Open almost any discussion about modern dating and you’ll eventually encounter the same advice: Men should “play the field”, date widely, sleep with different women, gain experience, learn what you want. Women, meanwhile, receive a very different message – know what you’re looking for, but don’t have too many partners. Be experienced enough to be confident, but inexperienced enough to remain desirable. Be selective. Be discerning. Somehow, arrive at certainty without taking much of a journey.

The contradiction is obvious.

If men are expected to gain experience by dating many women, where exactly are all these women supposed to come from? We cannot praise one side of an equation while condemning the other for making it possible.

But beyond the double standard lies another question that interests me far more: does having more relationships actually make someone wiser?

We’re often told that it does. That the person who’s dated twenty people must understand love better than the person who’s dated three. That experience can be measured by accumulation.

I’m not convinced.

Psychology has long recognised that experience alone isn’t what helps us grow. Growth comes from self-awareness, reflection and the motivation to change. Experience simply presents the lesson. But reflection determines whether we learn from it.

For instance, two people can live through the same event and come away having learned entirely different lessons. One repeats the same patterns without ever questioning them. The other examines what happened, accepts uncomfortable truths, changes, and grows. The event is the same. The outcome is not. Relationships are no different.

Someone who has had three meaningful, long-term relationships may have experienced trust, heartbreak, compromise, forgiveness, conflict, intimacy, grief, change, commitment and personal growth. They may have spent years learning how they communicate, how they argue, how they love and how they heal. Someone else may have dated thirty people and never moved beyond the early stages of attraction. They may have repeated the same mistakes over and over again without ever stopping to ask “why?” – which of those people is truly more experienced?

We often confuse experience with repetition. But repetition is not the same as learning.

Imagine someone who has driven badly for twenty years. We wouldn’t automatically call them an excellent driver simply because they’d spent longer behind the wheel. Or someone who has worked twenty different jobs but never reflected on why each one ended. Time alone doesn’t produce wisdom. Neither does a tally of romantic partners.

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of asking, “How many relationships have you had?” Maybe we should ask, “What did they teach you?” Because relationships aren’t trophies to collect or stamps in a passport proving you’ve travelled. Their value isn’t found in how many you’ve accumulated, but in how deeply you’ve understood them.

The healthiest relationships often demand lessons that cannot be rushed. Learning to communicate without becoming defensive, understanding your attachment patterns, recognising the difference between chemistry and compatibility, learning when to apologise, learning when to walk away and learning when to stay. These lessons aren’t guaranteed by numbers. They’re earned through honesty, self-awareness and the willingness to grow.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been persuaded by the idea that someone with fewer relationships somehow knows less about love. A person who spends years building one meaningful partnership may learn more about commitment than someone who has spent years chasing novelty. Neither path is inherently better. Both can lead to wisdom. Both can also lead to very little if we never stop to reflect. What matters isn’t how many people have loved us, or how many people we’ve loved. What matters is whether each experience leaves us a little kinder, a little wiser and a little more capable of loving well.

We live in a culture that loves numbers: age, income, followers, body count, relationship count etc. They’re easy to compare because they’re easy to measure. But the most important parts of being human have never been measurable.

You cannot count emotional intelligence. You cannot quantify compassion. You cannot put self-awareness on a graph. And you certainly cannot calculate someone’s capacity to love by counting the number of names in their past.

Perhaps wisdom has never been about how many roads we’ve travelled? Perhaps it’s always been about how much attention we paid along the way.