By Michael Sugarman 

I was talking to a friend who told me that he had recently asked his girlfriend of a few months how many partners she’s had.  He meant sexual partners.  Bad move.  Horrible move.  ROOKIE move.  I wish that he could take back that question for a variety of reasons, some of which will be explained below (though it’s a shame that I need to explain them), but the easiest reason is because we all know he won’t get the real answer.  Don’t know what I’m talking about?  Consider three things:

The first is reality.  This actually happened: I’m visiting a different guy friend of mine who’s IM’ing with a girl he knows on-line.  Jokingly (but only half-jokingly) he asks if she has any attractive friends that he can sleep with.  [C'mon girls, focus: why he asked this, or what kind of person he is, isn’t important.]  She responded with “why would I set you up with any of my friends when I wouldn’t even consider letting you get in my pants?”  Good response!  She took the high moral ground AND essentially called him a scumbag in the same sentence.  The problem?  He’d already slept with her. 

Then there’s the movie “Chasing Amy”.  If memory serves, the plot goes something like this: guy meets girl, guy drops girl when he finds out about a sordid sexual encounter from her past that he can’t let go.  Guy tries to get girl back, but fails. 

Finally: the Rule of Three.  This rule states that, in theory, to find the REAL number of sexual partners a person has had, for a guy divide the number they tell you by 3, and for a girl, multiply the number they tell you by 3. 

Taken together, these three items have me wondering why women lie about the number of partners they’ve been with.  I already know why guys lie about their number: we’re trained to; we’ve been doing it since high school, if not before.  The male mind equates sex to conquest; the more conquests we make, the more manly we’re perceived.  If you think I’m wrong, take a look at the guys that women call douche bags.  These guys may have lots of negatives, but being unpopular isn’t one of them.  So, conversely, this may be one reason why women lie: they don’t want to seem like whores, or more horrifically, that they made bad decisions with some of the douche bags they’ve slept with.  Or God forbid that anyone find out that the real reason may be the simplest: women enjoy sex… 

But I think that there’s yet another reason that’s linked to the first 2 things above.  In the first example, when the girl is confronted by my friend with the fact that they, in fact, DID have sex, she guiltily responded “Oh yeah.  I forgot.”  I think it entirely possible that the girl intentionally forgot about hooking up with my friend because, whether or not it mattered to her at the time, it clearly doesn’t matter to her now, so he shouldn’t count against her “real” number.  [Evidence of this also points to the similar “out-of-zip-code hooking up” not counting towards the real number, either]  And that’s kind of the point of “Chasing Amy”: that the things that girls do/did in the past may not have any bearing on who they are today.  Fair enough, but it doesn’t answer the question.  Still, I can already hear women respond to this by saying that, for most/many women, sex is just one component of what hopefully is a complex, emotional relationship.  If a girl has sex with someone she doesn’t have a relationship with (i.e. “one night stand”), the sex doesn’t “count” towards the number of partners she’s had.   

This is why asking women an uncomplicated, logical question can be so frustrating.  Women enjoy semantics and rhetoric.  The question is not “how many sexual partners have you had that have been part of an attempt at a committed relationship”.  The question is simply “how many partners have you had”.  Getting back to my friend who actually asked this question, it’s important to understand that this article is solely for entertainment purposes.  I hope that no guy in his right mind would ever really ask a girl how many guys she’s slept with.  To do so would prove that he’s either horribly insecure or jealous, in which case he’s not going to be able to keep the girl for long anyway (unless she’s a masochist, which many females apparently are).  Guys, do you really want to know how many partners a girl has had?  Come on, we all know there are no virgins left anymore, and you can be sure she had a past before she met you.   It’s too late for my friend, but for the rest of you guys, do yourself a favor: NEVER ask this landmine of a question…