By Dani Alpert

I may be going out on a limb here when I say that for most of us, we fancy ourselves the next best thing since butt plugs when it comes to our prowess and mad skills in bed. We will go to our graves thinking that we’re the most adventurous, sensual, nasty (fill in your own sexy adjective) sex partner that our lover, significant other, or spouse has ever had the pleasure of fucking. In my case, Miss Tina Turner said it best, “Better than all the rest.” That’s what I choose to believe anyway.

This got me thinking about how many of us have compared ourselves, sexually, to all of those that have shared time with our lovers between the sheets. After only a few minutes of this insipid line of thinking, I can confidently say that it is a one way ticket to Looneytown. That is if you don’t know how to spin it properly. 

How can we not think, or obsess, for a brief moment or several months, about how we stack up to our partner’s past paramours? How can we kick our ego out of the bedroom? Because isn’t the ego what this is really about? I’m just saying. Why can’t we stop ourselves from asking our partner questions like, “Could Sasha squirt like me? Come on, be honest, who blew you better than that? Did Melvin give you multiple orgasms?” On some level, isn’t it human nature to compare ourselves to the ones that came (pun intended) before us?

We all want to be, ‘the best of the best’, the sexual high standard. I certainly did, er do. Sex can bring out the best in us but it can also turn us into psychotic green eyed monsters if we’re not careful. My boyfriend and an ex-girlfriend of his used to have sex for hours a day, and she was a squirter. I completely understand and envy the ‘amount of hours’ portion of the show, but squirting? Where the hell is the allure in that? Is this supposed to be sexy? It sounds like a whole lot of messy to me. The proverbial wet spot is bad enough, and now I’m going to add to the spot, and make it a full-fledged puddle? No thank you.

In the early days of dating my boyfriend, I asked to hear stories about his sexapades with his ex (because I’m an idiot) and sometimes they would bother me. I thought that if I didn’t squirt myself (or him) that somehow I had failed as a sex partner and that I didn’t measure up. As if squirting was the apex of bad-ass sex. AND as if squirting was something that I could control. It’s like height. You’re either 5’4” or you’re not. Just like you’re either a squirter or not, and there ain’t nothing that you can do about it, if you’re not. I’m done. I’ll get off (pun intended) of it now.

All of this comparing is a friggin’ head trip that no one needs and it has proven to be absolutely useless and unproductive. The focus should be on what you can do in bed, finding your individual talent and practice, practice, practice.

What does all of our comparing mean anyway? Perhaps it’s really about our personal sexual insecurities? Do we feel threatened because deep down (pun intended) we’d like to be better lovers but we don’t know how? Do we secretly want to like anal (but don’t) because our lover used to do it with his ex ALL OF THE TIME, and we don’t want to be a party pooper? That last question wasn’t a personal statement because just for the record, I enjoy anal.

Most of us have past lovers, and we have to look at the simple fact that those that you are comparing and contrasting yourself against are just that, past lovers, as in, no longer. And then ask yourself this, if the sex was so earth shattering awesome, why isn’t your lover and his or her ex still squirting each other? Sorry, I had to.

If anything, learning about your lover’s exes can be motivating. It might even inspire you to step outside your sexual comfort zone and do a little experimenting, as long as your consciousness is in the right place and it’s a positive one and not coming from a negative, jealous place. Do it because you want to be the best lover you can be, not because your partner told you about the time he, or she and his or her ex had sex twelve times, in twelve hours, orgasming 144 times collectively, while riding bareback along a beach in Majorca.

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