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.
Nevertheless, I knew my parents had only ever had each other and theirs was a profoundly lasting love, so it made sense to emulate it. So I’d not had sexual partners either, but more boyfriends than I could count since I started dating in my early teens. Telling Shaun about them filled me with regrets. I wished I’d been more abstemious. He never said so, but I suspect he did, too.
Anne Atkins doesn't regret only having one sexual partner - her husband, Shaun Atkins. Pictured: Anne and Shaun getting married in July 1983
The truth was, with my parents’ happy example and a determination to have the best, I never wanted to go all the way with any of them.
Several men had asked me to marry them by the time I was 20. Some who fancied me went on to be extremely successful household names — but I didn’t want that ultimate intimacy with any of them.
Then Shaun fell in love with me. We were never really ‘going out’ but we knew we couldn’t live without each other and after few months, he proposed.
We wanted each other so much we agreed to marry straight after our final exams. Throughout that year of waiting I thought: ‘If one of us dies now, we’ll never experience that superlative expression of love.’
It almost seemed worth pre-empting our wedding night in case of a fatal accident . . . But why would we spoil it?
Of course, I haven’t tried the other way — just as someone with multiple partners can never try mine — so I’ll never really know the difference. But I do know our sex life couldn’t be better. Total trust, total freedom and no jealousy whatsoever.
Last summer our beautiful, intelligent, very much desired (and several-times-proposed-to) daughter married, in her late 20s, having made the same choice that we did. So we must have got something right.
Novelist Olivia Fane, from Sussex, wishes she had been a virgin on her wedding night in 1982
I married my fourth lover — after divorcing the fifth
Olivia Fane, 53, is a novelist. She has three sons from her first marriage and two from her second to her husband of 20 years, Mark, who she lives with in West Sussex.
When I was 16, my mother said to me, ‘Darling, you are so lucky to have been born in these liberal times. I was a virgin when I married your father, and look at all the great sex I missed out on.
‘You, on the other hand, must have as many lovers as you possibly can. We must put you on the Pill straight away so you can have the best fun of your life. You lucky, lucky, girl!’
But of course, as all self-respecting teenagers are, I was a rebel. I even, briefly, considered becoming a nun.
Every holiday a series of well brought-up young men would pick me up in their sports cars and drive me 120 miles an hour up the A3 — ah, those were the days — in the hope that I would have sex with them afterwards.
My mother even arranged for one ghastly man to land his helipcopter in our garden, and whisk me away. When we landed on a rooftop in London and he took me to his flat, I saw what was on the cards and ran away, somehow finding my way home again.
I eventually lost my virginity at 18 to a dashing young soldier I met at a party, under pressure not just from my mother but from the whole world.
But what a waste of time it was. I remember reciting Latin verbs all the way through it and then saying to my poor lover, ‘Have I lost my virginity yet? Does that count?’
My first husband, Adam, was lover number five, although my other four barely counted. I wanted to know if there was a difference between a good lover and a bad lover, but I never found out because they were all pretty indifferent. We were all so young and inexperienced.
I rather wished I had been I had been a virgin on my wedding night in 1982 — and that, like Elizabeth Bennett in Pride And Prejudice, my husband and I had shared something secret and intimate.
Adam and I drew up what, in theory, was an open marriage contract (still rebelling against my mother, I suppose; once married she would’ve expected me to be faithful) but in practice became our downfall.
For Olivia's second marriage, she returned to her sexual past and ended up marrying the fourth man she ever slept with. Pictured: Olivia and Mark, her second husband
I was too ensconced in motherhood to think about having sex with anyone else, while Adam was clearly looking for something more.
I returned to my sexual past to find my second husband, Mark. He was actually lover number four.
While I remembered him as a boy, I met him again to find he was now a man — and wow, what a man. You can imagine what a strange yet wonderful coincidence that was.
DID YOU KNOW?
Women have an average of eight sexual partners in their lifetime while men have 12
So when my first marriage fell apart about two years later I got in contact with Mark again.
Two more children and 20 years later, we seem to fit so much better than when we were those gauche undergraduates. Now our family has grown and flown the nest, our relationship is more romantic than it has ever been.
I don’t believe in this ‘sex is so wonderful and normal we should all be doing it all the time’ business. I wish there was more mystique about it.
In the Seventies, if you weren’t having lots and lots of sex with different men, people called you frigid.
Nowadays, the pressure seems even worse — my five seems such a tiny number. I feel positively pure.
Olivia Fane is author of The Conversations: 66 Reasons To Start Talking (Square Peg).
Angela Neustatter believes that having a couple of sexual partners before settling down can be a good idea
Flings taught me how to recognise a keeper
Angela Neustatter, 70, an author, has been with her husband Olly for 42 years. They have two adult sons and live in North London.
The voice on the phone was deep, expressive and full of teasing humour. This was 1964, I was 21 and had just started my first job with a news agency in King’s Cross, London.
Steve was a freelancer working for the same agency. I developed a sixth sense for when he would ring, and made sure to answer the phone.
Then one day a tall, slim, black-haired young man came into the office. He greeted me with a mischievous grin: ‘Angela, I presume?’. It was that voice.
