The Virginity Project

Back in the 1980’s when I was a teenager and we felt like the first generation of women who could make like a man i.e. have sex with whomever we chose (not without its issues but that’s a story for another time), it wouldn’t have occurred to us to think of virginity loss as anything other than awkward penetrative sex with a member of the opposite sex. This was the demarcation line between cool and not.

On a personal level, wearing a faded pink Fruit of the Loom t-shirt and tumbling in the grass with a French boy with cheekbones like razors on a balmy Spanish evening, I made sure I was cool, even though the physical experience itself still makes me wince when I think about it (the story behind it, however, was enough to inspire a book). My point being that times have moved on. People are freer to define their first sexual experiences in a more personal and frankly, interesting way. To give you an example, a female interviewee once said this to me:

"After a few months of sleeping with my boyfriend, I started to feel the twinges of a possible orgasm. And then he made me come. That’s when I really started to lose my virginity."

THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. Is that not one of the most joyous, evolved sentences you’ve heard? Everyone should be able to put pleasure at the center of their sexual experiences whether it be the first time, the fiftieth time or the last time - and not to concern themselves with the route they took to get there, whether it be trad penis in vagina sex, tongues in all manner of places or the classic dry hump.

And it definitely shouldn’t involve guilt, shame or at the worst, a doctor, politician or religious person who feels the need to define what to this day and forevermore will remain indefinable. There is no such thing as a test that can prove or disprove female virginity. I sincerely hope that one day we will live in a world where the need to even discuss this will cease to exist. Your virginity, or ‘lack’ of, is nobody’s business but yours. End of story.

Today’s story teller drives home, if you needed more reasons, why, contrary to what Susan Sarandon says, you actually DO need to vote with your vagina if you value the freedom to make your choices about your body. Susan Sarandon has enough cash to flee the country and not worry about the outcome of this election if it all goes tits up. If you don’t, close the lid of your lap top now and go and vote.

Hi Kate! I love your blog. Reading about other people's experiences is amusing and interesting. So I wanted to share mine. I'm Samia. I was born in 1995 and I'm from the United States. 

I come from a conservative Christian home. I was raised to believe that your virginity is special, only to be given to your husband. And also that no good guy wants a girl that's already had sex. Youth pastors used horrible analogies to get this point across like ‘Would you want a present that's already been unwrapped? Exactly’.

This scared me a lot. I've always been intrigued about sex from the time I got ‘the talk’ in fifth grade, but I didn't think I wanted to do it until I was married. I even had a purity ring, which sits, dusty, in my jewellery box as I type this. I had also been told by many people that you would experience immense guilt after doing it before marriage. So I felt pretty confident in my virginity pledge. 

I met Evan when I was 16. He was so easy to be around. I never felt uncomfortable or judged by him. Soon after we started dating, the topic of sex came up and it turned out he’d had a pretty crappy experience with it at first. He had been kind of talked into it by a girl he was dating for a few months and didn't enjoy it. We decided it was in both our best interests to wait. 

Fast forward two years later; we were on his bed, getting hot and heavy. He asked if I wanted him to ‘go down there’, I reluctantly said yes and I didn't regret it. It was bliss. 

After about a year of doing everything but intercourse, a few weeks ago, we tried it. 

This huge experience that everyone told me about was finally here. I was anxious to see what my own ‘first time’ would end up like. 

It was pretty bland. It only lasted about four minutes, neither of us finished. It was very uncomfortable and slightly painful. Afterwards he held me and kissed me and told me he loved me like thirty times. I was excited to have done it, and I can't wait to get more practice in. 

The thing is, I don't feel guilt like I was told I would. I don't feel this big emotional connection either; I was already so emotionally connected to Evan. He's the love of my life, and it was simply one of many first experiences we have shared together. 

That is my theory. Sex is what you make it out to be, and for me, it's an experience to share with someone. Don't get me wrong; I'm glad I waited to do it with Evan. But honestly, we had been ready to do it for a long time! Our relationship is strong and solid, with or without sex. And that is what my youth pastors left out: Sex does not make or break a relationship. People do.

