Dear Readers,

Having sex with someone is a lot like sharing your first secret. After all’s said and done and the glass of water has been fetched, there’s still all of this pleasant oxytocin and dopamine and other good stuff flowing around in your head. There’s something about touching genitals that makes you feel comfortable enough to start sharing other secrets afterward, or even just things that you held back on Date 1 or 2 or 47 because you were afraid they were deal-breakers. But now, you’re propped up on elbows, in between pillows, talking about art and that new episode of “The Newsroom” and, more often than not, _your number._

You know. Number as in the number of sexual partners you’ve had, besides each other. So, you might say, trying to keep your voice at the optimal casual tone, “How many other people have you been with?” Cue enormous pause.

I always say that I’ve had sex with seven male individuals. In actuality, it’s debatable. See, #2 was unable to get the organ in question ‘up’ to task, so it lasted maybe 5 seconds. And #4 tried to slip in without a condom, which earned him an abrupt stop and a ”drive me home _now!”_

So, really, seven is just the number of different PIV (P in the V) sexual partners I’ve had. But if we went by the medical definition for sex, which includes _any_ genital contact, that would also would bump my number up in ways that would force me to recall some literally fumbled accounts from the teenage years.

What counts and who counts was something that bothered me for a long time, particularly when I got asked and didn’t know what to say. If I rounded down, would that make me seem more virginal or whatever? If I rounded up, would that make me cooler? Counting hadn’t given me this much of a headache since preschool.

For now, I’m sticking with seven. This isn’t college algebra. It’s no one’s business to correct me. So I’ve decided that if I think #2 and #4 count, they count.

There’s this perception that women in particular with larger numbers are looked down upon. I don’t know if seven is supposed to be a big number or not, but I say to hell with the haters. “Slut” is just a word people use to describe others who have more sex than them. I’ve never encountered judgment on my number (though #5 — a science major, unsurprisingly — did the math and calculated my average partners/year, and raised a pretty judgmental eyebrow. I moved on pretty quickly to #6 after that).

I have friends who’ve had sex with more than 40 people; I have friends who are virgins. The idea that someone could deem the amount of sexual partners they have as “good” or “bad” seems ridiculous.

It’s not that numbers don’t matter at all. But the whole point of asking, especially between sexual partners, is so you know if you need to approach things differently based on whether it’s your partner’s first time or their 90th. The bottom line is that your number matters only as much as you want it to matter.

There is one exception to this rule:

A few years ago, I was at a house party where a few girlfriends and I were completely bored. So we sat on the couch and started discussing our numbers, giggling as we recounted the most disastrous ones. And this awful guy comes swaggering in, overhears us, and literally, I kid you not, pulls out his phone, opens a Word document, and starts reading off the 30+ names on it.

Like, props to this guy and his apparently magical penis, but there is no bigger turnoff than someone bragging in public about many various sets of genitals he’s touched. Because each sexual experience is great and unique and ultimately should be of more worth to you than a party trick.

So, to reiterate:

Your number matters only as much as you want it to matter. But don’t be Braggy Word Doc Guy.

_Love,
Edna_