I am in a relationship with a man that I truly love. We are now engaged and I know he is the one for me. But recently the subject came up of how many people he had been with and I asked him to tell me the truth.

But his response was not what I thought it would be, he was honest with me and told me that he had been with 23 other people. I have been with one other man besides him and that really really bothers me that he has been with that many women. What should I do?

I’m going to start off by telling you, and hence everyone reading this, what you shouldn’t have done, which is to ask this type of question. In my opinion all such questions can lead to is trouble. Jealousy is not easily controllable, and once you open the Pandora’s box of a lover’s past love life there’s a very good chance that some sort of trouble will ensue. The two of you are planning a future together so the past is just not that important. I’m not saying that you don’t want to have a vague idea of a potential husband’s past, but in certain areas, it’s better to leave the mists in place. (And had he asked, I would have told this man to lie. How stupid to give you a number like 23. He should have known how you’d react.)

You will never forget that you heard this statistic, so I can’t tell you to forget it, but what I will advise you to do is not to dwell on it, even for a second. When the thought pops into your mind, quickly think of something else. The first few times will be difficult, but eventually it will become a habit and eventually your brain will stop pushing this thought towards the surface. On the other hand, if you allow yourself to wallow in what his past must have been like, if you spend hours talking to girlfriends about it, if you start asking him questions as to who they were, then this relationship is not going to survive. So you can either make this molehill into a mountain or you can walk away from it and you’ll discover that the further away from it you are, the smaller it will seem, until one day it will disappear altogether.