But Ella isn’t exactly a prude. She describes herself as being “notoriously blunt and to the point about sex”; she was the first among her close friends to shed her virginity, at 19, to a New Hampshire boy she was dating in her freshman year of college. Since then, she’s slept with six different people, but they were nearly all either close friends or boyfriends. (She tends to hook up with her male pals. “I have exactly one male friend I’m close to whom I have not made out with.”) Ella’s mom is gay, but she’s never experimented with girls. “Sorry to be dull, but I was harassed way too much about how I must be gay ’cause my mom is. So I’ve been quite the nice straight girl.”

Ella once had to get tested for an STD because of a scare (all tests came back negative), so she vigilantly encourages protected sex. She’s always offering condoms to friends, and she leaves them on her desk in case her housemates need them. But she admits that she’s stopped using them since she’s been in a yearlong relationship with a Boston-area boyfriend. She doesn’t really like how they feel. “The two people I think of as sucking in bed ... I had sex with them using condoms.”

The (reformed) collector
SM, 30, 60+ previous partners
Mike doesn’t mean to sound like a porn star, but the Allston-based musician swears he can’t remember how many women he’s slept with since he lost his virginity 12 years ago. “It’s in the low 60s, but — and I don’t mean this to sound like a Ron Jeremy thing — I just don’t remember everybody’s name, so it’s hard to have an accurate count.”

When Mike reflects on his formerly promiscuous tendencies, his explanation calls to mind a Revenge of the Nerds subplot. “I used to get ‘Faggot this, faggot that’ called to me a lot in high school.” So he flung himself crotch first in exactly the opposite direction. “As Neanderthal as it is, [being promiscuous is] kind of showing them. The dudes that were supposed to be all macho have no idea — just no idea — the life I’ve led.”

The life he led never included more than three different partners in a day; there was usually one but frequently two. “I would often not end up going to sleep wherever I woke up. I had many toothbrushes in Boston.” He also didn’t distinguish between oral or genital partners. “Honestly, the recent phenomenon of kids not considering oral sex real sex just boggles my mind,” he offers. For the record, he estimates that he’s had between 12 and 15 anal-sex partners.

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Mike describes himself as “solidly lame looking,” but says one reason women so often got naked with him was because he came across as both cocksure and humanly flawed. “I’m very confident when I meet a girl. And then you let the tiniest bit of vulnerability slip out — it’s not intentional, it just tends to happen.” And he continued to be successful for the same reasons the scorpion got a ride across the river from the frog: he never promised to be anything other than what he was. “I was the least trustworthy person I knew, so girls would just skip it and not try to trust me. That’s not to say I wasn’t fun to be around.”

But Mike calmed down when he turned 30. “I look at my parents, who made an awesome life, and I want that now. I want a wife, and want to be a dad to a kid like my dad was to me, and a house with a yard.... Either that or keep hooking up at the Middle East till I’m really old and pathetic and sleeping in a shitty apartment with posters everywhere. It’s no contest.”

Mike is in a committed, monogamous relationship with a woman he calls “stone gorgeous,” “bright,” and “curvy” — he wants to keep certain distinguishing details vague for fear of  publicly embarrassing her. He still has an insatiable sexual appetite, he admits. He just deals with it differently. “Jesus, if you knew what went on in my head.”

The happy couple
SM, 25; SF, 28; 25 previous partners (combined)
Mary and Jonathan met nearly five years ago through mutual friends. They slept in the same bed on their first date but kept to their own sides. “He’s told me since that he watched me sleep,” remembers Mary, a lithe dancer and native New Yorker. “He had to leave because he was like, ‘I am in love with this girl and I need to go.’ Then he wrote a note and put it in my shoe.”

Mary and Jonathan continued hanging out. “Our first kiss, I was like, ‘I’m done, this is huge, this is it.’ It was crazy.” Although neither one was a virgin, they didn’t consummate the relationship initially. Even before they did, Jonathan asked Mary, who’d been planning to leave for New York, to be his girlfriend. “He said, ‘We’ll deal with New York when it gets here, but what we have is too awesome to not do something about,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah you’re right.’ Then we were like, ‘This is really kind of cool that we haven’t had sex.’ ”