The New Normal

 

‘That picture looks like two slugs performing a mating ritual’. I couldn’t disagree with this comment as I sat pouring over a set of interviews I spent a lot of last summer sourcing & editing….and the lurid image chosen by The Guardian to illustrate them.

I was in Athens when the interviews went online. They feature people discussing their sex lives so I was performing wifi gymnastics in a street-side cafe to get onto the website and find out what people thought of them. I love the comments. They’re like an extension of the feature for me.  A bonus piece of ‘content’ if you must. An added extra peep into people’s interior lives’.

Because whomever we may appear to be in normal life: the barista who helped kick start your day today with hot coffee, your dad or a fighter for ISIS, my interviewing world has taught me that every person we encounter has a vulnerable place inside them that needs to be heard. Every single person – no exceptions. Trust me; I’ve collected a book’s worth of virginity loss stories. I’ve been told some stuff and I’ve come to the conclusion that vulnerable places are neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. They just are. May as well wrap your arms around them and make friends. They’re not going anywhere.

And from time to time, these soft spots can be spied in the comments section of The Guardian. I know! But I had my socks knocked off a couple of years ago when they published a feature I’d written about being single. Men and women of all ages had let down their guards and told me how they felt about being un-attached, (with varying degrees of happiness it must be said). Some were delighted about it and some really weren’t.

You’ll rarely meet a more cynical crew than those who inhabit the comments section of the Guardian but reader, they sung like recently dumped canaries.  A nerve was twanged like an out of tune guitar. The response to my interviewees was poignant, tender, brotherly at times. At one point commenters began to counsel each other. ‘Don’t give up mate’ one reached out to another. People revealed their innards to each other in a way that took me by surprise. It is precisely this reaction that inspires me to keep mining. To keep finding out how people think, feel and function in this funny, awful, incredible world. To keep reporting from the front line of what it is to be human.

And when I say frontline, I mean the actual version of our lives and not the curated version that we present in its place, on social media, at the school gate, wherever. Slipping between the slats of these two versions of ourselves is what gets me out of bed. Once I’m armed with this emotional cargo, I attempt to create what social research agency Mass Observation first called ‘weather maps of public feeling’ back in 1937 when they began doing what entire ad agency planning departments do today.

‘The science of us’, Mass Observation named it i.e. finding out who we really are and not who we say we are.

The genesis of last summer’s feature lay in a bunch of interviews I originally conducted about LOVE. I wanted to know how our ideas about the L word evolve over time. I have thoughts on this (actually I have a million thoughts on this). But what would a child tell me? What does the word mean to someone who has not been around for that long? Compared to someone who has been around the block a few times? And what notions do we distill about love when coming towards the end of our lives?

I did the interviews (in the process interviewing a man who had been married for 60 years. He knew some stuff about love), got pulled swiftly in another direction and ended up pitching them to the Guardian as a Valentine’s day piece. It was January at the time so they laughed me out of the room and the interviews are still on my hard drive.

But they did say this: you’re always banging on about sex & relationships Kate, so why don’t you ask people to talk you through their sex lives instead? Yes, just like a sexual CV. The whole shebang, from start to finish.  Go and find out about the bits that people bring to mind when they’re asked to smile for a photograph and the heinous shags they’d rather forget. What makes them so? What is the architecture of a rocking sex life? We want to know it all. Go forth and ask people what they get up to behind closed doors (and other places). Anonymously. That way they can say what they like. So I did.

Well now. First of all, in the pits of a terrible summer, during which my mum retreated slowly away from me in a hospital bed, the ability to journey into the most private part of other people’s intimate lives allowed brief moments of mental flight during the saddest time of my life. There is much to be said for an absorbing project when you are having a shit time. I could have loved it for this reason alone, for keeping me sane and for connecting me to something that is very much about being alive.

But it was also the sheer breadth of people’s experiences. We are so convinced that this post Fifty Shades world is new. It is not. People have always dabbled, had sex with multiple partners or experimented with different genders (ok not everyone and not all the time, but you get my drift); it’s just that now we live in a culture that can have a conversation about it…just.

