I've been posting on MB for about 8 months now, and sometimes I really feel like I'm losing the battle here on the homefront. <p>I seem to have this need to know how far off normal I really am when it comes to number of sexual partners. <p>For those of you who haven't read my posts, I've been married for 15 years and my H recently found out that I was very promiscuous during my teen years (I was married by age 20). Between the ages of 14 and 20, I was with 30 guys and/or boys. Now that I'm older and wiser I truly do regret that I didn't have more respect for the act or for myself, but that's another story.<p>Of course I have my theories and reasons and all that surrounds my state of mind at the time, but what I really want to know is - what is normal? I read somewhere that for women 4 partners is average. Does that hold true here at MB, too?<p>And secondly, does your H or SO know all the details of your histories? Please repond honestly - I don't know it it'll help or not, but maybe if I can show him that I AM NOT normal, he can start to understand the circumstances behind it all.

Well, when I was 18 it was a very different world. Veneral disease could be treated with a shot of penicillin and the free love of the '60's had become pretty acceptable by my generation. <p>I honestly have no idea how many guys I've slept with in my life--I didn't count but it was more than the two I married. My husband doesn't ask and I don't volunteer. That's MY history and has nothing to do with him, just like his life before he met me. I don't think I can hold him accountable to me if he didn't know I was alive!

I have a history of sexual abuse, so take this as you will... and remember that I was a teenager in the 70's and like diddallas, a shot of penni would do the trick.<p>I had my first sexual encounter at age 18, and married my first H at age 21. Between the ages of 18 and 21, I slept with 19 guys. It was the age of disco and "lookin' for love in all the wrong places"...<p>I told my first H (who was a virgin when we met) everything he wanted to know. We were married for 20 years, and yes, I think my promiscuity had something to do with his straying (as well as his having been a virgin and wanting to know what it was like with other women). <p>I have told my second H (to whom I am married now) everything as well. More even. We've swapped 1st time stories and the best/worst stories... everything. In our cases, maybe because we're older now, it doesn't seem to matter at all.<p>I feel for you. I did hear my ex say MANY TIMES that he thought I'd cheat just because I'd "been around"...<p>[ March 07, 2002: Message edited by: new_beginning ]</p>

Dear Lost,
<p>I've been married the same amount of time as you and am 37. I'd been with about 15 guys from the time I became sexually active at 16 until my marriage at 22. My H knew all about it, and he has a much larger sexual history than I did. Is that normal? I don't know. Do I regret them? Not a whole lot because all of my experiences up to now have made me the person I am today, and if I'm happy with myself today, then I ought not reget my experiences. <p>What I do regret is my H's A's and how THAT has changed me. I hope to be able to say someday that I am happy with the person I am and no longer feel like I have lost a very important part of me, my faith in people, my belief in the (mostly) goodness of others, my place in this world. So far I am unable to believe this in my heart. So I don't regret those other experiences, but do regret D-day and its aftermath.<p>Is it possible that what bothers your H is that you have had more sexual experience than him? Would it bother him so much if he were the one with more experience in that arena? I guess I'm wondering about that 'ol double standard.

Oh, puh-leez.<p>Any guy who's possessive about his wife's past before he met her is a control freak who will show his controlling nature after marriage.<p>Any guy who's that insecure, well, I won't go any farther.<p>A lot depends on the nature of the number of partners, and what the overall pattern is. I went through promiscuous periods in my life, mostly when I wasn't in a relationship. When in a relationship, I was faithful.<p>Unless your religion dictates that you arrive in the marriage bed virgo intacta, and you're really serious about it, I don't think that sexual history necessarily says anything about someone's morals.<p>My premarital partners number in the double-digits. I've been married 15 years, together 18, and I've never once cheated.<p>How many of the women here who married as virgins can say that?<p>It's not what you do before marriage, it's what you do afterwards that's important.