We had lunch together and the chemistry was instant. Although I was a virgin, and positively puritanical about my contemporaries having casual sex Sixties-style, sleeping with Steve — who was attentive, serious and romantic — seemed right when it finally happened, three months later.
I fell for him very hard and our four-year affair was a loving, valuable experience. After our break-up I had several — at a push, I’d say seven — meaningless flings.
Then, in the early Seventies, I went to work in Amsterdam and met Ron, a psychology lecturer who made me feel like the only person on earth when I was with him.
But monogamy, he explained, was repressive. I would have to share him with other women.
I was determined to try being ‘modern’ in such a sexually liberated city. Finding myself one of several sexual partners in a relationship that could not progress emotionally felt increasingly seedy. I quit after 18 months.
I was determined to try being ‘modern’ in such a sexually liberated city. Finding myself one of several sexual partners in a relationship that could not progress emotionally felt increasingly seedy. I quit after 18 months.
Married for 42 years, Angela and Olly met in a bar in Amsterdam
A year later I met Olly in an Amsterdam bar. I liked his boyish blond good looks and carefree approach to life, but our backgrounds were so different I couldn’t imagine making a life with this free-spirited son of a shipyard worker.
I only began to fall for him more deeply the evening he came to collect me for a date. A dear friend was there, in bits, because her boyfriend had just ditched her, so Olly immediately invited her to join us.
Similar acts of kindness have always marked my times with Olly. He is not a romantic, but he shows love by being reliable and honest.
I realised I could imagine him as a father to my children; all of which brought a warm depth to our sex life that, 42 years later, still remains.
I don’t think endlessly sleeping with people is good preparation for finding Mr Right. Casual sex with no depth can dull the understanding of what love-making really is.
But having at least a couple of meaningful sexual partners before settling seems a good idea — it certainly taught me enough to know I should stick with this one, when I found him.
Angela Neustatter is author of The Year I Turn . . . A Quirky A-Z Of Ageing (Gibson Square).
Gillie Coughlan says she had 'a blast' when she was younger and doesn't regret the number of sexual partners she has
Yes, I slept around but I have no regrets
Gillie CoGhlan, 59, a freelance PA and music manager, has been married to Status Quo drummer John Coghlan, 67, for the past 32 years. They live in the Cotswolds.
I remember my first kiss, at 15, like it was yesterday. I was sitting in the back row of the cinema in Bristol on a date with a friend’s older brother.
When he leant over to kiss me, my stomach turned somersaults. I loved the rush of excitement — it was like turning on a switch.
Living under the watchful eyes of my boarding school teachers meant I didn’t get the opportunity to lose my virginity until three years later, but that wasn’t for lack of teenage fumblings.
My ‘number one’ was Will, my first serious boyfriend who I met while working at the same music company in London. Half-Italian and half-English, he was four years older than me with long, black curly hair and blue eyes. I was completely smitten.
After only a week together we did the deed at his house in North London and it was wonderful, not awkward at all. I’ve always been confident and aged 18 was slim and beautiful, with not a care in the world.
The relationship rumbled on for another 18 months and I was devastated when we eventually split up. But coming of age in the Seventies — after the Pill had been invented but before the shadow of HIV — was a wonderfully liberating thing.
I loved sex from that first experience and went on to approach it rather like a man. I never had a problem separating sex from love.
Working in the music business alongside all these gorgeous boys I would think: ‘I’m going to have some fun with you.’ Invariably, I did. After work on Friday a whole gang of us would hot foot it from London to a house in the country and return late on Sunday, having partied all weekend.
I had many a dalliance in some unusual places, from planes to trains. Keeping count was not something I did, and I can’t quite remember exactly who all of them were. During that period of my life I had a lot of boyfriends, so some would overlap.
Gillie moved in with John Coghlan, a drummer for rock band Status Quo, a week after they met and they were married six years later
Some say that those who have a lot of sexual partners must have low self-esteem, but that’s not the case at all. Sex can simply be fun and frivolous — and great exercise. It doesn’t have to be taken too seriously.
Then, when I was 22, I met John at the backstage bar of the Hammersmith Odeon and it was lust at first sight. Within a week, we’d moved in together and married six years later.
By that time I had probably had 20 partners, but John never minded a bit — being a member of Status Quo and seven years older than me, he’d notched up at least five times that number.
DID YOU KNOW?
Men take 88 days on average to tell their partners they love them, while woman take 134
We knew we were perfect together and what started as lust developed into a lifetime of love.
I still get plenty of offers from men of all ages, but far from being jealous, John laps it up when I tell him. He’d hate it if other men didn’t fancy me just as much as he does, and he knows I only have eyes for him.
My number of partners may have stopped climbing but my sex drive has never dipped throughout our 32-year marriage, not even through the menopause.
When John goes away, as he currently is with Status Quo on a reunion tour, I always make a point of going to see him — we can’t bear to be apart for too long. I think John and I give a lot of couples half our age a run for their money and believe we were meant to be together.
I don’t regret the partners I had before him — I had a blast, and if I’d stopped at a ‘respectable’ number, God knows where I’d be now! Certainly not with my soulmate.
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