All of my interviewees bar one wanted to be off the record. People understandably do not welcome the thought of work colleagues/in-laws hopping online to read about their sex lives. But they definitely want a place and a space in which they can chew over their intimate lives. Especially given the highly sexualized world in which we now live.

I’m the lucky person who got to listen whilst they did that. Here are some précised thoughts on what I heard:

I loved the variety and the ways and means with which people found their way quite naturally towards what they wanted, both pre and post internet: ‘back in 1987’, 64-year-old Christopher told me, ‘my partner and I set up a role-play group….we put an advert in a magazine, and a lot of people joined, including trans women.

I am hetero-flexible, he continued. ‘I respond sexually to girls, transvestites and transsexuals, as long as they’re dressed as girls. As soon as they put on men’s clothes, its not working for me.’  And so many more gems like that that I had to cut as I couldn’t squeeze the cascade of information into the frustratingly small word count. Talk about killing your darlings, I could do another book on these interviewees alone.

Sarah was the hardest of all to edit as she talked me through her Revenant-style epic life story via a broken home, the gay women’s liberation movement, a deep dive into the hardcore gay male S&M scene, addiction and now, fully back in the light, working with what she calls her ‘naked men’ (a massage service) and discovering ‘the simple sense of playfulness that gets lost in adult sex’.

How very beautifully put.

‘I’ve had some wonderful experiences of joyful innocent play. And those men tend to look a bit bewildered afterwards.  They sort of go, woah that was really...WOW, thank you. And nothing really complicated has happened. Its just about showing up and in a way that’s possible because its this kind of container…’

What a breath of fresh air.

I hear a lot from the younger generation, raised as many of them are on mainstream porn, about the pressure to come up to the sexual mark, how difficult it is to throw the porn rule book out the window and go on a genuine exploration with each other.  That we often assume we should ‘know’ what our partners want, as if the information might be absorbed just by looking at each other.

That if you have to ask, it might mean you’ve got a problem. That sex is a formula to be followed. Each time the same moves, even if its with a different person…*snore*

As I have found during years of talking to people about this stuff, the people with physical disabilities are almost always the most clued up because they have been put in a position, literally, where they have to experiment and communicate in order to get what they want. They are fearless and way ahead of the game as a result.

‘Disabled people have a blessing in a way’, 28 year old Matt confirmed,  ‘because they learn that there are lots of other things that you can do that are way more pleasurable (than penetrative sex)…..a lot of men have a narrative in their head about how sex should play out, which ends up prohibiting genuine experimentation. I see sex as play’.

Ahh there it is again. The magic word: play. Strangely discouraged as soon as we become ‘grown-ups’. Note to self: get Matt to write a book about sex & play. I know enough about him to know that he would probably call it ‘Crip sex for normals’; or something similar, and that it would be a best seller. I do so love a man who walks the walk with way more confidence than most – with one less leg than most of the population.

My panel were insightful on the emotional as well as the physical. ‘One thing I have learned is to maintain my privacy and not tell my partner everything’, Hattie told me. ‘Not that I’m being deceitful, but having boundaries – whether that’s physical space or not oversharing – is a good thing. There needs to be a little bit of mystery there, too’.

This is a great point. Our current relationship model appears to be built around the idea of being, or attempting to be, everything that one person can be to another: partner, lover, best friend & co-parent all wrapped up in one exhausted unit.

I know lots of people who can live this way, and an equal number who can’t, but try to because we have been hoodwinked into thinking that total transparency is ‘romantic’ and in Hattie’s words; retaining something of ourselves is ‘deceptive’. Crap! And people are surprised when the known becomes dull and sexual desire takes a nose dive. Which is fine if you’re ok with that and not so great if you’re not. FYI, Esther Perel is the queen of this subject. Read Mating in Captivity for further enlightenment.

