What's Your Number? Why Asking About Past Sexual Partners Doesn't Work

Are you a "perfect 10"?

Hey, what's your number? No, not the one to your cell phone, the other one.

It's a question so popular that many a Cosmo quiz has attempted soliciting the secret sum from their readers, and that a movie of the same title was released just last year—mostly to negative reviews—illustrating just how universal this premise might be: A woman discovers that, according to (surprise!) a magazine article, her number of past sexual partners is double that of the average, so she embarks on a hunt for long lost loves in the hopes that she's mistakenly overlooked a potential husband—all this, so she can avoid adding another notch to the proverbial belt. God forbid.

Because asking a woman for her other number is as taboo (and tacky) as inquiring about her age or weight, a dating site recently surveyed 1000 men and women in search of a slightly different figure: the perfect number of past partners they'd want their new lover to have.

Half of all women, and nearly the same percentage of men (at 46 percent), declared 10 the ideal number of past sexual partners. However, when it came to actually asking their partner the ultimate question, it appears inquiring minds really didn't want to know, and the numbers dipped. Only 35 percent of women professed wanting to know the total number of their new lover's old conquests, this compared to 30 percent of men. So, besides the curiosity factor, does the grand total ever really matter?