A Comprehensive List Of All The Notches On My Bed Post

I used to be able to count the number of people I’d slept with on one hand; although, that hasn’t been the case for a while now. Six: the infamous updated number. Six guys. Six heartbreaks. Six notches in my metaphorical belt. Six half-hearted regrets. Nima, Cole, Andrew, Kyle, Trevor, and Connor. One, two, three, four, five, six. Just like that.

What’s funny is when I was a little girl I always wanted to save myself until marriage. I wanted to wait for the right guy to sweep me off my feet, ask me to marry him, and then the whole clichéd happily ever after would follow. And he would be my number one. My ONLY number. The only notch in my belt.

But life gets complicated and messy, and I was young. So young. And just like many other girls, I unfortunately found my self-worth in guys.

I felt like I needed to do whatever they wanted or they would leave me, alone and worthless. And that’s how it all started.

Nima was numero uno. Number one. The first guy I ever slept with, and the first guy to ever break my heart. Soccer player. Family guy. And need I say — tall, dark, and handsome. I remember daydreaming about our wedding and what our 2.5 kids would look like and if we’d own a golden retriever or a lab… so when he told me that if we didn’t have sex he would break up with me, I did everything I could to keep that from happening. The entire rest of that year was spent tending to HIS needs and whatever he wanted me to do to please him. It wasn’t pretty. I remember feeling ashamed, and most of all I felt completely used. I finally called it quits, and that was the end of that.

Now, on to number two: Cole. The hockey player, the Justin-Bieber look-alike, and the most popular guy in school. I fell in lust and love with him almost simultaneously. And just like clockwork, the day-dreaming started up again and I could picture the two of us growing old together.

Because of everything that happened in my previous relationship, I explained to him that I wanted to focus more on an emotional connection rather than a physical one. At first he was okay with it, but then he wanted more. We ended up sleeping together just once in our almost two year relationship. I was okay with it, and he explained to me that he was too, but in hindsight I guess he really wasn’t. We never got around to living out my daydreams of growing old together because he thought that sleeping with multiple girls while we were still a couple was okay. Notch number two.

Andrew, Kyle, Trevor, and Connor. Three, four, five, and six. I’m going to talk about these guys as a whole because that’s how I think of them. It was like a big domino-effect of bad decisions. Notches. Heartbreaks.

After my first two failed relationships, I had pretty much given up all hope on a normal relationship. Because all I had ever known up to this point was that all guys really wanted was sex, I figured if I took my emotion out of it and participated in this highly-functioning hook-up culture we live in, some guy would magically fall in love with me. I thought that maybe if I did things a little out of order, sex before relationship, it actually might work! Boy, was I wrong.

Instead of one of the four actually wanting a relationship in the end, all they ever wanted was sex. Come over, get undressed, yada, yada, yada (and yes, I just yada-yada-yada’d sex). I felt used. Over and over again. It was like my first relationship had become a broken record. I tried to interact with the domino-effect of guys without any emotion attached, but it turned out to be an impossible task. I ended up developing feelings, and I ended up heartbroken every single time.

Now the reason I’m telling you my number and my dumb mistakes isn’t to scare you away from men. Not every guy just wants sex. But a lot do.

So my advice to you is to just be careful of your heart.

Make sure when you decide to have sex it’s out of love. Make sure you don’t find your self-worth in guys who won’t matter in the end. And most of all, make sure the guy you’re with respects you enough to listen to what you want, what you need, and what makes YOU comfortable because when you look back at all the notches in your belt, I hope you don’t regret a single one.