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It’s no surprise that prospective partners judge us for how many people we’ve had sex with — but new research suggests that there are key factors that may impact just how judgmental they may be.
Published in the journal Sciences Advances, a new paper out of Wales’ Swansea University found that although many folks are still reticent to commit to those who have high “body counts” — popular slang for a person’s number of previous sexual partners — many are willing to look past it if those numbers dwindled over time, suggesting they grew out of an interest in casual sex.
In a wide-reaching survey of more than 5,300 people across 11 countries and five continents, the Welsh psychological researchers examined a diverse swathe of the global population’s outlook on potential partners based on their sexual history.
Some findings were unsurprising. Overall, people seemed to prefer that their potential paramours had fewer partners.
Others contradicted popular narratives, such as the lack of a double standard between how people judged the number of partners men and women had across the 11 countries surveyed.
And other results seemed to uncover mechanisms of judgment that might be intuitive, but haven’t saturated popular culture in the same way. One experiment, for instance, involved showing study participants visual timelines meant to represent a theoretical partner’s sexual history.
The finding from that experiment was intriguing: even when different timelines included the same number of past partners, they were designed so that the concentration over time varied significantly, with some showing a lot more encounters early in life, others decreasing steadily over time, and others spread out evenly throughout.
After examining the timelines, the study’s subjects were asked how willing they would be to commit to or date seriously someone with each corresponding sexual history. Those whose number of new partners dwindled later in their lives were the clear winners.
While it may seem overly judgmental to base one’s willingness to commit on notches in a potential partner’s bedpost, head Swansea researcher Andrew Thomas posited that these preferences are rooted in a deep-seated desire for stability.
“People use sexual history as a cue to assess relationship risk,” Thomas said in a statement about the research. “In our ancestral past, knowing someone’s sexual history could help people avoid risks like [sexually transmitted infections], infidelity, emotional instability, or rivalry with ex-partners.”
Though there have been plenty of previous study showing that people prefer partners with lower body counts, this new research not only adds significant caveats to that preference, but also included respondents around the globe, from Japan and Brazil to Australia and Slovakia. (Notably, it does not appear that any people from the continent of Africa were surveyed.)
In sum, the study offers a novel and nuanced look into how people actually feel about their partners’ body counts — and one that suggests that many people are less judgmental about sexual history than we’ve been led to believe.
More on sex psychology: Scientists Identify Ideal Amount of Boinking for Maximum Mental Health