My Partner’s Upset Over How Many People I’ve Dated!

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Hello,

My partner (30M) and I (29F) have been together for over a year. We’re deeply in love, and from the beginning, it felt like everything just clicked. He feels like home to me.

A few months into our relationship, he asked me how many people I had been with before him. I was honest and told him — 14. Ever since, he’s struggled with obsessive, intrusive thoughts about my past. Despite being a confident man in many areas of life, this topic seems to torment him regularly.

He tells me it breaks his heart knowing I’ve “given myself to other men” and says it makes him feel like there’s “no excitement left” for him. Ironically, he was quite sexually active before we met, though he also spent several years focused solely on raising his son.

I can’t help but feel this is hypocritical. He often refers to societal double standards, saying it’s easier for women to have sex, and that it hurts him I “let so many men inside” me. He frames it as biological or evolutionary — suggesting that men are naturally wired to prefer women with fewer sexual partners.

I don’t believe he’s intentionally being sexist, but this has become a serious concern. These thoughts consume him — it’s been constant, nearly every day, for the past six months.

I’ve done my best to be patient and understanding, but it’s starting to wear on me. His words make me feel devalued, ashamed, and at times, unlovable. When I express how this affects me, he says, “I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t love you.”

And I do believe he loves me. His time is precious — split between his son and his passion for rock climbing — so the fact that he chooses to share it with me means something.

But I’m at a loss. He doesn’t see this as retroactive jealousy, and I don’t know how to move forward when this continues to be such a painful and persistent issue.

How Many Is Too Many?

Alright HMTM, I am going to say up front that I think your boyfriend is being ridiculous. Leaving aside my personal opinion that your number of past partners isn’t even that unusual or high, I think the question of “how many people have you slept with” doesn’t tell anyone anything outside of a bit of data. Numbers are just that: numbers. They don’t say anything about the relationship, about the importance of that person in your life (or lack thereof), how you feel about any individual partner, none of it.

The amount of importance that people put on the number of partners – and I mean across the gender and sexuality spectrums – is entirely outsized in relationship in relationship to its actual impact on anything other than statistical likelihood of exposure to certain STIs. Lots of partners doesn’t make you a better or worse person than very few or no partners. If anything, it’s how people respond to the number that’s more important. And that’s where your boyfriend is falling down.

How he sees it isn’t really the issue here. Maybe he’s right and it’s not jealousy; maybe it’s about sexism and misogyny instead. None of that makes it better. It certainly doesn’t make it less hurtful. And it doesn’t make it your fault, regardless.

And quite frankly, the falling back on “it’s just biology” is lazy at best. Leaving aside that this is just the naturalistic fallacy, or that it’s something that not only is demonstrably not true on a biological level, nor is it how evolution works, it’s also not even true for him. Or is he going to seriously claim that he’s never jerked it to porn?

I mean, I’m not even going to bring up things like the role of copulatory vocalization, the average number of sex acts necessary for procreation in humans, the Coolidge Effect or concealed ovulation. If we’re going to go with “because evolution says so” as his baseline, then he better be able to explain why he eats anything with corn in it.

It also betrays a lack of understanding of the dynamics that surround sex, both biologically and culturally. It’s not easier for women to have sex, it’s easier for people who have sex with men to find sex. That’s not about women, and that sure as fuck isn’t about evolution or biology, that’s about men. The difference is rather crucial, because not recognizing and acknowledging that is putting a hell of a lot of blame on women for a dynamic that is entirely about men and how men move through the world.

It sure as hell ain’t about “fairness”. 

Now, I will be generous and say that there’s still a lot of folks who push purity culture bullshit about women’s sexuality and What It All Means on folks, especially young men. It’s entirely possible that your boyfriend’s response is more about what he’s been taught. If he’s grown up swimming in a sea of purity bullshit, then it’s not a surprise that he wouldn’t recognize it for what it is off the bat; it’s like trying to explain the concept of “wet” to a fish. It’s even possible that this isn’t about culture and instead it’s hitting him in the feels because it trips an emotional landmine that you would have no way of knowing is there. He may, like a lot of men, have some sort of anxiety or self-image issue about being “deserving” or feeling “special” tied into his sexual relationships that need to be unpacked, preferably with a therapist.

It’s important to note, though, that while that can make some of this understandable, that doesn’t mean it’s ok.

Right now, it seems like he’s focused entirely on his feelings and how this affects him. The way he responds to your telling him that his behavior hurts you with “well, I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t love you” is missing the point. That’s not an acknowledgement of what you’re telling him, that’s him answering a question you haven’t asked. You aren’t asking “does this mean you’ve stopped loving me”, you’re saying “the way you’re going on about this hurts because of how you’re behaving.”