Well one guy when I was 14. Next guy I married at 18.<p>Between 18 and 26, hhhmmmm, 7 guys. Then I got married again and that was it..so total of 9.<p>Does my H know? Not hardly. It's my past. He knows about the first 2 and the last one. That's all he needs to know. The rest is really not something we've ever talked about. He feels its in the past and that's where it should stay.
[img]images/icons/grin.gif" border="0[/img] <p>And the funny thing is HE was the virgin when we married and he is the one that had the A. [img]images/icons/wink.gif" border="0[/img]<p>[ March 09, 2002: Message edited by: margue ]</p>

I too was very sexually active between the ages of 16 to 18. I was 18 when I married the 1st time and ended in d three years later. He was a virgin when we first had sex. No a, he was gay. Go figure?<p>I agree with previous post I read that everything you experienced in your past sculpts your personality today. And just because you weren't a virgin when you married doesn't mean you will be unfaithful. Who hasn't changed mentally and physically since they were 16. I know I don't look the same (too bad) and I certainly don't think the same. My tastes in food, music and entertainment have also changed. I have matured and so have you.<p>You were a child and you did childish things not thinking of the consequences. Everybody has. My SIL ate earthworms once when she was 2 and she grew out of that. (I think)<p>Good luck and don't feel guilty. You shouldn't allow anyone else to make you feel guilty about it either. The past is the past, pure and simple. The only one you have to answer to is God and He can forgive anything if you just ask.

I'm the prude here. Virgin when I got married, as was my H. Did 'make out' with one other serious boyfriend. H had affair with my former best friend 6 years ago. He was somewhat bothered with the other boyfriend thing but knows it was before we were dating. I am one of those really old fashioned people who thinks that sex is a wonderful part of marriage but that's it!

<p>[ May 07, 2002: Message edited by: Lulu ]</p>

<small>[ January 27, 2005, 12:56 PM: Message edited by: hanora ]</small>

And now for a slightly different twist......I didn't get married till I was 28 and was very active the 10 years before. I tried to talk to my husband about this before marriage, but he preferred to believe I had barely any experience at all. He stressed how important sex was to him tho, so I figured we'd be fine.....however, he insisted we barely touch each other before marriage, for religious reasons. Fast forward 12 years....we've had sex about 10 times and it was never great. He won't LET me do anything, oral, etc....says I'm "not that kind of girl", whatever that means. I'm getting divorced and definitely going to "try out" the next one before marriage.... regardless of my religious beliefs.

One source has surprisingly low numbers:<p> <blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>...the average American male will have six partners in a lifetime, while the average female will have two. That's according to research done by the University of Chicago and published in the book "Sex in America," which represents the most comprehensive data available on American's sexual habits.<hr></blockquote><p>This tells us about the mean, but nothing about the standard deviation; or indeed about the past of the 60s and 70s, when conditions were different. But according to another source:<p> <blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>In a Government-sponsored survey of 20,055 people aged 18 to 69 in France in 1991 and 1992, French men reported an average of 11 sexual partners; French women reported an average of 3.<hr></blockquote><p>Does that reflect the past, or does it mean French people are about half as sexy again as Americans?<p>I'm also wondering what happened to the Harley concept of Historical Honesty. [img]images/icons/wink.gif" border="0[/img] <p>(Duck and cover...)

Hello! I am a 42 yr old christian and most of my wifes other lovers have been since we have been married. I dont think I even know about all of them, all I know is that it sounds like your H is insecure in where he is with you now. I hate to sound boring and say read the instruction book, but.....if you 2 were living the policy of joint agreement I dont think we would be here.

I want to thank you all for taking the time to reply to my post. The funny thing is I never thought about my past until it was flung in my face. I had never counted - I really tried to forget it ever happened. My H finding out happened quite by accident. He found my journals from high school and insisted on reading every word. I definitely wasn't prepared for the fallout. He knows more details about my past than I do. Every thought, every disgusting word.<p>Now, this is all I think about. Wherever I go, I think, I'm sure I'm worse than everybody. I have tried to tell him that I'm sure some of this was because I was raped at age 14 and that it just didn't matter anymore, but he thinks this is just an excuse.<p>Why didn't I say no? I think I had major issues because I felt like I had nothing more to offer. I wasn't aggressive, I just never said no to anything. I didn't talk much and I never expressed an opinion of my own. I was always just responding, never taking control of my own situation.<p>The only time things were different were at home. There I could be myself. Now my H says that couldn't be for real and I was just spoiled. My dad passed away almost two years ago and he and I had really been close. We used to play cards and word games and he loved to hear me play the piano. H says if I loved my dad so much, how could I do the things I did knowing how he felt about them? He was a stand up guy and SO ethical. I don't have an answer for that. But I get angry when he tries to take that away from me. I cherish those memories more than anything!<p>I'm babbling and I apologize. I know he feels like he missed out and that the only kind of girls he could get were girls like me. He slept with a total of five other people before marrying me (one while we were dating). Now he's 40 and feels like his time is gone and it makes him mad. I've tried to tell him how I grew because of him. I admired in him all the things I didn't like in myself. I really did become a better person because of him.<p>I just wish I could make this all go away! The things he's said to me won't go away. He's called me names, says it gives him the "heebies" when he thinks about it. Always goes quiet after we make love. Any advice?<p>I love him more than anything - but he doesn't buy it. He thinks I'd love anybody that was willing to stay with me....

