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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My brother is out west helping his wife move their father from her childhood home into a nursing home. She is also collecting her HS memorabilia that has been sitting there for 25 years. She found a photo album with the usual pics of prom, homecoming, beach week, etc.

There are, according to him, about 25 pictures of her with different guys. He jokingly asked if she'd slept with all of them. She got angry at the question but eventually admitted she had.

They have been married for 13 years and both shared their 'numbers' but he now realizes this is a complete lie. He is quite upset, really not so much about the number, but more that she's been lying for years and years. He feels like he doesn't really know here now.

Why would she lie about sex from HS?[/quote]

Honestly, if my brother asked me this, I would ask him if he was upset about the lie or upset about the number.  Either way my brother answers, I’d still tell him he’s sexist.  The whole conversation about numbers is sexist - women are judged for their number in a way that a man would not be.  Your brother feels like it is his role to investigate and question his wife about her sexual history that happened a decade before your brother met and married her - that is bananas sexist and controlling.  Who his wife slept with prior to him is actually none of his business. If he was worried about STDs, then the thing to do is get tested and negotiate monogamy. If he was worried about sexual fidelity, then the thing to do is talk about that and negotiate it explicitly, not guess whether fidelity will won’t happen because of past sexual history.

The conversation about numbers also doesn’t include any thought to the ways in which women are taught about their sexuality by the culture - ways that encourage them to sleep with men (gatekeeping sex and childbirth are still a woman’s main power even in these modern times) or ways in which they are sexually abused which encourages a cycle of sleeping with people to soothe or act out abuse, and then there’s the whole aspect of figuring out your sexuality and what you do and don’t like in people.

Honestly, if a guy asked me for my number, I would dump him. Your brother is lucky she didn’t do that to him. [/quote]

Dumping him for asking the question is of course principled, and I respect your view there; lying instead is not. You don’t get to decide what other people should and should not care about in selecting a spouse, and if she knew the information was material to his decision and she lied anyway, that’s an act of profoundly low character.  This idea that there are certain things that are “none of your business” in selecting a spouse seems entirely indefensible to me, when considering making a lifetime commitment to someone it is reasonable to be interested in basically everything about that person, and if you want someone to commit to you for a lifetime, you should be willing to be honest. It should not be a high-stakes poker game where you conceal information to get the result you want. [/quote]

Even “that’s none of your business” is fine. That makes everyone’s boundaries clear, and everyone gets to make decisions both based on the fact that the question was asked (and what that says about the asker) and the answer that was given.

Choosing to answer and intentionally lying in an effort to deceive someone to whom you are making lifelong promises purportedly on a foundation of trust is something else entirely. [/quote]

It doesn’t even have to be such a stark “none of your business.”  One could say “I’m uncomfortable talking about that.”  And, to be clear, I’m not saying that getting super granular about these issues is a necessary or healthy thing to do, but getting a general sense of one’s partner’s sexual past is a reasonable thing to want to do when settling down, and if someone is materially deceptive about it that’s not cool. There’s nuance. Obviously I think we can all agree that claiming to be a virgin when your body count is 200 is materially deceptive; saying it’s high single digits when actually it’s low teens does not seem to me materially deceptive; but if—as I read OPs post—[b]you imply the number is like three when it’s actually like 25, I do think that’s not fair to your partner. [/b] 
[/quote]

Why? How does that actually affect them? Name concrete ways that it affects them. [/quote]

Simple. You can't trust a liar.[/quote]

But how does it affect you if the number is 25 instead of two if she was honest?[/quote]

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