I had 5 or 6, and if you count kissing a lot more. By now I’ve had several more and if you count kissing I’ve completely lost count.
For reference, I’m not particularly attractive and I’m right on the border of normie but not quite. I think my weird friends think I’m a normie and my normie friends think I’m a nerd.
There were guys I went to high school with who had far, far more sex than I ever did. More than I was even interested in because they’d sleep with just about anyone who was willing at any party.
By 12th grade, some of the “cool kids” I went to school with probably had 10-15+ sexual partners under their belt.
I left school at 16 with exactly one person to put on a graph like this.
My first two relationships were like 5 years long in total. After the second break-up things accelerated a lot, but in school I think my situation was pretty standard.
I “dated” a classmate for a month at 14 until he wanted me to sit on his lap and I broke up with him because I felt like I’d be too heavy but didn’t want to admit that, so I didn’t know how to talk to him about it.
If you’d asked me at 14, if he was a romantic partner, on god I’d have said yes.
I kept looking at that too. It's crazy to me that there are only 2 cycles in the graph and one is the big accidental one. It honestly makes me think that either something must be wrong with the data, or it's reflective of some deep principle of math or sexuality (e.g. that people won't fuck around within their close social grouping nearly as readily as they will with people on the outskirts of it).
The authors wrote that they were surprised too and went back to talk to the students and apparently there was an unwritten rule that you don’t date the ex of the new partner of your ex. So if Bob and Alice split up and Alice starts dating Ben, then Bob should not date Ben’s ex Alison.
This is actually very interresting. I always found it hard to understand how some people can have so many sexual partners, and then there are people with very few of sexual partners. I had this theory that there must be some subculture of people who are really into this, date eachother in this group which causes their number to increase abnormally. It was just a silly theory but this sort of supports it?
If you look at this a little closer, you’ll notice that there aren’t actually that many highly connected nodes.
The big structure is mostly composed of single link chains.
Elsewhere it was mentioned that the researchers were also surprised by that, and did followup interviews that revealed that it was against social rules to date your exes partners ex. Basically two couples can’t “swap” partners. I thought it was interesting that you didn’t see that, but you do see a few triangles.
And that’s even more interesting. As someone who was not part of any of the graph in high school / college, how would a big link of chains play out in real time?
Like “The Mary and Tom met at a party. Next week Tom stumbled into Lucy by the lockers…”
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