<p>[ May 07, 2002: Message edited by: Lulu ]</p>

I agree with Dazed & Confused. The guy sounds like a control freak, and you are feeding into it. Were you guys drunk one night playing truth or dare??? How on earth did this come up after ALL this time??
Tell him, you are married to him NOW, and everything BEFORE him is irrelevant. He should be happy with that! You've been married 15 years and this is just NOW coming up? Tell him you did pentanence for your sins, and your sins before you met him are JUST THAT! If you have been faithful to him all this time, that is all you are accountable to him for in my honest opinion. You can't judge a woman on her life before a life change.
What if a woman had 40 partners and was a drug addict, then found religion and became a doctor is she a bad person or worse than a Nun who decides to renounce her vows and become a call girl? Hmmm who is worse? The first because she had more sex partners in her youth??
If he brings it up again, just be adamant and refuse to discuss it. Did you tell him you were a Nun before you married???<p>[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: Catwalk1 ]</p>

Lost,
I'm not saying this is right or wrong but it is the way the majority of men feel.<p>
http://www.ask.com/main/metaAnswer....Efcg%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Easkmen%2 Ecom%2Fdating%2Fcurtsmith%2F42%5Fdating%5Fadvice%2Ehtml%26qry%3Dpromiscuous%2Bw

First guy at 18....have been with 20+ total. Would not take the same route again, but hindsight's 20/20.<p>I never told my STBX anything because if I even mentioned the name of someone I dated (much less slept with) he'd go nuts. Any details would only have come back to bite me in the a**. Control freak? Yep...the poster child.<p>My past is my past and I have never shared it with anyone. It's nobody's biz.<p>A

Most people on this site respect Harley. I'd hope it is because he is a credible scientist. His sytsem works because his advice and his books are well documented and rooted in real research and empirical evidence. That in mind, you might be interested in the research of a well respected collegue of Harley by the name of Larson.
Larson is a leading researcher in premartial counceling and in his book (should we stay together?) he cites premarital promiscuity as an important and significant predictor of marital unhappiness.
He cites research showing that BOTH promiscuous men and promiscuous women are significantly less likely to be happily married, AND significantly more likely to be infaithful to their partner.
Interestingly enough -and no doubt you will all scream bloody murder (but hey, I didn't conduct, reveiw, publish, or replicate the studies - social scientists did- so don't yell at me), but research also shows that promiscuous women are significantly more likely than promiscuous men to be both unhappy and unfaithful to their partners.
You can speculate as to why this is... self esteem? need for male approval? other issues imposed on women by a sexist society maybe? Who knows?
But it would seem (and make sense to assume) that for both men and women, your actions prior to marraige do tend to tell us something about who you are, and what your values are. It may also make sense, (since men and women are different), that the same action may tell us more, or something different, about women than it does about men...
AS with all these studies and statistics, this says nothing about any individual case, and nothing about any individual who posted above. I'm sure you are all as faithful as you claim... it only says something about overall liklihood of a particular outcome given a certain set of conditions.... in addition it says nothing about how one defines promiscuous... whose definition of promiscuous is right? or if that definition be the same for men as for women?
Cant wait for the fireworks on this one...

