I haven’t lost my virginity yet. I had a boyfriend at age 20. We were pretty great at fooling around. I thought about losing my virginity to him. When I told him I hadn’t had sex before, his response marginalized my sexuality and focused on him so much that it turned me off and I decided he wasn’t the right guy. Our relationship didn’t last long after that. I felt mature and inexperienced, self-assured and pathetic.

Aside from telling him, no one else knows I’m a virgin. While I can’t believe it is such a big deal, I also realize I perpetuate that by not speaking up. Yet in the same way, I avoid speaking up because I am still deciding for myself what it means. I want to be calm, safe and secure in myself before sharing my body with someone else. If that is shameful and innocent, that is this culture’s problem, not mine.

The older I get, the more ambivalent I become (I use the term ambivalence in its medical/psychological definition, “simultaneously occurring contradictory attitudes or feelings [such as love and hate]”, not in the “meh, I don’t care one way or another” sense). It’s just sex, a physical delight! But ugh, it’s not! The pressure the impending conversation will put on whichever relationship it will happen in is enough to cause me to want to just get it over with some sad, random drunken night. Or just lie and say that I did indeed have sex with that first boyfriend. I suppose I want to be with someone where he realizes its a facet of me, but that facet does not define, change or disturb with whom he has been developing a relationship.