[NSFW] How do you keep the list?

No list, just memories.

I don’t. Maybe I should. I get in these awkward conversations with women I don’t recognize who say stuff like: “Didn’t you date my sister?”

I prefer the memories since anything outside your mind stands a chance of being deciphered…no matter how cleverly concealed. I wouldn’t want a list to fall into the wrong hands.

I lost count a long time ago! :-/

Really easy. By not making a list. I only have one.

The only list is in my head and ill-maintained at that, though the lessons learned are kempt. For the most part, the ones that meant the most are still part of my life.

I started keeping a list early in college when I realized I was having trouble remembering names of some of the girls I had kissed in my life. I felt like that was wrong in a way, and that at the very least I should remember their names.

Since then I’ve kept a word/works file with the name of every girl I’ve ever kissed (even just a peck), and additional marks if we’d done further things.

Actually I should probably update it.

I keep it in my head.. Even though there are someone along the way that i would prefer be forgotten..

I don’t really keep a list; I keep memories of my few past lovers. Some are fond and some are not.

Spreadsheets? I’m sorry, but IMO that seems a little sexually deviant . . . a SPREADSHEET?! LOL

I’m not judging, I’m very sexually liberal, but that just ventures into ridiculous/comical territory by my standards.

Well, I guess there’s one more thing Excel is good for to add to the list, LOL

for the last 30 years the list has been mighty short. Before that, I’m not real proud of my behavior and would have a memory wipe if I could. I kept a little calendar back then. I don’t remember, but I hope I burned it.

Since my list is short and each once lasted a significant amount of time I can just remember them all. Fondly.

@wundayatta, now the motto of a jellie is to be “true of heart” right? Don’t know if you heard about our infamous defrocked Colonel Russ Williams here in Canada. If you get a chance, check out his story on the internet if you care to see how detail oriented his spreadsheets were!

In my brain, and in my best friend’s brain.

No list for me, but I did work with a person that kept a little black book.
As of 1999, he had 246 names and addresses of his “scores”.
I always thought this was repulsive and one day, his black book would give him a black eye.

Hope so.

holy damn 246.

I confess, I am the spreadsheeter.

A few girlfriends and I have a shared google doc, and we fill out 50 columns of data on each person.

Any dude who has a problem with that should probably not be sleeping with us.

Some sample columns: Career, Sexual hangups, Health of attitude toward sex (0 to 10), Educational background, How important is sex to this person? (0 to 10), Level of confidence (0–10), How much of an asshole is this person (0–10)?

(Our system has enabled us to pool our available data and perform useful analyses, e.g., answering once and for all, “Do women prefer assholes?” and “Does size matter?”)

Only memories.

no list….i wouldn’t see the point to it.

@wundayatta do you know if there were formulas and pivot tables on that “spreadsheet”

If someone was spread out on my sheets my memory would excel and there would be no microsoft either.

@blueiiznh No. I was only told of the existence of said spreadsheet. In fact, two different women claimed to use a spreadsheet. No one mentioned formulas or pivot tables. Is a pivot table some kind of elaborate sexual position? If so, how does it work? I dunno, somehow this reminds me of the game, “Twister.” Not sure how formulas work into it. But I can see a twister mat working as a spreadsheet. If I catch your drift.

Actually, I think you’ve got something going there. Instead of colored dots, we could put put a spreadsheet depiction on the mat, and other than that, you could have a spinner thing… or better yet, use an actual spreadsheet to generate random positions.

Anyone for strip spreadsheet?

We could call it, “from spreadsheet to spreadsheet!”

This conversation reminds me of the chart on The L Word.

Memories.

@nikipedia so what are the results to the questions you’ve posed at the end of your statement thus far?

I’m a list maker for many, many things, but not this. There’s no need to as I have only had one partner. I do occasionally write down details about our intimate moments, but that’s for reflection and fun—not for boasting.

@nikipedia Whats the point? I’m not trying to sound rude, I’m just curious.

