Does "Body Count" Really Matter?

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person, real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Oh boy, is this a topic I really want to tackle? Oof. Eh, what the hell. You only live once. Hm. This is what we call a sensitive topic. What the heck do we mean by body count anyway? Isn't that the name of that shitty thrash metal band, you know, headed by Ice-T? When was that, back in the '90s? No, I'm not talking about that. Body count is the internet term for the number of people you've slept with. And by sleeping, I don't mean, you know, snoring next to another person. I mean sexual intercourse. Let's be blunt here. The debate on the internet right now is, does the number of people that you have slept with in the past, your body count, determine your value as a long-term monogamous relationship partner? Before we answer that, let me illustrate with a little story here. Maybe this will get the, the brain juices flowing. You got a couple of ladies having coffee with each other. One is 23 years of age and the other one is, let's say, 30. The conversation for some reason goes to past relationship experience, and the 30-year-old says something, just makes an offhand comment about, uh, you know, I've been with like 7 different men in my life. And the 23-year-old says, I'm sorry, what? 7 different men? And the 30-year-old says, hey, don't judge, that's not that many. And the 23-year-old says, oh no, no, I wasn't judging for that's, you know, a lot. I'm just confused because that's like not many at all. And you're like 30. And the 30-year-old says, yes, I think that's a pretty average number. That's nothing small or large. And the 23-year-old says, I sat down and counted up how many partners I've had. And it was 236. And the 30-year-old does what most people would do sitting across from a table. From a 23-year-old that just told you they slept with 236 separate men? She does this. What? Why? Why would that be so shocking? Well, first of all, logistically, how do you find time to do that? It's a lot of work, presumably, to find a person, number one, get comfortable with a person, number two, and comfortable enough to to do what is arguably the most intimate and vulnerable of human acts, sexual intercourse. That's a pretty, for most of us, a pretty lengthy process. Occasionally, that process is short-circuited, usually for some of us in the form of a one-night stand, which usually involves the social lubricant we call alcohol, or recreational drugs, but most of the time it involves the courtship process of, "Hey you, you look good. Let me talk to you. Let me get to know you. Let me date you. Let me see you in social settings. Let me get to the point where I trust you enough and I feel comfortable and safe enough with you and yes, turned on enough by you to do again, arguably, one of the most, if not the most vulnerable and intimate of all human acts. And now you have this 23-year-old sitting across from you, telling you that they have done this with 236 different human beings. Holy crap. Maybe they just have the process of finding a person and the courtship, if you want to call it that, the mating dance, and they get to the point. Maybe they have that down to a science. Maybe they're just really, really good at that. Unlike most people, they know what to do, they know how to do it. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, putting the logistics aside of the act, does the fact that they did that— again, most vulnerable and intimate acts— with that many individuals in that short of a time span, does that point to any other kind of mental deficiency? That's where we're getting into some touchy stuff. Because for a lot of us, we don't want to be seen as non-sex positive. We don't want to be seen as a person who shames another person for their sexual choices. Because, and I'm the first to say this, I consider myself to be a sex positive person. I'm the type of person that if somebody says I'm polyamorous, I'm a swinger, I'm asexual, I'm strictly monogamous, whatever, you know, wherever they're at in that spectrum of the relationship world. I just sit back, listen, and say, how cool, tell me more. I'm genuinely interested, no judgment on my part. I'm one of those rare individuals that says everybody has something they can learn from each other. I'm not one of those that says, oh, you're that, oh, I don't have— get away from me. I, strange as it may sound, want to learn more from other people. But with that being said, you have to recognize that your choices in this wonderful world of relationships, more specifically sexual relationships, may in fact impact your ability to join different teams on that sexual spectrum. For example, going to the 23-year-old woman, She's been with 236 different men. And by the age 24, she says, you know what, I think I want to suddenly try out this strictly monogamous world. I think that's for me. I think what I want to do is I want to be strictly monogamous, marry and devote myself to one guy and have kids and a family. What a lot of people that are more egalitarian and progressive in nature will say is her previous 236 sexual partners will have absolutely positively zero effect on her ability now as a 24-year-old to carry through with a lifelong monogamous relationship. It has zero impact. Might as well not even mention it. I think we're fooling ourselves here, guys. Of course it has some kind of an impact. I mean, just look at this from really blunt point of view. If I'm raised as a kid and as a young adult on a giant buffet of 3-star Michelin quality food. And by buffet, I mean a huge variety of food. Like, I could wake up in the morning and have, you know, a, an awesome French breakfast, and at lunch I could have a Peter Luger steak dinner from New York City, and at dinner I could have, um, I don't know, you know, the best Italian food in the world. And then that changes every day, all day, for years and years and years. And then suddenly, as a young adult, I decide, you know what, I think I'm just gonna have chicken nuggets from now until the day I die. Every day, every meal, chicken nuggets. If you sat down and told everybody your past with the buffet, the heavenly buffet, and then you tell your friends, I'm a chicken nugget guy from now on, they're gonna say Dude, there's no way you can just eat chicken nuggets. I'm sorry, that's just— it doesn't work that way. I think we