Original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/s/5steioqyxg
If there is one place to get good relationship advice, it’s from strangers on Reddit. So here we go.
I have been dating my girlfriend for about 2 and a half years. I love her very much and I know that she feels the same way about me. Our relationship is good. We do fun things together, have deep conversations, laugh together, and both clearly love and prioritize eachother. She is my first long-term relationship and I am considering proposing soon.
Something that continually came up in our relationship is that my girlfriend was curious about how many people I had slept with before being with her and wanted to know about my previous relationships and sexual experiences. I didn’t want to tell her my number and I didn’t want to know hers.
Every time it came up, I told her that I didn’t think anything good could come of the conversation and who we were with before we were together shouldn’t matter since we are together now, committed to each-other, and don’t have any stds.
She said that she wants to know everything about me, and that me not telling her my number felt like I was hiding something from her and that it felt like there was a barrier between us that was affecting how much should could trust me and be intimate with me. This was very frustrating.
My opinion on the number of people that someone has slept with is that I would really rather not focus on it. I know that (unless they are a virgin) that anyone I date will have had sex with people before me. I think it is unsavory for anyone to think about their partner being intimate with someone else (unless they are into that sort of thing), so it seems sensible to me to just not go there. No matter what the number is for my partner, I would rather just not focus on that and instead focus on our relationship.
(I understand that there are statistics out there that say that people that have slept with a lot of people in the past are less likely to be able to maintain a long-term monogamous relationship. My take on that is that you don’t really need to know if someone has slept with a lot of people before you because people can change and if they are the sort of person who won’t be satisfied by one person, that will manifest itself in all sorts of ways.)
To give some context on the situation, I think it is necessary to summarize some of my background.
I struggled with dating for the most part growing up. I never had a girlfriend in highschool or college and struggled with confidence for a big chunk of my life due to bullying and other factors. From the outside, you would never know. I presented myself as a confident and successful dude, and upon meeting me, you probably would’ve never guessed that I had a hard time with relationships.
For years, I worked on all of the external factors, like going to the gym, progressing in my career, and improving my conversational skills (particularly with the opposite sex). I would have flings with girls and occasionally get laid, but deep romantic connections and relationships always eluded me. My mom one time asked me if I was gay. It seems like so much of your worth as a man is wrapped up in how attractive you are to women and how many successful relationships you’ve had with women, and I felt so much shame at my inability to get a girlfriend.
It seemed like every time I was actually interested in someone, it would fall apart. This made me feel like I was unlovable.
It got so bad that I became depressed and started considering suicide. I knew that something had to change.
I went to therapy and made a lot of progress on feeling better about myself. I came to learn that what was holding me back was how I felt about myself and the fact that I wasn’t myself with women I was attracted to. I was putting on a facade and coming across as needy (because I was). I started to believe that if I could detach from the outcome of any given courtship and just genuinely be myself that women would be attracted to me. And it worked! I started dating multiple women and it seemed like they were swooning over me. My newfound confidence was absolutely intoxicating. It felt sooo good to be desired.
One of the women was my girlfriend and as time went on, I realized there was something special about her that I wanted to explore further. I stopped seeing the other women and we became official. This was one of the happiest times of my life.
After going to therapy, I feel totally different about myself, and I am still practicing and enjoying the new perspective that I gained. Still, part of me feels ashamed of my past and I vividly remember times where I felt invisible and undesirable.
Back to the conversation with my girlfriend:
After having a conversation several times where she would ask about how many people I’ve been with and I would tell her that I don’t want to talk about it, I eventually caved because I told myself maybe it’s not that big of a deal and I don’t want us to have trust/intimacy issues over something so stupid.
We talked more about relationships and shared some of the experiences we had. I told her what my number was. Then I made a mistake. In that moment, the curiosity I felt after sharing my number and the asymmetry of her knowing mine but me not knowing hers was too much for me and I asked her what her number was as well. She told me.
Her number really isn’t that high, in the mid-teens. My number is 5.
After the conversation, I felt sick to my stomach. It’s not because I am disgusted by her number (I actually think it is really normal) but I feel insecure about my number. Also, I think it is always bothersome to imagine your partner having sex with other people and to have it concretely laid out for you in the form of a number. I couldn’t help but compare my number to hers and wonder about how I stack up compared to the other guys she’s been with.
It definitely doesn’t bother me so much that I want to break up, but I’ve tried to explain to her that having the conversation made me feel bad. I think about my number and makes me think about times in my life where I didn’t feel desired, and when I think about that conversation it makes me feel like I missed out on a lot of sexual experiences in my past.
She got upset when I said this and said that if I feel like I missed out, then maybe I should just go sleep around now and we shouldn’t be together. She is skeptical that these feelings of missing out will ever be resolved for me. I tried to explain that I don’t want anyone else, and I am happy with her, but that I still feel weird and insecure about the whole thing. Also, I kind of feel like I got blackmailed into having the conversation and can’t understand why she absolutely needed to know.
I haven’t talked to my friends about it because it seems too revealing to get into the details of the situation and also I am not proud of the way I feel about it. I really think that it should not bother me knowing her number.
I know it is stupid to think about her past sexual experiences before she met me and to think about my own number and how I stack up, but now that all that information has been talked about, it comes up sometimes for me and bothers me.
After learning about her number, I can’t help but think about my own number in comparison to hers and my peers and I feel left out. I feel like I missed out on a big chunk of my life. I know that this is illogical because it’s not like I had no experience before her and casual sex isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be anyways.
To some extent I think it is normal to talk about exes and past relationships. Particularly if it is relevant to the current relationship. I just wish that we could’ve just not had that conversation about the number of people we’ve slept with and that the conversation about our pasts could have happened more organically.
How can I reconcile with her and move on? Also, how should I approach the conversation about prior experiences in the future?
tldr: I didn’t want to talk to my girlfriend about the number of people we’ve slept with, but she wouldn’t let it go and now I have negative feelings about it.
Edit: A lot of the comments are about boundaries. Some people are saying that I should have just not had the conversation if I didn’t want to. I thought about it some more and realized that I missed an important detail.
I had always landed on us just not talking about the number of people we’ve slept with. I didn’t think anything good would come of it.
The conversation would come up periodically, and I always told her that I didn’t want to know about it and didn’t want to share my number either. I always told her that I would rather focus on us and I don’t care about how many people we were with before. I held this boundary for a long time. After about half a dozen conversations about it over the course of about a year and a half, she decided that this was information that she could not live without.
She told me that it felt like I was hiding something and that if we could not talk about it that she couldn’t see a future for us. We didn’t talk about it right then, but then I rested on it and decided that I didn’t think it was worth breaking up over something so stupid. That’s why I ultimately caved.
From her perspective, she said not knowing was causing her to feel distance and a lack of trust for me. She said that based on me not wanting to talk about the number of people we had slept with and not wanting to get into details of past sexual encounters, she felt like she couldn’t bring up past relationships and sex at all or it would freak me out. Also, she was scared of learning about my past in real time and didn’t want to be surprised by anything she learned.
She was cheated on before. Her ex continually lied to her face about the cheating. I wonder if her feeling like she needs to know absolutely everything about me is to guard against future cheating.