@nikipedia Do you let the guys know they will be scored? Do you tell them that all your closest friends will be notified? ( If guys did that, they’d be in prison.)

By the way, years ago, the women at work kept a list of all the men who had vasectomies.
I had a surprising number of offers.

My list is so short I can use my fingers. On one hand.

It’s a very short list, less than five, so it’s not hard. But, it gets tricky depending on the rules of who makes it on the list.

No list. of lovers, but i do have a grocery list : )
How do you go about making one and what is the purpose?

@mrrich724, to determine whether women really prefer assholes in bed, we correlated the extent to which the men were assholes (rated on a subjective 11 point scale) against the quality of the sex had with that person (also a subjective 11 point scale). We found that r(35)=0.08, p=0.62. This is not a statistically significant value, suggesting that being an asshole does not make you better in bed. Another way to interpret that is using the r^2 value, r^2=0.007, meaning that being an asshole accounts for less than 1% of the variance in the quality of sex.

To determine the effects of penis size on quality of sex, we used qualitative judgments on two different scales to categorize penis size. One was a six point scale that took into account both length and girth (e.g., 3 and 4 were both “medium” in length, but 4 would be girthier than 3) and the other was a simple three point scale (small, average, large).

Using the six point scale as a continuous numeric variable, we correlated pleasure vs. size, and found r(78)=0.41, p=0.0001.

Alternatively, using the three point scale to divide participants into nominal categories, a one-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of penis size, F(1,77)=12.33, p<0.0001.

So, it looks like size does matter.

@deni, we just thought it was fun. And I mean, not to go all nihilist on you, but what’s the point of anything, you know?

@worriedguy, for the most part, I do let them know ahead of time. Not all my closest friends use or view it, but we are all pretty open about discussing our sexual experiences with each other, and I think the men who choose to become intimate with me have a pretty good understanding of that. Likewise, I think it is a reasonable expectation that my partners will probably discuss some details of our sexual encounters with their friends.

I had nowhere to hide my list when I got married, so it went the way of all flesh. Being a faithful person, I never thought I ‘d need to update it, but since my marriage fell apart six years ago, I wish I had it now.

That’s kind of sad…

I write dairy sometimes about some special people and events…

My list has one name on it. I don’t need to write it down.

EDIT: @Nikipedia, that sounds very Big Bang Theory to me ;)

@EnchantingEla How do you make the list? You write down all the names of every lover you’ve every had. You can define “lover” any way you want, so some people count everyone they’ve ever kissed. Others only count those they’ve had intercourse with. People can choose to count how they want to.

I guess it would be more important for people who have a longer list, since it can become difficult to remember after a while. I have only spoken about this with women, so I only know what they have told me. One woman’s list was over 100, and so you can see why it was important for her to keep the list.

I’m not sure what the significance of the length of list is. I don’t know if there is a different kind of person who has fewer than five partners compared to those with 25 or less compared to those with between 26 and 100 compared to those with 100 or more.

Thanks @wundayatta : )
I still don’t get the why, but whatever floats ones boat ; )
It sounds confusing and impersonal to me.
Think I will just stick to my grocery list. lol

Do To-Do lists also count?

@EnchantingEla It doesn’t have to be impersonal. I just wrote my list for the first time a couple days ago. I didn’t just list names. Instead I wrote a little story about each and how I met them or related to them or how they related to each other and what period of life I was in and how I felt about them and how important they were in my life.

Unfortunately, I think I missed out on maybe ten lovers because I just don’t remember. Or maybe I do remember and I had a lot fewer than I thought I had. I don’t know because I never decided to work on a list until now. I mean, I thought about it before, but I never did it. Now that I see mortality looming (at least for my memory), it seems more important.

I think the stories of my loves are pretty important because they help me understand what I was working on, psychologically, at the time. Love is a problematic issue for me, perhaps unlike many others, so keeping the list helps me understand myself. Maybe it doesn’t help other people understand themselves, or they don’t think understanding their important relationships is useful. I don’t know.

