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>How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner? Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? All exp

>How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner? Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? All experienced people start off inexperienced. At least with experienced people, they are more likely to know what they want. I am a woman the same age as you. I am only interested in long-term monogamy. As such, I have a lot of sexual and relationship experience due to my age, but all if it is with just 3 people. Not only that, but all of my experience is with who, themselves, had never previously had casual sex experience. The first 2 were young and inexperienced like me, and they initially thought they wanted the same thing that I want. But as time went on, they realized that they felt confined by long-term monogamy and actually wanted more experiences with more people. After we broke up, they proceeded to have a series of flings and casual sex. They did have some attempts at long-term polyamorous relationships, but nothing that lasted more than a year or two. By the time I met my 3rd partner (who I have been with a long time now), I was pretty gun shy about dating men. My experience was that men talk a big game about wanting a stable partner for the long haul, but get bored and break your heart. What helped me give my new partner a chance was that we were both older by this point and more settled into our lives. He had plenty of relationship experience by that point, and his history demonstrated that he stayed dedicated in long-term monogamous relationships and that he was not interested in casual sex, despite plenty of opportunities for it. If I were advising someone whose goal was to only ever have one partner in their life, my advice would be to only date people with a lot of life experience. Inexperienced people are a wild card. You can't manipulate them into only ever wanting you. Maybe back in the day, you could lock them into marriage, but modern DNA evidence suggests that a huge percentage of children back then (some estimates as high as 25%) were not genetically related to their fathers, so I'm not so sure that marriage was actually what you imagine it was. If you want to date women who are fully dedicated to long-term monogamy, then date people with a demonstrated history of exactly that. (However, be aware that this only works if you yourself have such a history. You can't expect to date women with high standards if you don't actually live up to those standards.)

veave 3y ago
>Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? Yes? What do I care what happens to her after we break up?
- Planktonne 3y ago
  With that attitude, she would be luckier if you were never her partner at all.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  I thought the goal here was to end up in a stable long-term relationship? That doesn't work if you break up.
  - veave 3y ago
    It is, for me. I enter a relationship if I think it's going to last forever (or, more realistically, a very long time). Therefore whatever happens after we break up is something that doesn't concern me. But it concerns me that she hasn't been promiscuous before, because that says a lot about her character.
    - RoyalHenOil 3y ago
      Why does her behavior before your relationship speak of her character, but her behavior during and after not speak of her character? I presume the reason you want to date someone with fewer partners is because you are trying to weed out partners who are unlikely to stick around. So if she doesn't stick around anyway because she wants to play the field, that means your judgement was wrong. If you don't actually care about breakups (which is the impression your comments are giving me), I'm not sure why any of it matters. Why avoid dating someone with a long history of break-ups if you don't actually care when or why your relationships end? For what it's worth, when I was looking for a partner, I discounted men who had more than a couple short-term relationships like that. Even if they were completely serious about all of those relationships and it was their partners who left them for a more promiscuous lifestyle, a pattern of such relationships speaks poorly of their ability to identify compatibility in a partner. I was picky about men I would date, and so I was only interested in men who were similarly picky about women they would date.
      - veave 3y ago
rainworld 3y ago
modern DNA evidence suggests that a huge percentage of children back then (some estimates as high as 25%) were not genetically related to their fathers This is not true at all, typical historical rates are 1% or less: https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/trends/ecology-evolution/tree2086.pdf https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/trends/ecology-evolu... The surprising result of these new studies is that human EPP rates have stayed nearconstant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years. This poses an immediate puzzle for behavioural scientists, who estimated that without the availability of modern contraceptives the historical EPP rates should have been much higher, in the range of 10–20%, based on present behavioural measures of EPCs and observed kin investments of matri- and patrilineal family members, which are known to be inversely related to EPP [13]. Hence, it appears that people were more faithful in their relationships in the past, or – put differently – that the recent widespread adoption of modern contraceptives has sexually liberated women, resulting in a relatively greater number of extra-marital affairs, but in EPP rates that have remained as low as they were before.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  Thank you for the link. This is very interesting. My only complaint is that the method of study seems like it would not be great at differentiating paternity between relatives (i.e., cases where the affair partner is related to the husband, such as his brother or cousin) due to shared Y chromosomal DNA. It does, at least, suggest that rates of cheating with unrelated men were likely low in most cases (outside of poor urban populations as mentioned in this paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31305-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... ).
caeril 3y ago
> Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? The answer is a definitive yes, from an emotional standpoint. When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. Particularly when you are the sexual selector. The problem is that that primal desire never goes away, even though people get better at making practical choices. If you're #1, you have the emotional security of knowing that your partner loves you at a deep, primal, biological level. If you're #23, that emotional security is gone. You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well. And maybe that makes for a great partnership, in the sense that you could have a great partnership with your co-founder. But you still know, in the back of your mind, that your partner doesn't love you in a deep biological sense. You're a practical, rational choice. And your partner's body will never crave you like it does others. And in a world of no-fault divorce, it's a trivial matter for your partner to give in to just a taste of the old days. The word "insecurity" gets thrown around a lot here as some sort of pejorative. And it's true that #23 often has "insecurity issues", but those "issues" are not unfounded. Insecurity is often an emotional response to a genuine lack of security that actually exists in interpersonal relationships.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well Is that a bad thing over "oh she thinks I'm hot"? Like you said, youth is fleeting and I can't be hot forever (in this alternate timeline where I'm considered attractive). Besides, these aren't mutually exclusive. Are you just worried your spouse will cheat on you with a 20 year old? That has bigger red flags for you and the spouse than any rational choice.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. Hopefully, as you age, you choose partners based on many factors, the most important being both your abilties to understand yourselves; see others in a sophisticated, mature, and especially non-objectifying way; feel love; and form deep, healthy, emotional bonds. It's the non-objectifying factors that count. Sex object, money-producing object - that is all the same misunderstanding of other humans. If that's what someone wants, they should hire someone and not marry them.

