Anne Atkins, 58, has only one sexual partner - her husband
Olivia Fane, 53, married the fourth man she slept with
Angela Neustatter, 70, thinks sexual experience is important
Gillie Coghlan, 59, says she slept around but doesn't regret it
I’m so proud I’ve only ever slept with one man
Anne Atkins, 58, a broadcaster, has been married to Shaun for more than half her life. They have five children and live in Bedfordshire.
‘Do you regret it?’ someone asked me recently. We were discussing me having only one sexual partner. The one I’m still with more than half my life later. I was as astonished as if you’d asked me if I regret winning an Oscar.
For there are some things you can’t lament: having children, investing in a knockout successful business, or both of us being virgins on our wedding night.
It might not have been easy, but you couldn’t possibly regret it.
We’re rediscovering what our forebears always knew: our sexual history matters to our future partners. It certainly mattered to me. Shaun was quite simply the sexiest man I’d ever met when I first ran into him at Oxford University, aged 21. (He still is.)
Not least because he had never so much as touched a girl before me. Correction: he’d kissed his girlfriend when he was 14. After that, he decided to save himself for the right girl.
So when he told me he was passionately in love with me — despite his resolution to stay single — I had a coup de foudre, too. He’d never said it to anyone else, and presumably never would.
Unlike him, I’d been brought up in a Christian home, though it was not remotely strict. My mother told me it had been right for their generation to save themselves for marriage, but perhaps it was different for us.
