There’s one question that’s pretty much guaranteed to come up in any fledgling relationship:
“How many people have you slept with?”
Of course, the right answer is either “None of your damn business” or, you know, the actual truth. But it turns out there is a specific number people want to hear.
Three.
Yep. According to a study conducted in the UK, both men and women identified three as the ideal number of notches in their partner’s belt. Any higher than that, their interest in pursuing a relationship with that person begins to fall.
The results, obtained by researchers at Swansea, Bristol and Nottingham universities and published in The Journal of Sex Research, seem to undermine the idea that sexual promiscuity is more acceptable among men.
“Contrary to the common notion that male promiscuity is tolerated whereas female promiscuity is not,” the authors wrote, “both sexes expressed an unwillingness to get involved with someone with a high number of past sexual partners.”
We should point out that of the 188 people surveyed, all were heterosexual and ranged in age between 18 and 35 years, the average age being 21.
So keep that in mind if you’re thinking three partners seems a tad, erm, low.
Also, while the participants picked three as the ideal number of past partners, their actual ones were higher: for men, on average it was 8.4 and for women, 5.81.
We’ll have to take their word on that one.
Top Comments
I'd really rather now know how many people my husband has slept with! We've never had the conversation and I doubt we ever will, now.
Funnily enough I have had this conversation a few times with people that in some conservative countries you are expected to be a virgin till marriage, but in our westernised world people think you are some kind of prude if you are still a virgin, on the other hand if you have sex with 'too many' people you are labelled a slut. So I have said to people someone really needs to come up with a number so that we can just trot out that number when we are asked. And then I added I figured out the acceptable number is 3, because 1 is almost like being a virgin (say if you are 46 and divorced for 20 years people will think you are weirdo if you only had sex with your spouse), 2 is not too bad, but still a bit of the virginal side, 3 is acceptable (unless you are 16 then it is considered too much, but if you are older it's a good number), over 3 could be verging on slutty.
So I have had said to a number of people that it appears the acceptable answer is 3, (unless you did all 3 on the one weekend then not so acceptable! - Though if you think about it easily doable on a long weekend especially at times like Christmas when everything else is shut and you have to keep yourself occupied somehow!) I wonder if therefore people have taken my advice and started quoting this number. So I would like to claim myself as the originator of this '3' theory!
Oh and by the way, seeing that you have asked, even though I feel it is a very personal question, my number is 3 also :)