Sexual History – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell?
Posted by: erogenouszone on: February 1, 2010
- In: Advice | Relationships
- Comment!
Everybody is guilty of it at some point; judging someone on their sexual history. But whether you ask in a relationship is a difficult subject.
Obviously there are the health issues, it’s important to make sure the person you are sleeping with is healthy, especially if you’re planning a long term relationship with them an plan to stop using barrier forms of contraception. But once you get past that and are both given the A-OK for health, how far should you delve?
There’s the old joke that however people a woman tells you she has been with you should multiply it by three, and whatever a man tells you should be divided by three. The old double standard of stud vs slag rearing it’s ugly head.
I think you ultimately want your partner to be equally as experienced or equally as innocent as you are. That way you’re on a level playing field, and nobody can judge the other for their experiences and experimentation.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out like this. One of you will have the greater number. In my experience both ways basically suck.
Your partner reveals that he or she is a virgin, how do you feel? Especially if you definitely aren’t one? Assuming you don’t have some kinky virgin-seeking fetish and it’s a discovery down the line in your relationship, how do you feel?
In my experience the ultimate feeling is panic, you’re about to become an intrinsic part of thie person’s life. You’re about to launch their sexual history. Regardless of whether you’re planning a long term commitment to this person or not, this is a huge commitment you’re making to their life. The story of how you lost your viriginty, who you lost it to, where it was, what it was like, how it felt…. these are stories told around the campfire for years to come. Regardless of if you never see that person again or whether you can remember your encounter with them in much detail, they will remember it and speak of it and most like dream of it at times.
Do you want to be told before or after? If you’re told before you have all the formerly mentioned panic, but at least you are entering into it with a larger amount of respect. But if you’re told after… at least you were able to relax and enjoy it, but perhaps you will then worry that you didn’t give a performance worthy of a lifetimes worth of recollection.
But then you have the other way around, you’ve had a modest number of partners and discover that you’re number 50 or number 100 for your partner. You will feel a variety of things, most likely a lack of trust in your partner, if they have been through that many sexual partners they can’t have a great deal of respect for the act itself, and possibly get bored very easily and will end it with you after one or two sessions of love making. Also, if they have so much experience will they find your more limited experience to be boring?
I have found that is completely unfair to think these things of your partner, and it does depend from person to person. Some people, men and women, do go through partners at a rate of knots and whittle their bedpost down to a toothpick before the age of 30 and they’re proud of it. Others have a “phase” in their life, they’re young and foolish and they enjoy an overly healthy sex life until they eventually settle down and then consider their love life with you to be as unique and special as you do because it means something rather than just being another hot fling.
So whether you’re the more experienced or the less experienced, issues are going to be raised, and your partner will judge these things of you as well as you judging the opposite of them. So do you tell?
It might be better to just keep schtum. Tell your lover that the past is the past, and what matters is now and how you feel about them. Assuming you’re in a happy and committed relationship, that is all that matters. You may always wonder though, so can you put those feelings behind you?
If you ask you then have to deal with reality, which you may not like. This is the path I have always taken. I make a vow that it doesn’t matter and I won’t ask, but I am a big believer in honesty, and whilst I am not exactly proud of most of my sexual partners, I like to believe that each mistake I make ultimately leads me to the person I am supposed to be with, so if I can look at my past in that logical manner, I should be able to see my lover’s past in the same way.
Doesn’t always work like that.
If you’re going to ask, and going to find out things that possibly make you very uncomfortable, then you’re going to have to be prepared to let it go. If you decide, as you should, that the past is the past, then you have to let it stay there. Look to it, learn from it, but don’t dwell in it. Don’t bring it up in fights. Don’t constatly probe for more information because ultimately you won’t want it, and you certainly wouldn’t appreciate him or her probing to find out sordid details of what you have done before.
Don’t ask, don’t tell certainly seems the easier option. Start fresh and move forward as a couple without his or her history pulling at you reminding you of what they did before. But if you can’t do it and you have to know, then just be prepared that the truth sometimes hurts.
