Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
For men: in a relationship, do you ask about your partner's body count? Or perhaps you don't ask about it, but ask certain other questions like attitudes about casual sex? Does asking about it actually help with the preoccupation at all? How do you get over it?
Hell no I don't ask. I have a rough idea and that's bad enough, I know it would destroy me to get more info. I wish I knew how to get over it. I've been struggling with the mental health issues of my wife having had sex with other people (whereas she was my first) for almost 10 years now. Stoicism helps me some (and indeed it's the reason I got into Stoicism), but I'm not always feeling rational enough where appeals to philosophy can convince my brain to quiet down. Therapy didn't help at all. At this point I've given up on fixing it and figure I'll just have to live with the pain until the day I die.
Was this because you weren't trying, or because a lack of success at getting laid despite it? That matters, at least in terms of how you interpret things.
More importantly, it should greatly reassure you that you beat out all those other men in being the one she decided to settle down with. If you've been married for 10 years (and hopefully happily), that's a far more meaningful commitment.
Lack of success despite trying (to a point: at some point one starts to figure "if I've failed every time I'm just going to fail this time too" and gives up, but that took years). One thing that's continually surprising to me is how much those years of rejection still hurt on some level. Logically it makes no sense - I made it. I genuinely love my wife and we have a great relationship, but somehow in defiance of rational thought it's hard to shake the feelings of pain from back then. Thankfully it gets easier year by year - at this point it's mostly gone, but not entirely.
Similarly I think you are completely correct in your analysis of the situation I described with insecurity. We've been together 10 years, married for 8 - I won over all those other dudes, and I have the receipts to show it. Unfortunately (as I'm sure you're well aware, lol), human brains are pretty shit at being rational sometimes. Thankfully that, too, is getting easier year by year - perhaps it's habituation, perhaps something else, but it has gotten easier even if it has never gone away entirely (and I'm doubtful that it'll ever go away entirely).
I've been trying to think on the points that you and @fmac raised, so as to try to give you both a good answer and not just shooting from the hip. I think that ultimately, the reason I feel insecure in the way I do is not because I fear something per se, but because I believe that sex is something very special, almost sacred. And as such I believe that the more it is shared, the less it means to share it. By way of analogy, when a person gets married for the first time, I find that to be a very exciting and meaningful event. When someone gets married for the fifth time, I don't really think it's significant any more. That is roughly how I feel about sex, so basically I have that belief deep in my core values which says "this isn't particularly special between you two, you're just the latest man". Again I know this to not be particularly rational (though to be fair, values often aren't), but it can be difficult to maintain rationality on such an emotionally charged topic. The most helpful thing I've found thus far (as I mentioned in another post) is Stoic practices, where I try to hold the negative feelings at arm's length and remind myself "it doesn't matter, what matters is that I conduct myself well". I'm not always able to do that either, but sometimes I am - and in those moments the practice does help.
Dude, you described my feelings perfectly here. I tried to do it here but didn't expect the pushback. I didn't suspect my views were so alien to a lot of the world. Sex was so synonymous with marriage in my upbringing, so your marriage analogy makes a lot of sense. In the Old Times before everyone was forced to let young people do whatever they want, sex was synonymous with marriage for a lot of people. Modern day relationships are sort of like micro-marriages from this perspective. And yes, it is a bitter pill to swallow that I purposely avoided micro-marriages until I was ready to walk the walk, and very few others even stopped to consider it. I do not like modern society. Maybe I would like it better if my evangelical parents didn't instill these traditionalist values in me, but at least one of them didn't like the way modern society handles relationships, either, so it's hard to blame them. Birth control really must have cheapened sex a lot.
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