On other fronts, my male interviewees, both straight and gay slayed myths with lightsaber-like precision. Jonathan on the angst of a commitment-phobe partner: ‘I don’t find uncertainty thrilling; I find it a pain in the arse. The more you feel that sense of commitment, the more playful and expressive you are able to be. A big part of sex is getting to know someone…’  

Paul, on being a young gay man:  ‘people sleep around and it’s not my scene. I remember going on Grindr when I was 16. I was terrified…’

I also liked the way one of my interviewees summed up the BDSM component of her partnership with prosaic simplicity:  ‘It’s really nice to have someone take control for a little while. It doesn’t mean they take control in the rest of our life together. At the end of the day, it’s just an act.’ Nothing more complicated than that.

I mentioned the architecture of a rocking sex life before but let it also be said that a sex life should be whatever you and your partner want it to be: rocking, sedentary, whatever moves you, literally or metaphorically. Christopher likes getting it on with girls….and boys dressed as girls but ‘in the end, it’s the cuddling and the spooning that matter.’ 

Swinging from chandeliers can be fun but finding someone who thinks the sun shines out of your backside is also a deal breaker. Twenty five year old Sadie nailed it: ‘My ex had a look that only certain boys are capable of giving: it’s about love, and who you are, and wanting you because of that, and that’s really hot’.

It really is. We live in a brutally visual world, where we can reject or accept another person with the flippant sideways swipe of a finger across a smart phone. Clearly life has moved on from my mum’s era, when you passed quickly from child to adult hood, got married to the first person who looked halfway decent and if you were very lucky, fancied the pants off each other. But modern life has challenges too. We are liberated, for sure - and lucky to be so – but current sexual mores can be oppressive in their own way. And complicated.

I often think to myself that in a hundred years’ time, sociologists will look back at the late 20^th/early 21st century and think holy smoke, what a tricky time that was for women and men to try and get to grips with each other. Because we are poised on a tipping point between the patriarchal age (literally. Centuries of men being in charge) and something new and different and we constantly make the mistake of thinking that its sorted. Job done. That men and women are on an almost equal footing and therefore, everybody should know what they are doing and exactly how we should relate to each other.

We don’t know. Not because we are stupid but because it takes longer than the evolutionary equivalent of five minutes to work out how to co-exist after such seismic change. Women gaining control over their fertility in the 1960’s was a massive deal. The repercussions of which we are clearly still sifting through today. Simply put, and with increasing frequency, women do not depend on men in the way that our mothers and grandmothers did.

Today’s young Western women can direct the course of their own lives and as a result, we are all shuffling around, occasionally bumping into each other, (some because they clutching their out of joint noses), trying to re-arrange ourselves into new groups in light of this humungous power shift and discovering in the process –thank god – that there are a lot more choices than there used to be. There are all sorts of new ways to fit together. That there is something for everyone. That you don’t even need to identify as exclusively male or female anymore if you don’t want to, let alone tie your sexuality down to boring old gay or straight but it is discombobulating.

It is painful at times. We are very much mid shake down. Men aren’t sure what their role is in this new order and women are impatient whilst they work it out. There is collateral damage as we work our way towards the relationship iterations of the future.

And all of this is reflected in the complexity and color of our sexual lives. It’s all being played out in bedrooms and living rooms as we Netflix and chill, fall in and out of partnerships, raise children in new kinds of families and figure out how it all fits together as we wave goodbye to a generation who for better or worse, often partnered for life. It makes me unfeasibly happy to know how much my mum, like many of her generation, enjoyed her second marriage. She passed on in the autumn, just shy of her fortieth wedding anniversary to my step dad. There is a story that involved love.

We are all headed in the right direction, much as it sometimes feels otherwise. And we are doing it at a speed commensurate with actual change i.e. it doesn’t happen overnight. It happens as it happens, in its own good time.

Whilst that bubbles away on the back burner, talking helps build bridges, between men and women of all persuasions and types, between old ways and new. And if you can’t face talk then doing what you’re doing now, i.e. peeping through the port holes of other people’s lives is the next best thing.

Either way, together we are creating some pretty cool weather maps of public feeling, even here on this blog. We are building the science of us brick by brick, as we walk the walk, dare to talk and play our way towards the new normal, whatever that may be for you.

You can read the full edit here

 

Viva la difference

I won’t lie. Last week was a long one and the thought of cuddling up in bed on Saturday morning was infinitely more appealing than arranging to be on the Euston Road by 10.30am.

