'Every man ticked off on his fingers was someone I'd been compared to at one point or other. Someone kissed better than me. Someone had more stamina, a more seductive voice'

It was a Friday night in mid-July, around nine o'clock, and Hugh and I were at the dinner table, eating this spaghetti he makes with sausage in it. We've been together for 23 years, and for some reason I waited until this moment to ask how many people he'd slept with before we became a couple.

Hugh looked at the ceiling, which is crisscrossed with beams, and, to my great consternation, spider webs. I'm vigilant, really I am, but out in the country there's no keeping up with them.

"So?" I said.

"I'm thinking," he told me.

I used to know how many people I'd slept with. After meeting Hugh, though, I took myself off the market and the figure faded from my memory. If I were to slog through all my old diaries I could certainly retrieve it. Twenty eight?

Thirty? Do I include those early gropings? They felt significant at the time, but does it qualify as sex if you never took your clothes off, or actually touched anything with your bare hands? I wanted to ask Hugh, but he was too busy counting. "Thirty two, thirty three..."

I put down my fork. "You're not finished yet?"

"Shhh," he said. "You're making me lose track."

It shouldn't have surprised me. When you look like Hugh, all you have to do is leave the house and people will approach you, especially gay men, the dogs. His handsomeness was never my own personal opinion, rather, like the roundness of the Earth, something society generally agrees upon. Without my face to use as bait, I had to work a lot harder than he did. There are times, I'll admit it, when I had to beg. That said, some of Hugh's earlier choices seemed poorly thought out to me, especially once Aids came along.

"Thirty five... thirty six."

Every man ticked off on his fingers was someone I'd been compared to at one point or another, not overtly – he's anything but cruel – but surely it happened. Someone kissed better than me. Someone had more stamina, a more seductive voice. I'm confident enough to compete against a dozen of his exes, but he was moving on to the population of a small town.

"Thirty eight, thirty nine…"

By what miracle had neither of us contracted Aids? How had we gotten away? I don't just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn't have a name and no one understood how it spread. One of the men Hugh had lived with – a professor he had in his first year of college – had died of it in the late 80s, and surely there were others, on both my side and his. Yet for some reason we'd escaped, had prospered, even. Now, here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.

Whore.

• Do you have one that got away? Send your story of lost love to mind@theguardian.com and we'll publish the best.