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The Numbers In Sex Matters
Lessons In Mattress Maths
It’s not the number of sexual encounters you’ve had that matters, it’s how you feel about them. Find out why here...
Recently, I found a cocktail serviette shoved into an old diary. On it was the list of guys I’d slept with up until that point in the late Nineties. I remember the night a friend and I helped each other tally our totals. (“What about the waiter at that wedding in Cape Town?”) To fit my list, I had to write on all four squares.
Yes, I know.
Let’s just say that the total was more than my age at the time… Sure, I had a lot of fun, but in my twenties I was a premature hooker-upper, ever hopeful that sex would lead to love. Occasionally it did, but mostly it didn’t.
Evidently I needed to learn that lesson many times over. Still, I don’t regret any of it (and the sex was always safe). I can’t regret something I learnt from.
Many of us do the tally but are not as comfortable with the bottom line. (Take, for example, Anna Faris’s recent rom-com, What’s Your Number?, in which she plays a woman about to date her twentieth guy. Freaked out by what she feels is too high a number, she sifts through her past to see if she missed The One.)
Fact: 35 percent of Women’s Health readers have lied to a partner about the number of notches on their bedpost. “In SA, the more sexual partners a man has had, the higher his social status; with women, it’s something to be ashamed of,” says WH sexpert Dr Elna Rudolph. “These societal views discriminate unfairly against women.” While guys are applauded for having slept with a lot of women, our culture is still not ready to consider women interesting and powerful for having a high number. And while having a low tally carries less of a stigma, women with very little experience – for reasons other than making the conscious choice not to hook up – might not be bragging about that either.
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You may have many lovers, but only one guy is the one. That was my case and I am sure that you are not so different from me. Also your wedding will be unique, because you deserve it. Don't waste your time and go find your guy. It's too bad that this site doesn't load photos because I have very beautiful pictures to show taken by Wedding Photographers NYC crew. The feeling is amazing.
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