I saw a post the other day where the number of previous sexual partners was being used by RPers to suggest that they are less or more likely to be long-term relationship material - that is, the more partners they have, the more likely they are to leave, be dissatisfied, etc.

Two words caught my attention: "likelihood" and "risk", and it suddenly struck me why these arguments felt incomplete to me. Earlier, I wrote a post about correlation and causation, and this idea is similar but a little more specific.

First, having multiple sexual partners doesn't necessarily increase your chances, as an individual, of having less satisfying LTRs or leaving your LT partners. One does not necessarily cause the other, even if there is a relationship between them (that is, if the majority of women who have a high sexual partner count are also women who are dissatisfied with long-term relationships). It is, rather, a matter of character. This, on its own, should indicate that advice like telling women not to sleep around if they want to have a LTR later is not necessarily particularly useful.

But that's not my main point here. The point is that the RP uses this type of information from only one perspective. That is, it is not necessarily a "risk" for a woman with a high sexual partner count to become less satisfied with a LTR, but it is a risk for the man that if he chooses a woman with a high partner count she will statistically be ore likely to come from the group of people that are also liable to be less satisfied, and more likely to leave, LTRs.

But there's a subtle difference here, and one which I think might characterise the RP/non-RP split. RPers are using these sorts of statistics to narrow down the pool of women to one where they are statistically more likely to end up with a good LTR - they are indicators of certain types of behaviours. But this is problematic in one-on-one relationships. To me, it seems that RPers have elevated these sorts of indicators above personally knowing the person. For example, RPers take partner count as an indicator more seriously than getting to know someone's character through sharing some of their lives together (talking, doing things together, spending time together, reacting to things together, exploring things together, etc.).

To me, this raises a big red flag - if someone is judging my character by using my stats to associate me to some average group rather than getting to know me, there's something wrong with their interpersonal skills and relationship values, surely?