring myself to stick my dick where ~200+ guys had been. No matter how talented guys had told me she was. I told her I was still carrying a torch for the girl I had just broken up with (not true–but,how do you reject an offer like that without hurting her feelings?). I remember a delicious sense of smugness as this guy argued with me even though he had valid points. It was like I had license to disregard him; arrogant, I know, but that’s the way it felt. I looked around and saw about a half a dozen guys that had had his wife and I had shot her down. He had no idea why he didn’t rate highly on anyone’s scale. We had all wondered who would marry her (this girl had been known to blow a train of guys in the bathroom back during high school parties–imagine the long line for the guy’s bathroom). I think if you’re with someone you love, it shouldn’t matter; but I also think, for better or worse, your sexual past or you partner’s reflects on how people judge you.
As for the old post asking why guys go to prostitutes, my brother makes the argument that the men aren’t paying for sex (they are), they’re paying for the lack of any attachments/strings that are usually involved with sex. Basically, a guy wants to bust a nut, but not have to go through the effort it takes to have a real partner, one night stand or wife. I think there’s something to this argument.
“Guys, on the other hand, are sluts, and are happy to BE sluts”
Am I the only one that finds such a gross stereotype to be offensive? I find the fact that you, without even meeting me, think that you know what sort of person I am and what sort of relationship I’m looking for to be rather presumptuous. And just what “other hand” are you referring to? Your post hardly showed women to be paragons of chastity.
“No arguing this one, boys: the proof is in the fact that pretty much the only market for male prositutes is with other males.“
If you think that constitutes any sort of “proof”, then I hope you never end up on a jury. Yes, men, in general, will do more for sex than women, and are willing to accept less of an emotional connection, but that just shows that they prefer casual sex to abstinence, not that they prefer casual sex to noncasual sex. And all of this is refers to men in general, not all men. There’s a word for assuming that everyone in a particular group is the same. It’s “prejudice”.
-Ryan
" ‘Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter.’ " -Kurt Vonnegut, * Breakfast of Champions *
I think you’re assuming everyone lives in some backwater 3 horse town. I grew up in a city of over a million people, and even though I lived in the same city, same part of the city even, for 7 years after graduating from high school, I think I ran into someone I knew maybe twice. 25 years in the same city, and I almost NEVER bumped into people I knew. I think you’re being a bit ridiculous.
Hehe…there have been literally hundreds of times when my husband has been in a bar full of men and known for a fact that ALL of them knew what my nipples looked like. Of course, it was a topless bar, and I worked there…
I don’t understand that attitude. I know it is common, but I just don’t understand it. I want to know as much as possible about my husband. I want to know what he did when he was a kid, when he was a teenager, during his wild years, all of it. It is all who he is and I’m not afraid of it, threatened by it, or whatever. Likewise I would hope that he is interested in my past. We both talk at length about old relationships of ours… it is the same as talking about anything else… I don’t see any point in making a big deal out of it. shrug