A wine connoisseur with an amazing rack and a dog of an ex-husband. She leads a pretty normal life as a number cruncher, wife and mom/slave to three cats.
Apparently I was rather young the first time I had sex. That’s what people tell me when they hear ‘my number’ anyway. It didn’t feel that young to me at the time. I was fourteen. It was 1988.
What did I know about sex at the time? Plenty. A friend had given me The Joy of Sex as a gag gift. And I had studied it. Prior to that, aside from the basic mechanics, the only instruction I had had on sex I’d gotten “on the street” because all my mother had to say was “Sex is a very wonderful and beautiful thing between two married people.”
I put that in quotes because I remember it verbatim. Because she said it in those exact words over and over again. It was actually more like, “Sex Is A Very- Wonderful And Beautiful Thing Between Two Married-People.”
Spoken in monotone.
That was it.
Unlike other first time stories I’ve heard, I wasn’t pressured by the guy to do it, at least not in the traditional sense of “C’mon, baby, let’s do it. You’re giving me blue balls.” It was my idea.
In retrospect, it was not one of my better ideas.
But I don’t regret it. I have always been one to go my own way and this experience was no exception.
My boyfriend at the time, let’s call him Mike to protect the stupid, was clearly more…um…‘experienced’ than me. I suppose I was “the good girl” to his “bad boy,” he did have a mohawk after all. But he actually didn’t try much with me when we would make out. I do remember him once trying to finger me while we were kissing and I gently moved his hand away … because I had my period.
Ew, gross!
But I didn’t tell him that. How embarrassing.
He never tried anything else ‘underneath clothing’. He behaved like a gentleman in that regard. I remember thinking that was odd. I wanted to try more, experience more. Or find out that I didn’t by saying ‘no’ if he tried something I wasn’t ready for. But that one act of pushing his hand away had apparently sealed my fate.
Then came a time, perhaps a month or two later, when I didn’t see him for a week or two. I think I was grounded. I was pretty much always grounded because my crazy motherthought I was out partying, boozing and having sex. It probably had something to do with the fact that she had found that book hidden in my dresser. But I wasn’t doing any of that. My mother drove me everywhere I went. She called parents before I went wherever she drove me. She was completely delusional in her accusations.
I can’t remember which came first, the rumor about Mike and another girl or a close friend telling me she had lost her cherry. I don’t think it really matters which. The point was, I now had a really good friend who had ‘done it.’ And I had a boyfriend who apparently wanted to do ‘it’ and was perhaps doing ‘it’ with someone else because he thought I wouldn’t do ‘it’.
I decided to find out what ‘it’ was all about. Being a fourteen-year-old girl, of course, I also did ‘it’ thinking ‘it’ would help me keep my man. That reason makes me want to kick my former self now. That is the stupidest reason possible and if my mother had only had a real conversation with me about sex…
I told him I wanted to do ‘it’ and I conspired to be somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be (divorced parents can be useful that way: “didn’t she stay at your house last night?”). And we did it.
It was…painful, I guess. I’ve heard many describe it as traumatic. Not for me. It just…was. It hurt. He tried to back out of it because it was hard to um…ya know…insert tab A into slot B. Especially with a condom on (I may have been young and naïve but I sure wasn’t stupid). There was pretty much zero foreplay. I’m sure there must have been blood but I don’t specifically remember that. He was nice enough about it. And he clearly wasnot as experienced as I had thought he was. He might have done it before but it was clear he hadn’t had much practice.
There was quite a lot of fumbling around. We were in someone’s empty spare room. I think we just had blankets and a sleeping bag, maybe. I don’t think there was even a mattress on the floor. Romantic it was not. A tender moment? Nope. It was more like research.
For my part, I just wanted to do it. Get it over with. Find out what was the big deal. And what I found out was…it wasn’t that big a deal. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it.
He didn’t speak to me after that.
I got away with that rendezvous as far as my mother was concerned but then I think I was punished for some other made up transgression. And so I finally came to the (inevitable) conclusion that if I was gonna do the time, I might as well do the crime. Especially since I had already committed one.
So it was just the next logical step that I went to a kegger. There, I met that other girl he had been with. He hadn’t spoken to her since either. We became fast friends and gave him so much shit for being an asshole toboth of us that he left in a hurry.
And that was that.
The whole thing really was all very matter of fact.
I wish I had known better than to try and use sex to keep a man. I wish that that experience had actually taught me that lesson. What I learned, unfortunately, from that lesson was that men (boys) want sex. And if you want a man, you have to give him sex. But you can do it on your own terms. But you have to do it.
I also wish that my friend, the one who had told me she lost her virginity, had included the part about how it was rape. She didn’t tell me that until about six years later. I still want to punch that guy.
Has my attitude toward sex changed since then? Of course.
Has my attitude toward my mother? No.
Talk to your kids about sex! Openly! Honestly! Encourage them to wait but don’t make it taboo! Teach them how to respect the opposite sex! Instill in them a healthy attitude towards sex!
I didn’t have a horrible first time. But I could have. And I did have a long road of reprogramming my brain, relearning what I needed to know and think about sex.