I'm back with some things to add....<p>How did H find out? Worse than truth or dare. My dad passed away almost two years ago and in the process of helping my mom clean out the garage, I found two of my old diaries. DON'T KNOW HOW I COULD BE SO STUPID, but I brought them home with me. I wanted to read them, and when I started I was shocked. To this day, I don’t remember with any clarity these things I wrote about. Alcohol and drugs played an important part of all this, and low self esteem from being raped didn’t do much to increase my self worth. I thought I had found my purpose…..<p>Well, before I could get very far, my H found the diaries and he started to read them. This happened the day after my H's 40th birthday (big sigh). He came downstairs and was just shaking and his heart was racing. He said we needed to talk and when we went back upstairs, my whole life flashed before my eyes. He insisted on reading them – I didn’t want him to because I knew it got worse, but I didn’t dare say no out of fear I’d lose him. So he read every intimate detail and every thought I ever had from the time I was 17 until about six months before I met him (I met him just after turning 19). Then it stopped. Then there was another journal started after I met him and everything was different about this one. The writing style had changed, the words weren't dirty and foul, and there was no big descriptions of the sex we had. This journal focused on me finding the love of my life and I guess more “real life” problems and concerns. H thinks this change is because my life suddenly got boring as soon as I met him, and the sex must not have been good enough to describe. This is SO not true, but I can’t deny there was a change in the things I wrote about.<p>I really don’t think my H is any kind of control freak. He’s insecure, yes – but only since he found out the whole truth. He used to think we were meant to be together and that we were compatible. <p>There’s an important blip that I’ve left out of this post but have posted in other places. Nearly three years ago, H and I weren’t unhappy, but not quite happy, either. My success at work was at a high and I was receiving praises from even the CEO of the company. H usually blew off my work and at times even mocked me when I would talk about it. I don’t think he realized that this success at work was helping me grow as a person. The kids were small and consumed much of my life and between work, the kids and the house, there was a time when we drifted. He started drinking more beer, and I started withdrawing from him. He’d fall asleep on the couch and we could go for months without being intimate. I screwed up and while I remained “faithful” in the true context of the word, I let a guy at work tell me all the things I needed to hear about how smart I was and what a valuable asset I was, blah, blah, blah – take me out to my car and kiss me. The thing that gets me now, is this was probably the first time I really ever said NO! to anybody. I knew I wanted to be faithful to my husband – I took my vows before God and everybody I cared about and wasn’t about to break them. I probably would’ve remained open to the compliments and the good feelings I had about myself around this person, but H found out about this incident, too (because of something else I’d written) and we sought counseling at this point. We had a heart to heart and I supposedly came clean about my past and he thought we were totally equal then in every way including # of sexual partners. Thing is, I only told him about the ones I counted (there were 5 besides him). The rest I didn’t even count because for one, I’m not sure at the time, I even could’ve without the journals and two, I wasn’t willing to own up to the rest on top of what I’d already done.<p>So, H has reason to distrust me BIG TIME! He’s very afraid that something else will come out about me. And like I said, to make matters worse, he just turned 40 and his life he feels pales in excitement compared to mine. And everywhere we go, it seems, everybody has these exciting tales to tell and he feels boring. He thinks he’s stupid because he didn’t know. He feels like the only kind of girls he could get were the easy ones. I had been a prize, but now I’m just everybody else’s leftovers….<p>I try to tell him it’s because of him, that I changed. I admired in him all the qualities that I was lacking in, such as responsibility, morality, accountability, his love for God. I knew there was a good person inside of me and that I had qualities that someone could love if only they saw the REAL me. I thought he discovered me. He completed me. He made me want to be a better person.<p>Now he thinks that these things aren’t qualities at all – that he wasted his life being responsible, moral and accountable for his actions. He should’ve had more fun – like me. I don’t remember my past as being happy. Sure, there were some good times, but 9 times out of 10 I didn’t feel good about myself after having sex. I felt like it was my purpose to please others and that was how I gained fulfillment. Now I feel degraded and angry by it. Another big thing for me is the fact that H is the only one to fulfill me in the right way that way. I didn’t even know what an orgasm was….. <p>I’m really going off here, and I apologize for wasting so much space and taking your time. I don’t want him to regret his past – I don’t want him to regret marrying me – both of which he does now. I think deep down he loves me or at least wants to, but we’re dealing with so many issues I don’t know if we’ll ever come out of it all right. Counseling again didn’t seem to help. We always left with H feeling like he’s done something wrong and that he just needs to get over it. He deals with regret now every day of his life about the things he didn’t do, and I feel regret every day of my life about the things I did do. What a mess I’ve made……………..