veave 3y ago

>Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? Yes? What do I care what happens to her after we break up?

Planktonne 3y ago
With that attitude, she would be luckier if you were never her partner at all.
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
I thought the goal here was to end up in a stable long-term relationship? That doesn't work if you break up.
- veave 3y ago
  It is, for me. I enter a relationship if I think it's going to last forever (or, more realistically, a very long time). Therefore whatever happens after we break up is something that doesn't concern me. But it concerns me that she hasn't been promiscuous before, because that says a lot about her character.
  - RoyalHenOil 3y ago
    Why does her behavior before your relationship speak of her character, but her behavior during and after not speak of her character? I presume the reason you want to date someone with fewer partners is because you are trying to weed out partners who are unlikely to stick around. So if she doesn't stick around anyway because she wants to play the field, that means your judgement was wrong. If you don't actually care about breakups (which is the impression your comments are giving me), I'm not sure why any of it matters. Why avoid dating someone with a long history of break-ups if you don't actually care when or why your relationships end? For what it's worth, when I was looking for a partner, I discounted men who had more than a couple short-term relationships like that. Even if they were completely serious about all of those relationships and it was their partners who left them for a more promiscuous lifestyle, a pattern of such relationships speaks poorly of their ability to identify compatibility in a partner. I was picky about men I would date, and so I was only interested in men who were similarly picky about women they would date.
    - veave 3y ago

rainworld 3y ago

modern DNA evidence suggests that a huge percentage of children back then (some estimates as high as 25%) were not genetically related to their fathers This is not true at all, typical historical rates are 1% or less: https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/trends/ecology-evolution/tree2086.pdf https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/trends/ecology-evolu... The surprising result of these new studies is that human EPP rates have stayed nearconstant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years. This poses an immediate puzzle for behavioural scientists, who estimated that without the availability of modern contraceptives the historical EPP rates should have been much higher, in the range of 10–20%, based on present behavioural measures of EPCs and observed kin investments of matri- and patrilineal family members, which are known to be inversely related to EPP [13]. Hence, it appears that people were more faithful in their relationships in the past, or – put differently – that the recent widespread adoption of modern contraceptives has sexually liberated women, resulting in a relatively greater number of extra-marital affairs, but in EPP rates that have remained as low as they were before.

RoyalHenOil 3y ago
Thank you for the link. This is very interesting. My only complaint is that the method of study seems like it would not be great at differentiating paternity between relatives (i.e., cases where the affair partner is related to the husband, such as his brother or cousin) due to shared Y chromosomal DNA. It does, at least, suggest that rates of cheating with unrelated men were likely low in most cases (outside of poor urban populations as mentioned in this paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31305-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... ).

caeril 3y ago

> Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you? The answer is a definitive yes, from an emotional standpoint. When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. Particularly when you are the sexual selector. The problem is that that primal desire never goes away, even though people get better at making practical choices. If you're #1, you have the emotional security of knowing that your partner loves you at a deep, primal, biological level. If you're #23, that emotional security is gone. You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well. And maybe that makes for a great partnership, in the sense that you could have a great partnership with your co-founder. But you still know, in the back of your mind, that your partner doesn't love you in a deep biological sense. You're a practical, rational choice. And your partner's body will never crave you like it does others. And in a world of no-fault divorce, it's a trivial matter for your partner to give in to just a taste of the old days. The word "insecurity" gets thrown around a lot here as some sort of pejorative. And it's true that #23 often has "insecurity issues", but those "issues" are not unfounded. Insecurity is often an emotional response to a genuine lack of security that actually exists in interpersonal relationships.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well Is that a bad thing over "oh she thinks I'm hot"? Like you said, youth is fleeting and I can't be hot forever (in this alternate timeline where I'm considered attractive). Besides, these aren't mutually exclusive. Are you just worried your spouse will cheat on you with a 20 year old? That has bigger red flags for you and the spouse than any rational choice.
wolverine876 3y ago
> When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. Hopefully, as you age, you choose partners based on many factors, the most important being both your abilties to understand yourselves; see others in a sophisticated, mature, and especially non-objectifying way; feel love; and form deep, healthy, emotional bonds. It's the non-objectifying factors that count. Sex object, money-producing object - that is all the same misunderstanding of other humans. If that's what someone wants, they should hire someone and not marry them.