Losing your virginity isn’t so much about timing but about who you are with when you do it.  If you feel that you can completely trust the other person when you decide to let it go, then it is really a beautiful thing and can be an amazing experience.  Giving it away to the wrong kind of person, though?  I think this just makes it frustrating and saddening.

I didn’t lose mine until I was 25, and I lost it to someone I really couldn’t trust who I was in a very dependent relationship with.  It resulted in rifts between me and my good friends, as well as my parents, who always insisted that I wait until marriage.  Those took awhile to patch up.  For my whole life up until that point, I’d been fighting a battle between what I wanted to do (have sex) and what my parents wanted of me.  That conflict made it extremely difficult for me to have positive thoughts about sex, or any thoughts about it for that matter.  From this, I learned that even if I as a parent think my kids should wait until marriage, providing them an environment where they feel open to discuss it with me is important.  At least if they want to be irresponsible, they will feel safe.

I think there are some definite signs that the person you are with is not a person you can trust.  They might pressure you into having sex when you’ve said you don’t want to.  It might feel like they have ulterior motives.  Maybe they don’t have your best interests in mind and don’t care about you as a person very much.  I’d say that when you are with someone you can trust, it just feels different to make love with them.  It doesn’t feel strange or foreign, just like you are giving yourselves to each other completely, with no strings attached, and that feels good.

And now to completely rescind what I just said (in a way).  There is a wrong time to be exposed to sexuality, and it’s TOO EARLY.  My friends introduced me to my first pornography magazines when I was 9.  That was definitely too early.  That means I had my first exposure to sexuality of a dubious reputation which presents what I perceive to be extremely unrealistic gender roles and that is explicitly targeting the young male mind when I was far too young to be able to understand what was happening to me.  That really prevented me from thinking about sex and gave me some strong ideas about it when I had no ability to contemplate them, nor anyone besides my young and immature friends to discuss it with. 

Bottom line: we need to create an environment where people feel safe talking about how they feel, and we need to be educated enough to discuss it with them.