It's interesting that only one out of the lot of them was (at least within the last 6 months) gay. All the rest with same-sex relations were bisexual (at least within the last 6 months).
They're probably in touch with their emotions and express them in a healthy way and aren't afraid of intimacy outside of sex and romantic relationships
I kept looking at that too. It's crazy to me that there are only 2 cycles in the graph and one is the big accidental one. It honestly makes me think that either something must be wrong with the data, or it's reflective of some deep principle of math or sexuality (e.g. that people won't fuck around within their close social grouping nearly as readily as they will with people on the outskirts of it).
The authors wrote that they were surprised too and went back to talk to the students and apparently there was an unwritten rule that you don’t date the ex of the new partner of your ex. So if Bob and Alice split up and Alice starts dating Ben, then Bob should not date Ben’s ex Alison.
There are 6 people who've had gay sex that I could find and all but one of them are bi (or at least bi-curious). That seems like a statistical anomaly.
It's a 90s high school, somewhat rural and religious, according to the article. Either there really were few homosexual relationships there, or the students didn't want to reveal them.
I think people feel liberated to say they're gay these days, so there are much more people claiming to be gay than in previous decades. On the other hand, there's still a lot of homophobes and also quite some biphobes around, so there's probably a lot of bi people that present as hetero or even gay.
I'd assume that most people are at least a little bi, and that they'll try that out in high school even if they later decide they won't pursue it.
He is not saying anything about it being weird there are gay or bisexual relationships. Just that every instance of a homosexual relationship is also bisexual.
Like its interesting there are no purely homosexual relationships as you would expect from an accurate sampling
They'd have to lie about who they slept with, and I expect the other person might have something to say about that if it was not true.
I wonder if they verified each claim from both sides.
Edit: it's a scientific paper, so there's no need to wonder!
In fig. 2, and in all discussions presented here, all romantic and sexual relationship nominations linking students are included, whether or not the nomination from i to j was reciprocated with a nomination from j to i.
These aren't all sexual relationships. So if someone says "I had a crush on X", maybe there would be a line. Even if X did not have a crush back. Maybe one date is enough for a line.
This is actually very interresting. I always found it hard to understand how some people can have so many sexual partners, and then there are people with very few of sexual partners. I had this theory that there must be some subculture of people who are really into this, date eachother in this group which causes their number to increase abnormally. It was just a silly theory but this sort of supports it?
If you look at this a little closer, you'll notice that there aren't actually that many highly connected nodes.
The big structure is mostly composed of single link chains.
And that's even more interesting. As someone who was not part of any of the graph in high school / college, how would a big link of chains play out in real time?
Like "The Mary and Tom met at a party. Next week Tom stumbled into Lucy by the lockers..."
I “dated” a classmate for a month at 14 until he wanted me to sit on his lap and I broke up with him because I felt like I’d be too heavy but didn’t want to admit that, so I didn’t know how to talk to him about it.
If you’d asked me at 14, if he was a romantic partner, on god I’d have said yes.
I had 5 or 6, and if you count kissing a lot more. By now I've had several more and if you count kissing I've completely lost count.
For reference, I'm not particularly attractive and I'm right on the border of normie but not quite. I think my weird friends think I'm a normie and my normie friends think I'm a nerd.
There were guys I went to high school with who had far, far more sex than I ever did. More than I was even interested in because they'd sleep with just about anyone who was willing at any party.
By 12th grade, some of the "cool kids" I went to school with probably had 10-15+ sexual partners under their belt.
I left school at 16 with exactly one person to put on a graph like this.
My first two relationships were like 5 years long in total. After the second break-up things accelerated a lot, but in school I think my situation was pretty standard.