It’s impossible to predict what will bother you most about a partner’s exes. The beauty of this exercise in testing your own self-esteem is that you often can’t know what’ll get you until the precise moment you discover one of them was a particularly talented artist, a manic pixie dream girl, or really good at handjobs.
Over at Slate, Seth Maxon sets out to discover what men find particularly challenging about their partners’ pasts. He looks, first, in the most obvious place—concentrating on how many exes people have, meaning how many people they’ve slept with. The post is inspired by Amy Schumer’s new movie Trainwreck, in which her boyfriend, played by Bill Hader, is apparently shocked to discover she’s slept with a lot of guys—though the actual number isn’t specified.
Maxon writes:
There are a lot of reasons that Schumer’s character might be starting to freak him out by that point in Trainwreck—her drinking, her selfishness, her aversion to nonsexual touch—but one is definitely the notion that her bedpost is too thoroughly notched.
Trainwreck is not a documentary, but still—is this a real thing? It’s only natural to wonder about a partner’s sexual history and how it might stack up to yours.
We’ve written before about whether or not you should tell your partners your “number”—I vote no, unless you want to, of course—but what’s interesting about Maxon’s piece is that he’s sure that most (straight) men don’t care about this anyway. And he turns out to be right, at least from his highly informal poll results. The men he asks care far more about everything but the number and were refreshingly not gross about it:
“If there’s a number like a hundred, I would want to be like, Well, you better go get tested for STDs,” the 26-year-old said. But later he said that if he really liked someone, he ultimately wouldn’t care. The 36-year-old said, “There are guys in these movies who say, ‘I thought she was a sweet girl, but then she’d been with 100 guys!’ That doesn’t mean she’s not a sweet girl.”
Another 32-year-old, who is engaged to his partner of three years, likewise isn’t fazed by 100. “If you’ve had 100 perfectly healthy and safe one-night stands, then go nuts,” he said. What number would be too high? “I don’t know if that number exists. I mean, I’m sure that it does. I just don’t know what it is.”
But that doesn’t mean nothing bothered them, and what did was finding out other aspects of those past relationships: details, locations where they’d slept together. Enough material to either compare themselves with the aid of their partner and come up short, or to simply compare themselves silently, and also come up short.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
