MY FRIEND JANA went to her high-school reunion last month. She was one of the only unmarried women in attendance, and at one point found herself in a conversation with two old friends, each of whom was married and had two kids. The conversation turned to the relative value of being single versus being married. For each of the married women, the biggest negative of the wedded state was that she would be sleeping with the same man for the rest of her life.

“Well, how many men had you slept with before you got married?” Jana asked them, intending to follow up their answers with a cheerful “Well, it’s not like you didn’t sow your wild oats!” “Three,” answered one. “Two,” said the other. Aside from the fact that her plan had completely backfired, Jana experienced an unintended consequence. “I felt like the Whore of Babylon,” she told me.

Ah, the Numbers Game. We all play it in one form or another, and no one ever walks away from it feeling good. Some people consider it a badge of honor to push the number as high as possible, others see it as a mark of integrity that they can count their sexual partners on one hand — my friend Gwen literally refers to each of her lovers according to which finger he was. (“Ya, Ralph was Mr. Thumb, Jimmy was Middle Finger.”) Some people feel they have dropped into the depths of moral depravity if they cannot remember the phone number of every single lover they’ve ever had. As for me, I stopped counting some time ago — not because there were too many to remember, but because keeping track just seemed like a waste of time and valuable, limited memory capacity.

There are only two types of people for whom my decision not to count causes a problem: my friends and my lovers. It’s a bad day when a new boyfriend ventures into this exceedingly dangerous territory. If I were Queen of Time, Space, and Reality, I would make it a federal crime to broach this subject with a lover. What possible good could come from knowing the answer? If one values sex as a sacred act shared only between two people in love, finding out that you’re number 24 can be a real deal-breaker. On the other hand, people who place the act in a less exalted position inevitably want to know how they rank — sort of like a horizontal Pepsi Challenge. No two people feel better about their relationship after the numbers conversation, ever. Its chilling effects can linger days, often months. The best option is just not to go there. So I don’t.

My lack of a “number” also does not go over well when the girls get together. Women have lots of numbers. How much do you weigh? What size dress do you wear? How old were you when you first did it? How many lovers have you had? When it’s my turn to answer this last one, I just say, “I wasn’t keeping score.” They think I must be lying. “How could you not know?” they ask incredulously, with an increasing suspicion that I might also be one of those women who don’t know how much they weigh. For women, sharing our numbers is the height of intimacy. Failure to share can be grounds for expulsion from the community of friendship. It is also a form of female benchmarking that begins with the age of slumber parties and continues ever after. I feel a little bad about my inability to participate fully in this time-honored tradition. It’s our way of establishing what we think are norms and making sure that we fall within them. It’s a way for us to figure out what our bodies and our lives look like to the outside world, because even as adults, it’s sometimes easier to see your friends than it is to see yourself in the mirror.

But I have a big problem with the “lovers” number. Inside many women, there lives a little girl who still believes that women who have sex are sluts, and men who do it are experienced. Many men hold this same view. For them, the “number,” whatever it is, high or low, is about judgment. Enlightened as we are, the fact that we care about this number reinforces just how strongly this view lingers and shapes our self-image well into adulthood, when we should all absolutely know better.

I’ve obsessed over my fair share of numbers, but the “lovers” number is not one of them. My theory is this: you’ve slept with someone, or you haven’t, and at the end of the day, as long as no one gets hurt, what does it matter? The number of lovers you’ve had is the least telling number with which to gauge the success or failure of your life. I think there are vastly more important numbers to keep track of. How many people have you loved? How many do you love now? How many truly bad mistakes have you made, and what did you do to rectify them? How many hearts have you broken? How many times has yours been broken? How many people have you treated so poorly that you still feel guilty? How many lovers do you miss, and think of fondly to this very day? These answers say so much more about you than the number of people who have climbed into your bed.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

Issue Date: June 7-14, 2001