It’s great that he says he still loves you, but that doesn’t make his behavior less hurtful. Especially if he doesn’t stop it.

And that, I think, brings up an important question: is he actually wrestling with his feelings on this? Is he willing to recognize – if not accept (yet) – that maybe he’s wrong about this? Is he willing to recognize that maybe this is a him problem? Or is he using this as a club to beat you over the head whenever something bothers him? Has he thrown this back in your face or used it as some sort of counter-argument? If it’s become something he pulls out whenever he needs to position himself as having the moral high ground, then I think the problem has shifted to “how do we get past this” and into “how much are you willing to take before you leave?”

He hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory with comments about “you gave yourself to so many men” and “there’s no excitement left for me”, but there’s at least a chance that he can pull out of this spiral. There’s recognizing that he may feel this way and that’s not cool and he needs to sort this shit out for himself, and then there’s throwing this around like it’s a misogynist red shell in Mario Kart.

The former, while uncomfortable, means he’s recognizes that this is a problem for him and he’s trying to deal with it. The latter is the countdown to the first time he decides not to hold back on saying “…WELL MAYBE IF YOU WEREN’T SUCH A FUCKING WHORE!” during an argument.

(And while I’m here, what, precisely, the cinnamon toast fuck does “There’s no excitement left for me” mean?)  

I think you’re at a point where you should be blunt with him. Tell him that you’re not worried that he doesn’t love you, it’s the way he keeps going on about it and bringing it up and moping over it that hurts you and you want him to stop. He doesn’t necessarily have to snap his fingers and get over it, but not moaning about it at you and bringing it up as though you’ll eventually say “…psyche! Just kidding!” Even if it’s unintentional, it’s still hurtful, and if he cares for you, then he should be bothered by that fact.

That, to my mind, is the point you need to drive home: the way he’s behaving hurts you, and you want it to stop. And because I can already hear the response to this: your sexual history has nothing to do with him and comparing the pain he is experiencing is neither equal nor fair. You weren’t fucking other people at him and it all happened before the two of you even met. He, on the other hand, is doing this at you, specifically. This is his issue to get over; it’s not your responsibility to sherpa him through this. It sucks that this knowledge hurts him, but that doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong or that needs to be apologized for. You can help if you so choose… but this is ultimately something that he has to do for himself if he wants this relationship to work. And the first step is to recognize that if he loves you, then he needs to stop waving his fee-fees around in such a way that hurts you in the process… intentionally or otherwise.

This doesn’t mean that the topic is off limits, but the way it’s brought up and the way it’s talked about does need consideration. It may be fine if, for example, he wants to try to talk through what’s going on in his head and you can explain to him why what he’s thinking is incorrect – assuming, of course, you’re ready and able to do this. If he needs occasional reassurance or help walking back from the edge his jealousy and apparent Madonna/whore complex has drawn him to, that can be fine, too. But if he’s just going to keep doing the “woe is me” dance about this, if he can’t or won’t understand that this behavior is hurtful, then that suggests to me that hurting you is part of why he keeps doing it. You hurt him and now you need to see how much he suffers.

And honestly, in that case, it would be a lot quicker if he would just build himself a cross in the back yard and nail himself to it.

And one last thing: the fact that he chooses to spend time with you doesn’t automatically mean he loves you, nor does loving you excuse hurtful behavior. Loving someone doesn’t mean you can’t hurt them or that you don’t choose to hurt them. He can say he loves you all he wants and still think it’s ok to act like this.

The important thing is: if you tell him that his behavior and attitude are hurting you, does he change it? Or does he make excuses for why it’s ok for him to act like this?

That’s going to tell you everything you need to know about whether you should stay with him or eject like your F-16’s about to go down over the open ocean.

Good luck.

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Hi Doc,

I’m writing in with a situation and I’m curious to know what your advice would be. Fair warning: This letter may get a bit graphic.

Here’s the situation: I (30M) have been seeing Justin (33M) for about a month. On our first date, we ended up spending the night together. We didn’t have full, penetrative sex, but we did other things (I blew him, he gave me a handjob.) We haven’t even gotten handsy with each other since that night. Not for lack of trying on my part, but he just hasn’t seemed into it.

I spent the day with him this past Saturday and when I left his house that night, I said to him, “You know, we’re gonna have to have sex at some point.” He said “We have. I’ve not been inside you, but we’ve done stuff.” He even tried to lie to me and said that we’ve given each other blowjobs. I said, “Correction, I gave YOU a blowjob.” His mouth hasn’t been anywhere near that part of my body. I know what you might be thinking and this man is not asexual. (Unless he’s been lying to me about that too.) In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I haven’t felt that amount of passion from him since that first night. Doc, we’ve only been seeing each other for a little under a month. We should be doing it like bunnies.