It seems like some people seem to feel there is something unseemly or even seamy about keeping a list. I am surprised at the number of people who have so few on their list that they can easily keep them in memory. I guess I had the impression people would have more. When I was in college, in the time before AIDS, it seems like people were supposed to be having sex with a new partner every night, just about. I always felt like I was not doing what I was supposed to. I’d read Playboy and I felt like I wasn’t much of a man. So I stopped caring and did what I thought was right.

I used to keep it in my address book, with the initials and dates mixed in with other unrelated information by way of disguise. It wasn’t very long, but it seemed long to me at the time.

There’s been nothing to add in decades, and I don’t know where it is any more.

My list consists of one person. Nor do I care that it does.

It’s on a piece of binder paper, just names but they’re in order. At any given time I can write them down accurately, it’s no big deal.

I kind of wish I had a list. This sounds cool.

@nikipedia if you are going to keep a list, THAT’S the way to do it! LOL

@thesparrow You can have a list with one item on it.

Sounds like a wonderful idea for a new Social Media site….now for the name….....

@blueiiznh Name: Who’d you screw?

No list. Some memories, others get eaten by the amnesia monster. Sometimes may pop back, some are gone into the dark end and never to return again. When I have to answer the question “how many?” things get difficult because I just don’t remember. And I don’t even think it would be a worthwhile pursuit to list.

@SpatzieLover maybe a simpler “screwed” or “Scrude”

I like it @blueiiznh esp. “Scrude”

I thought it was “scrod.”

Fluther is my only lover. ;)

@nikipedia – I love it, good on you. If I were young and in your area, I would want to see a copy!!!

My answer though is as @syz and some others have said, the memories are enough.

@wundayatta My list is relatively short including the college days. Every time there was a new entry we both enjoyed it enough to stick around for many repeat performances.

Tempting as it was, I did not talk about exploits to my friends. There was an implicit agreement and trust that whatever happened would always be just between my partner and me.

@nikipedia No offense, but if I were one of those “test subjects” ... I would be incredibly offended.

I also suspect if guys did something similar to that, we would be downright crucified.

Thanks @rooeytoo!

@tedd, that’s perfectly fair. To each his own. My partner thinks it’s great. I come at things from the perspective of a student of human behavior, so in my world, quantifying and sharing data increases its value rather than diminishing it.

I am not sure if people would respond better or worse to men doing something similar. There was that scandal a while back about a girl from Duke who made a powerpoint evaluating her sex partners. People seemed mostly displeased about that. But I have a feeling that when guys do something similar it doesn’t qualify as news.

@nikipedia I think the issue why people would get upset is that these guys are potentially being measured and compared with other men about some of their most private intimate statistics… and this information is being shared/compared with other women.

If the guys agreed to be part of it that’s one thing. But if I was unknowingly included in something like this… it would be like me telling my best buddies about the intimate sexual details of all the girls I’d ever been with.

@tedd, right, I totally understand that some people wouldn’t want to be involved with that level of disclosure. But it wouldn’t bother me (I just assume it happens), and I tend to pick similar partners.

@nikipedia Are you at all part of Karen Owens’ Sex Rating list at Duke University?

@nikipedia I hate to press the matter, but in your posts in the past I think I’ve found you and I to be quite on the same page with most things. At one point I actually thought you were an x g/f of mine who is on here but hadn’t told me her handle.

If I had been unknowingly included on that list, it would infuriate me.

@tedd, I am pretty sure I have never slept with you, but if you give me your first and last name I’d be happy to check the list and tell you your mean performance and z-score ranking.

In all seriousness though, can you explain what exactly would be troubling about it?

@nikipedia It sounds like the types of things you guys are “rating” and comparing and sharing with your friends… are extremely personal.

It would be like if I had a list rating the tightness of vagina of every girl I’d ever slept with, and I was sharing that with friends and comparing.

