I love my partner. But can I come to terms with her sexual history?

Is this about compatibility rather than sexual partners, wonders Annalisa Barbieri. You need to dig deeper into why her past hurts you

I am in my early 20s and met a wonderful girl at the start of the year. I had only slept with one girl before, and since we’ve been together she has told me she has slept with nearly 20 other guys, including one on the night we met. And she’s played around with “countless” more. Some of these are close friends she meets regularly.

It may help you look at this differently if you imagine how you would feel if she found it hurtful to hear about your lack of sexual partners

I’ve tried explaining that it hurts to hear about this kind of history. But that makes her close down until I apologise. She says her personality is naturally flirtatious and that she doesn’t want to feel controlled or required to change to better fit our relationship. Yet she seems to feel for me the way I do for her. I am even going to meet her parents soon.

I feel quite torn. Never before have I so truly clicked with someone and I am most certainly in love with her. I worry I am setting myself up for disappointment, although I try to remember the philosophy that it is better to have loved and lost. How can I put her past behind us when so much of it is reflected in her current behaviour?

When I had my first serious boyfriend, I was shocked to find out he was oasis mobile still in touch with his ex (platonically, as it turned out, but it took me a while to see that was possible). I thought people split up and then never saw each other again. I changed my view as I got older and gained perspective through experience. Your situation is different, but I understand about the disconnect between you and your girlfriend being at different stages of your sexual lives.

The man who hurt me the least was the one who had had the most sexual partners

I think it’s a fine line to tread between being true to who you are and what you believe, and not appearing judgmental and controlling with your girlfriend. Similarly, it’s a fine line for her to walk between being true to who she is and not behaving in a hurtful way towards you. Which is why I wonder if this is more a question of compatibility than of sexual partners. A friend once told me that you know you’ve found the right person (I think there is a different “right person” for different stages in our lives) when they love you when you are most yourself – whatever that self is. For example, if someone is flirtatious, they need to be with someone who isn’t bothered by that, and maybe even celebrates it. The alternative is a short road to misery.

Be careful that you are not seeing her history as a reflection on you, for it has nothing to do with you, just as your sexual history has nothing to do with her. Past sexual partners are no guarantee of anything in a relationship. The man who hurt me the most had little sexual history of his own.

Because I do wonder if there’s some moral judgment from you and that may be something to do with the narratives around sex, and how women were “meant” to behave, when you were growing up. So much of what we feel about sex has been learned and isn’t what we really feel. Part of becoming our true self is losing those ideas and discovering our own thoughts about, and around, sex, including what we like and don’t like.