When I started seeing Justin, it felt like he was too good to be true and now I feel like cracks are starting to show.

We made an agreement to be ethically non-monogamous but that we would always be honest with each other about if we’re hooking up with anyone else, so I’d hate to think that he’s getting sex from somewhere else and lying to me about it.

I’d love to hear your two cents on this.

Sincerely,

Pent Up and Frustrated

Maybe I’m missing something here, or maybe there’re other incidents that you didn’t include in your letter, but it seems like you’ve made a hell of a leap from “we disagree about what we call ‘sex’” to “he’s lying to me about everything!”

It sounds to me like the issue here is that maybe you should be talking to each other about what you expect and what this relationship entails. What you both consider “sex” is a good starting point; people have sex without having tab-a-into-slot-b penetration all the time. Talking about what you’re into and what you’re not into is a pretty important part of sussing out sexual compatibility; after all,  some folks, including queer men, just aren’t into penetration, whether they’re the top or the bottom. If there’re reasons why he didn’t (and still hasn’t) gone down on you, that’s something to talk about so you can resolve it, rather than sitting there stewing over it while your testicles start to become an increasingly uncomfortable shade of cerulean.

There’s also a question of how much sex you both expect or want to have. Yes, sex tends to be more frequent at the start of a relationship, in no small part because of the flood of dopamine and oxytocin that comes with a new partner… but that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to go at it like greased weasels in the first month. Leaving aside that people can have differences in libidos, there are all sorts of reasons why someone might not be as hot to go when they’re first hooking up. They may be more demisexual, they may be under a lot of stress at work, they’ve got weird gut issues that’ve been flaring up and leaving them feeling incredibly unsexy, they have hangups around sex that they’re working through… or they may not necessarily be into the other person as that person is into them.

If I’m being honest, jumping to “he’s lying” seems a little aggro, especially depending on the circumstances of your first night together. If you two had been drinking or had an edible or something over the course of your date, it’s not inconceivable that he honestly thought he had gone down on you instead of just giving you a handy. He could misremember, he could conflate different people at different times… memory can be weird and slippery, especially if there’s any sort of chemical enhancement.

But if he was lying… well, that would be a weird thing to lie about, and that would give me pause. Especially when it also involves not being physically affectionate with you since then.

If I’m being honest, however, I would be less concerned about whether he’s lying to you about other partners and more concerned with whether he didn’t enjoy the sex you’ve had or, well… as much as I hate to say it, whether he’s just not that into you. It seems more plausible to me that there’s a mismatched libido issue or just a lack of physical attraction than to think that he’s not telling you about dudes on the side, especially this soon in the relationship.

It’s certainly not impossible, but this sounds like a “if you hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras” kind of situation. But again: if it’s a case that he’s actually lying about going down on you and not an honest mistake, then I think there’re a lot more issues than whether there are other men in the picture. Ones that I think would be a deal breaker, regardless of whether there’s a line of dudes outside the door or just you.

I think the best thing to do here is to sit down and talk about this with him. I don’t think you necessarily need to address the lying, but you should talk about the way you’re unsatisfied with the physical side of your relationship. If it’s an issue that maybe he doesn’t like how you kiss or only likes particular forms of sex, that’s something for the two of you to talk out and see if there’re ways to bridge the gap that will satisfy you both.

You should also talk about your expectations and what you want out of this relationship. If you were able to talk about how you both want to conduct an ethically non-monogamous relationship, you should be able to talk about your needs with one another. You’re a sexual person and you prioritize a sexual connection with someone you’re dating, and that’s completely valid to want. If sex isn’t as much of a priority of him or if he’s not as attracted to you as you are to him, then it’s better to find this out now, so you both don’t waste more of each other’s time.

But if it’s an issue of miscommunication, or there’s shit going on that you’re not aware of… well, better to start getting in the habit of talking about things, rather than letting them fester until it becomes unignorable, messily and all over the place. Though to be perfectly frank, if you’re having that level of poor communication and dissatisfaction when you’re only a month in, that suggests to me that maybe should’ve been a one-time fling, not an ongoing relationship.

And if it really is a case that he’s not telling you about being with other guys and this is leaving him without the energy or drive to be sexual with you… well, that’s still a dealbreaker, no matter how you look at it.

Have the Awkward Conversation and see where that leads you, PUF. If nothing else, you’ll know whether this is something that can be fixed, or if it’s time for the two of you to call it and go your separate ways.

Good luck.