“Body count” discourse has somehow turned into one of the internet’s favorite ways to make dating even more exhausting. People argue over what number is too high, who gets judged for it, and whether any of it should matter once you actually like someone.A 2025 study looked at 5,331 people across 11 countries and found that sexual history does affect how willing people are to consider someone for a long-term relationship. As the number of previous partners increased, interest decreased. This pattern held across every country in the study.The more interesting finding was who was doing the judging. Men and women reacted to sexual history in almost the same way. The familiar online argument that women get punished for having more partners while men get a pass didn’t really show in the results. Differences between the sexes were small and inconsistent across most of the samples.Your ‘Body Count’ Matters to Potential Partners, but There’s a Surprising CatchResearchers led by Dr. Andrew Thomas of Swansea University didn’t just ask participants how they felt about “high body counts.” Instead, people were shown timelines representing fictional partners’ sexual histories, with each mark standing for one previous partner. They then rated how willing they would be to pursue a long-term relationship with someone who had 4, 12, or 36 past partners.Interest dropped as the numbers climbed. No huge surprise there. What did change things was timing.“People use sexual history as a cue to assess relationship risk,” Thomas said. He pointed to concerns such as STIs, infidelity, emotional instability, or ex-partner drama. But the study also found that people were more forgiving when someone’s higher number of partners was concentrated further in the past.So someone with 36 previous partners was judged less harshly if their sexual activity had slowed down over time than if most of those partners were recent. People seemed to care about the direction someone’s life was going, not only the final number.There were cultural differences as well. Participants in Poland and China were less interested in partners with even four previous sexual partners, while people in Norway and the U.S. were more accepting at the lower end. Thirty-six was a tougher sell pretty much everywhere.The researchers also acknowledged that using sexual history as a shortcut for relationship risk has some obvious limitations now. Dating apps, contraception, and modern social norms make the world very different from the one evolutionary psychology is usually trying to explain.And “body count” is still a very crude way to decide whether someone would make a good partner. But this study does poke a hole in one of the biggest arguments surrounding it. When people were asked who they would actually date, men and women were much closer in their judgments than internet culture would have you believe.The post Scientists Asked 5,331 People About ‘Body Counts.’ Here’s What They Found. appeared first on VICE.