I feel most the girls I know would be offended if I just ranked their attractiveness and compared it with friends.

I often wish I had the capacity to keep myself emotionally detached from sex so that I could take the attitude of you fine men and women.. instead, I always was so serious about it.

I wonder if now, not being a virgin anymore, I could do it..

My question to women is this:

How do you maintain an emotionally disinterested attitude to a man who has given you possibly the best sex you could ever have (i.e. a long session of multiple-orgasms).. we assume, of course, that such sex could be achieved outside of a love context.

To clarify, by ‘love context’ is not meant a relationship. It could simply mean having certain feelings toward that person (i.e. not seeing them as just a body)..

Logically, you either

a] see the person as just a body and therefore have no feeling toward them, which shouldn’t make the sex that great
b] have some feeling toward them but know it won’t be reciprocated, which should make you question having sex with them in the first place (i.e. the ‘hell-come-around-one-day’ syndrome)

Hence, are such encounters logically a good idea?

@tedd, everyone has a different line for what they share. If you and your girl did something wild (awesome threesome? sex on a public beach?) would you tell your buddies?

One person isn’t much of a list.

Though, I do have a list of people I’m allowed to sleep with, a’ la’ Friends. Only, mine isn’t laminated. And I have more than five.

@thesparrow, I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that these lists are about emotionally detached sexual escapades. That’s not how the question was framed, and it’s definitely not how I answered it. It was always a pretty serious matter to me, too, and never promiscuous or random.

By the time you’re, let’s say, 30, you’ve had time for half a dozen or more relationships of fairly lengthy duration. Even if one lasted for 5 years, there could still have been 5 others of a year or more apiece. I don’t see that this possibility implies an emotionally disinterested attitude.

@nikipedia Well one, no I wouldn’t tell my buddies. And two, the few people I would tell (likely a future girlfriend if she asked or an extremely close friend) .. I would view this as a lot less personal a detail.

It’s different if I tell my best guy friend that I slept with so and so on a beach, and if I told him “oh her nipples are big, her vagina is loose/tight, and she’s a 7 in bed.”

@tedd the thing is some people talk some people don’t. It goes from saying nothing, to simplistic, to elaborating details, to embellishing the event.
If you are worried about this and it gets in the way of you being intimate in any way, you have three choices:
1) don’t have sex
2) have both parties sign a presex agreement with a air-tight clause on disclosure.
3) stop overthinking about what others may say about you.

@blueiiznh My comments are in regards to @nikipedia ‘s direct story of how she and her friends kept a spreadsheet comparing the various intimate details of their various partners…. Not specifically people talking just randomly.

Whatever floats their boat

I thought @nikipedia‘s post was a funny parody of a scientific study such as she encounters in her field and not an account of her actual habits.

I don’t want to have 5 relationships by the time I’m 30. The concept scares me. Even though I understand that it’s a legitimate possibility

I should have kept a list with a brief description of what happened to jog my memory. Just a name isn’t enough. Occasionally I try and remember everyone I’ve slept with and never quite remember them all. Not because I’ve had sex with a ridiculous number of people, but rather I’ve partied a lot over the years and my memory isn’t what it once was. I know it’s approximately a certain minimum number, so if I try and remember them all and don’t think of that many, I know I’m way off. Sometimes there are 15 I can’t remember. Lame, because it was probably fun.

Mind you, I lived in Wisconsin for a long time. There are probably some large ladies I’ve happily forgotten.

I’m in my mid 40’s, I’ve been sexually active since my late teens, I’ve been married, divorced and part of several longterm live-in relationships. In between these times I’ve had enough lovers to fill a page with their names and even without writing details, I know who was what just by looking at the name. I can only imagine the shock if I had joted down notes!

I have it engraved on a granite slate.

@blueiiznh Have you presented it to the people, yet?

@wundayatta It is currently with Moses to approve the latest changes