would all agree, once you've had a taste of the good life, it's really tough to walk away from it. And before you go there, this is not a gendered thing, because I have, as I've mentioned in previous videos, I've talked to one-on-one to a lot of men from all over the world, and a subset of those men are what we call former players. They had a lot of sexual intercourse with a lot of different women. Usually these men come from some type of industry like the nightclub industry, the bar industry, something like that, that puts them in touch with a lot of women who are drunk off their minds and are partying like crazy. And they see the cute guy, and next thing you know, they're making out with them. And next thing you know, they're going back to his apartment or even just doing the deed right there in the club, like in the bathroom or the coat closet or something. That, for some people, is not an unusual thing, believe it or not. And you can rack up a 3-digit body count number pretty quick. And that's what some of these guys did. And then you know what? They decide, I'm getting kind of tired of this. Believe it or not, that gets old.. And they say, I think it's time to, quote, settle down. And they have a lot of people in their social circle and society in general telling them, yeah, you need to cut it out with this playboy nonsense. It's not getting anywhere. It's kind of a dangerous lifestyle. Next thing you know, you're going to knock up some woman that you have no feelings for, etc., etc. Just cut it out, dude. So he listens, and he finally finds a woman, and he falls in love. And for the first time, this woman checks the boxes of the intellectual the emotional, and yes, the physical. Because during the honeymoon stage of the relationship, usually if you're a good match, you get a whole lot of physical stuff done. So as far as Mr. Player is concerned, this is not a step down as far as sexual activity is concerned. It's a step up because not only is the sexual activity the same, albeit with one person, the, uh, the, the level of activity is the same, the frequency is the same, plus You love them. So this is to him a win-win. And then life happens. Kids, job, stress, the normal stuff that gets in the way of intimacy. Next thing you know, it's a couple of weeks, 3 weeks, a month of nothing between he and his wife. It could be something as mundane as illness, childbirth, Job loss, death in the family, who knows what. But he, Mr. Player, is accustomed to the big buffet, right? Now he's getting chicken nuggets, or actually he's not getting anything. And he is extremely impatient with this new arrangement because the deal was, in his mind at least, I was supposed to have my best friend and my lover all wrapped up into one person. And the idea was, I can't go backwards sexually. As the comedian Chris Rock famously said, men can't go backwards sexually and women can't go backwards financially. He's not wrong as far as what I've seen. So here's this guy in this relationship, in this marriage with a woman he loves to death. Now he's got kids, but something that he has basically been trained to expect through all of his young adult life is suddenly just cut off. And I gotta tell you what, those guys cheat like crazy because they've built up over the years a set of skills that allows them to get that physical need met at little to no cost to him. That's relatively rare in the man world. In addition to that, he has a roster of women from his past. He He may still have them on his phone contacts, or he may know them on Facebook or some other social media. Thanks to social media, this affair thing is a lot easier than it's ever been. And away he goes. Now the question is, would that guy still be a cheater? Would he still not be the greatest match for a long-term monogamous relationship if he didn't have that promiscuous past? That's the question. And really, there's no way to know. Unless you look at the stats that show a promiscuous person and the chances of divorce once in a long-term monogamous relationship. And if you talk to some of your more traditional conservative types, they will all point to surveys that say exactly that. Now, what I've learned is any kind of survey or study, if you don't agree with it, it's pretty easy to pick it apart. I don't care what the confidence intervals are or the number of the population sample or whatever it may be. Somebody will have something that makes them go, I don't like that one little part, so that negates the whole thing. And that's what a lot of people do with those kind of stats. And they may be exactly right. They may— it may be the fact that those stats and those surveys are, you know, you can just throw them out. I don't know. But I just know from my own personal experience of speaking to both men and women that have been down that route of promiscuous, for lack of a better word, casual sex with dozens, if not hundreds of individuals, they will tell you, "It's kind of hard to devote myself to one individual on a sexual and emotional basis from now until the day I die." Is that wrong? No. Am I judging them and calling them bad and dirty and everything else? No. So I guess what I'm saying, we need to be really honest with ourselves. I think a lot of people that come from a very sex, sex-positive, promiscuous past, hundreds of partners, decide to drop that, throw themselves into a strictly monogamous world. They need to be open and honest with themselves. What is the purpose behind trying to shoehorn yourself into that world? Is it out of shame? Is it out of pressure from society in general? Or do you genuinely feel that, no, my personality has shifted, I have matured, I have changed over the years, and this is the, the path that I see myself going down? That's cool if that's what you want to do, awesome. But you got to realize, those that have been on Team Monogamous for basically, you know, most of their life, or if not all their life, they're going to be a little suspicious. They're going to study you a little more carefully. And don't be surprised that if they hear the number, the body count, that they may just discount you completely. That's their right to do so, and that just means that they're not a good match for you. That doesn't mean that there's some kind of judgmental asshole and that they are in the wrong. Nobody's in the right or wrong. This relationship game, it's kind of a difficult thing, in case you didn't notice.