Like, having 23 partners because, excuse my french "Elle voulait simplement baiser à tout va" is just fine (tm), they did what they want, and that tells nothing else about them that the fact they did what they enjoyed doing.
On the other hand, if they were looking for the one true love and thought they'd find it in 23 different people, it may reveal something else about them..
That they prefer a type of partner which does not align with their goal.
Or that they are a terrible judge of character.
Or that they are easily manipulated in general.
Those may be red flags in their own right, if those traits are undesirable to you.
People go out, have short relationships / flings, one night stands without any intent other than have fun. It's fine. Let people have things.
What if there is a diamond in a pile of garbage ?
If someone legitimately enjoys casual sex AND has no baggage OR some kind of dark triad trait.. is that sort of person common, or rare?
As for the act: If there's no harm to anyone, its great. ON that light, casual sounds logical. But is your own body just another playground ?
Throughout history, there are numerous records of temperance being a virtue and hedonism being a vice. Coming from all sorts of corners.
Its not as clear cut.
I'm making no assumptions _about_ intent.
I'm saying whether it's a "red flag" depends _on_ intent (which is then assumed to be known, at least internally by said person(s)).
I'm making no correlation between having causal sex and the attempt to establish a long-term relationship, I don't know how I could more explicitly define those as two different goals.
Maybe if I write it in a more simplistic (albeit, less precise) way:
* Many relationships may likely a red flag in a person who's seeking long-term relationships (ie, they're trying and failing very much, they're probably not a very good partner, or has very good judgement).
* Many relationships are not a red flag in a person who's not seeking long-term relationships (they're doing their thing, and all is good, as long as you're aligned with that).
For much of history (pre-industrialization) men weren't often as tall due to begin with, due to more prevalent nutrient deficits. Additionally, rather than trawling a site with thousands of men you were largely limited by your location for potential suitors, so you simply couldn't be as picky (if you had a choice at all, as women often didn't).
I generally find that people need to be much more careful when discussing these kinds of topics. People are very quick to attribute certain attributes of desirability to biology, and there are no doubt common threads amongst humanity, but there have also been enormous swings in social trends that have ignored these factors.
For the same reason you don't want to deal with a client who's churned through 23 other contractors before you either, or an employee who's held 23 other jobs.
They're either high-conflict, non-committal, fishing for something and not finding it, using sex as a coping mechanism/don't take the act itself seriously (won't be the last time you hear them tell you sex with strangers "means nothing;" just wait until your first big fight). There's also disease risk (mainly herpes).
Nothing about a body count that high signals stability or commitment. I'm sure plenty of people can and do change and can commit and be stable; we could be friends but they are not people I would bet the rest of my life on. The only three people (two males, one female) I know with body counts that high all got caught soliciting or banging children decades later, so my experience with this is admittedly subjective.
Why would you jump straight to that conclusion?
At 40, it is entirely possible for a prospective wife to have had at most ~3-5 partners in her lifetime. She would have been in long-term relationships for most of her adult life. Anyone with a history of long-term relationships is a pretty good bet that when trouble hits, they'll be there for it.
23 partners behind anybody is a red flag, but these days a bigger red flag would be any kind of vague abuse story surfacing early on (same goes for prospective friends or employees). Anyone who starts new relationships with strangers by defaming the previous one is going to be trouble (never hire a whistleblower). You will also forever be kept in check through fear of inadvertent "triggering" of vague traumas from past vague abuses you'll never fully understand, and when they leave they'll shake you down while telling the next partner how abusive you were to them. I'd say this is a gen-z thing but the worst two cases I've seen were perpetrated by the 38-50 age group, and /r/divorce has no shortage of these sorts of histrionic scam artists.
For the same reason, I would also recommend coming to terms early on vis-a-vis porn. This was by far the single most cringeworthy post I've ever seen on Reddit (the OP deleted it, but the comments retain context):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Divorce/comments/15b79d6/recording_...
The OP comes in claiming she caught her husband taking upskirt videos of strangers at a music festival 8 years ago. Except what she describes isn't an upskirt video by any interpretation, yet she continues to use all sorts of lurid language to frame him as a liar, a criminal, a porn-addicted sex addict, a sexual predator, and a voyeur-- and she was quick to change the story (then it became "he secretly filmed me during sex") and insult anyone who challenged her narrative. If it applies to you, settle the porn question early on so you don't have someone later trying to publicly humiliate you by litigating what you do on the toilet. (And for fuck's sake never claim to be a sex addict to explain away porn use, much less document that by agreeing to go to counseling for it. Just own it then and there-- divorcing over porn makes her look petty, but divorcing because you're a documented sex addict who bailed on therapy makes you look like a monster.)