Pre marital nookie.

Goodness Bijou, I'm curious as to how old you are if you first married 73 years ago? Think you must be our oldest gransnetter. Respect!

I don't think 6-12 is that many really. If you reckon girls become sexually active around 16 and don't marry until late 20s early 30s,less than 1 a year. Allow for a couple of long term relationships, a couple of teenage flings, a couple of drunken fumbles and it soon mounts up. There are risks, but men face them as well.

granjura you are right to highlight the pressure that there is.

As for the sheer numbers I have read it is far more than the numbers quoted in the OP with some having such a multiplicity of partnerings that they just don't remember.
If each person has had relations with just the quoted lower number of 6 by the time they reach 25 and each of them also with another 6 and you extrapolate out those numbers they are truly mind boggling.
One health worker told me that effectively each person has relations with everyone in that chain and since nobody can know how healthy and disease free they all are then we cannot be surprised at the facts put out by the NHS of the spread of sexual infections having surged off the scale.

Yes, partly this. Also in my experience as a teacher, often girls who lack affection and self-esteem due to family reasons- and are desperate for attention and 'love'. One of my ex students had several children, all taken away from her as she was clearly unable to look after them - which was truly tragic.

Girls, women- having such low self-esteem and being pressurised into sex - especially in bad conditions and circumstances- worry and saddens me much more than a sheer 'number'.

Granjura, I think some girls do it, also, just to get dates or be popular. Or is that what you mean by not wanting to be "left out?"

Unfortunately, I think that's just what would happen in some groups if a girl insisted on saving herself for marriage or even for a committed relationship. Of course, I always think girls caught in that kind of group could/should just go make new friends. But I guess they don't want to or they fear it won't be that easy.

Elrel, that wouldn't surprise me, LOL!

Absent and Whitewall - re the accuracy of numbers - a friend who worked with a lot of students from the 60s on reckoned as a rule of thumb, young men doubled their number of sexual partners and young women halved them.

Good for you Mama.

Truly, for me it is not about age, or number- but the 'spirit' - eg is that something a woman wants to do and is prepared to take responsibility for (could never understand my friends who behaved like 'victims') - hopefully jointly with their partner.

As a teacher and mum, I've come across so many young women who were having regular and often casual sex under pressure and duresse - feeling that unless they did they would be left out or bullied- because they have no self-esteem. THAT is truly tragic.

My little part of Yorkshire must have been very behind the times: at 17 (1978), after several months of using condoms with my boyfriend, I asked my GP for the pill, and got a very prudish lecture. I've never forgotten her saying that if my boyfriend wasn't prepared to abstain from sex until we were married, what would he do if / when I became pregnant (inferring that sex was definitely off the agenda for pregnant women)?
Despite being painfully shy, I stuck to my guns and left with a prescription, though could never bring myself to go back to her for another three months later!
Two years later I married said boyfriend and we're still together now. He has been my only partner. Sometimes, it makes me feel very old-fashioned

Elrel I used to get Lucozade free from work- the worst possible drink ever- yuk!

LOL harrysgran!

I was a teenager in the 60s and I remember it as sort of a mixed bag - some kids having sex , others having it "other ways" (the technical virgin thing) and still others practicing the strictest of traditional morals. Maybe that's true in any era though.

And TBH, as I recall, the girls who stuck fully to traditional morals didn't get dates - at least not at my high school. But I don't know if that was true everywhere.

By the same token, I'm sure some kids had "all" the information they needed and others were more confused. It was an era of transition, I think. As a PP said, the Sexual Revolution didn't reach every area at the same time. I don't think it reached every family or individual either. So, IMO, it's hard to make generalizations about how things were. Maybe we can about the early 60s, which, to my mind, were much like the 50s. But the middle and late 60s were more a time of change.

Anyway, by the time I was in my 20s (in the 70s), yeah, I knew some women who were having sex more randomly, yunno, like guys, but just a few. But love didn't lead to marriage so easily anymore, so, yeah, some girls ended up having more sexual partners than their moms or older sisters would have cuz they had more than one "love" before they found someone to marry. I still knew some women who married their first though. I'm not so sure about the guys, LOL!

So, anyway, if people are having 6-12 now, it doesn't surprise me, except that I thought AIDs had made people more cautious. Guess not.

Looking back not as many as I wish I'd had judging by today's standards.

Don't forget an element of bragging in those numbers.

I'm baffled by 6-12 being an average. Surely that would make it 9!

I have been looking at my family history lately and a Cornish relative became a father at 14! That must have been hard for the family. It was in the late 1700s I might add

Does the 6–12 average apply to both young men and women? Presumably, the numbers supplied in any survey had to be taken as truth because it would be very difficult to check the accuracy. Was the group of people questioned for the survey self-selecting or random?

ajanela - Lucozade?
(I remember a film sequence of a young man rapidly exiting a chemist's shop clutching a bottle!)

At a funeral recently on DH side I was chatting to one of his cousins who said he had just discovered after his Mother had passed away,a whole new family in USA. He was a GI baby
They say times are different in war.

I had 3, the first at college whom I adored and who loved me equally (we would have married, but he was 26 years older and already had a long-term girlfriend, so eventually we reluctantly agreed that he should do the right thing), nos 2 and 3 I did marry. No regrets that didn't have anyone else

In the film "A kind of lovin" with Alan Bates he plucks up courage to go into the chemist to buy some condoms, he wants to be served by the man, and at the last moment a stern woman steps up to serve him and he is so embarrassed he asks for something else. Can't remember what.

That's how it was. I remember after being married in 1967 it took me courage to ask for the pill and the doctor was helpful.

All I'm saying is that I'm very interested in family history and have been researching mine on Ancestry. Marriages and birth dates. Interesting. Nothing's new, it's just that we talk about it now.

LOL my DH is fully aware of my glorious past- and so are my daughters and family. And as Ana says, I would never ever discuss family issues here ever- but happy to talk about those great and free days of the 60s... If I was in any way shape or form be 'ashamed' I wouldn't.

It does seem that there is indeed a huge difference between those of us who were aged 16-20 in the 60s, and those in the 50s.

Exactly Ana. As said, no regrets and no shame at all, so no problem in sharing.

No point me posting, I've got a very bad memory!

I can't see what the problem is. No one seems to have any qualms about discussing family rifts and fall-outs with in-laws, sometimes revealing more of themselves than they probaby realise.

Who would care how many partners a bunch of grannies had before they were 25? And if you don't want to post on this thread, then don't!

Maybe your DH's!