Do You Know Your Sleep Number?

My Twitter friend @purplepeace79 Twitter-ranted recently about the notion that men view a woman differently if she’s slept with 50 men versus 5 men, and that this causes women to lie about their number.

At a certain point in your life, keeping track of the number of people you’ve had sex with is stupid.  Which is one of many reasons why I no longer do it.

When I was younger, I used to maintain lists naming the men I’d slept with.  It was cute for a while.  Each time I wrote down a name, I’d pause and indulge in a few sweet thoughts about our fun times together.

But then things got complicated.

In the beginning, I wanted to count every new experience.  However, when I left for college, some of those new experiences were being shared with people who were not my boyfriend back home.  That became a problem.  The goal shifted from recording every new sexual or quasi-sexual encounter to keeping as many people off that list as possible. 

Thinking like a lawyer long before I became one, I began questioning which experiences “counted” for purposes of the list.  Did making out with that guy at that fraternity party count?  Did it count if we went back to his room and, someone was, um, serviced?  What if the service was reciprocal?

My answer to all of the above was No.  Except I was stupid enough to write about the encounters in my journal.  My boyfriend read my journal and confronted me about cheating. 

I denied what I’d written.

“What are you going to believe?  What I’m telling you now or some bullshit I wrote in a diary?  And if anyone’s betrayed anyone’s trust here, it’s you!  How dare you read my personal journals and invade my privacy like that!”

It worked.  He bought my story.  The downside?   I stopped keeping journals.

Eventually there were experiences I didn’t care to record, situations I wished not to remember — worse than just the failures and the embarrassments.

Did the guy who date raped me earn a spot on my list?  Did I have to count the guy who lied and told his frat he did when he didn’t?  What about that almost-rape when I was alone on vacation?  Did my own behavior in these situations make them count? 

The list became, as Jo Nubian calls it, my ho tape, that voice that told me I was wrong for having the sex I’d had with the people I’d had it with, and for daring to enjoy any of it.

It also dawned on me that if a boyfriend could pick up a personal journal and read it, he could also come across a random sheet of paper with fiftyeleven dudes’ names on it and guess what it was.

So I found and burned all of the lists.  In time, the distinctions between what did and did not “count” blurred in my mind.  I forgot what wasn’t memorable.  I lost count, not because there were actually fiftyeleven dudes’ names on the list, but because the experiences and what I learned from them came to matter more than numbers. 

When I first met my ex, he wanted to know how many men I’d had before him.  I told him he was ridiculous. “You knew I wasn’t a virgin when you met me.”

He did some fairly sloppy due diligence, and confronted me with stories he’d heard.  Everything had been so mangled in the retelling, I could say with a straight face that none of it was true.  I honestly (and naively) didn’t see what difference it made.  He boasted about his ho exploits, so I told him to get real about mine.

It didn’t quite work that way, of course.  He threw the things he’d heard up in my face, regardless of truth or accuracy.  But the most damaging story was the one I told him: the story about the one that got away.  The one-who-got-away story confirmed what he had long suspected — that I was with him, but I didn’t love him.  

I was faithful for the close to ten years we were together.  No close calls, no judgment calls.  But my ex never stopped looking around the corner for the boogeyman: the man I wanted, who was not the man I had.

I was faithful to my ex, and I stayed celibate for a number of years after my divorce. 

So as far as I’m concerned,  I re-virginalized.  The clicker has been reset. 

I’m still not keeping count, though.  My sleep number is my business.  Each and every one of those experiences – good, bad, tragic, indifferent, and everything in between — made me who I am.  I don’t know the actual count, but I am no longer ashamed of it.   It’s irrelevant.

Besides, if any man asks me “how many” at this point in my life, I’ll assume he wants to make sure his name never gets added to my count.