But I had a ticket for the Wellcome Collection’s Symposium of Sexual Desire, so I got my shit together and I didn’t regret it one bit. This day long symposium promised to ‘delve into the complexity of sexual desire, tracing connections between history, sociology, psychology and neurophysiology’. It did so, with bells on and everything in between.

Two things spring to mind when thinking about this event. Research into an area that affects almost every waking moment of our lives is in its infancy and this fact blows my mind. We have built a rocket that could send a man to the moon but we still know next to nothing about the very reason that we exist in the first place. To illustrate my point, it’s only recently that we have begun to let go of the idea that vaginal orgasms are a myth for most women. It is simply not the way that the majority of the female population get off! But a man with a beard deemed it so sometime last century and culture dictated that these facts were not disputed.

Until now. Things are changing and Saturday’s programme at The Wellcome Collection confirmed this. The day was full of enthusiastic, insightful characters lifting away the layers of our intimate lives and trying to make sense of them. ‘It’s difficult to be scientific about such a subjective area’, said one of the speakers, but they gave it their best shot.

My second point is that at times, I am guilty of being negative about sex & the internet. I am disturbed by the fact that internet porn has become the default sex education. I’ve talked about this before. But the flipside is that the internet showcases a much more nuanced and less black and white model of sex. I see this in my own work all the time. If you’d asked a bunch of teenagers 10 years ago to define their loss of virginity, I’d wager that most of them (the heterosexual ones at least) would have mentioned penis-in-vagina sex.

Not today. Young people are freer to define their experiences on their own terms because they are exposed to more fluidity and choice. They understand that there are lots of different ways to experience sex and pleasure. So if the experience of having your first orgasm with someone meant more to you than having what, let’s face it, can be anti-climactic penetrative sex for the first time, so be it. Sexuality is a wide ranging arena and there are fewer and fewer ‘right’s or ‘wrongs’.  Just what feels right for you.

Asexuality, a phrase that I feel sure is set to become a buzz word for the future, was laid bare by Liz McDonnell & Susie Scott from the University of Sussex as they offered up a palate of asexual persuasions. Susie and Liz illustrated the spaces and places where the so called ‘normal’ sexual world overlaps with the asexual. Once again, who knew that asexuality was so nuanced and colourful? It reminded me of how shocked I was (at myself more than anything) when I first read the account that later become ‘The Asexuality Story’ in my book. Because I realised that asexuality was nothing to do with prudishness or having a personality schism or something that happened to people who had had disturbing experiences with sex.

It was more often about people who, whilst they might lack sexual desire, definitely did not lack interest in romance, intimacy or even passion. That there are all sorts of different ways of ‘being’ in this world and a lot of us are pretty limited when confronted with anything that strays from the norm. Here is some lovely writing on the subject of difference from Canvas8.

Katherine Angel led a fabulous conversation around the language that we use to talk about sexual desire, specifically women & desire because language in this area is mostly modelled on a male understanding and that seeing it solely as something that is ‘urgent’ can be prohibitive. That again, mimicking the theme of the day, there are lots of different ways to experience the D word. She also pointed out that that whilst we take male desire as a given, a story is emerging around women being more ‘unruly’ than is traditionally thought and proceeded to mention a piece of research conducted by Meredith Chivers that I really love.  I won’t go into one. You can read it here. But to summarize, women are turned on by just about everything: men, women, monkeys. Boom.

Kate Fisher delighted us with her collection of historical sex objects that she takes into schools to facilitate conversations with young people about sex, intimacy, body image and consent.  What a genius, not to mention genuinely informative idea.

And author Frederick Toates said that we 'needed more narrative based research’ which as you can imagine was music to my ears because this is what you, the readers & participants of this blog have helped me to co-create at The Virginity Project for the past 8 years.  Whilst I am at it, here is another narrative based piece of research I’ve recently completed.

The day could be summed up by Katherine Angel’s quote: ‘There is no normal; it’s just what is commonly accepted’.  So going forward, can we open our minds and commonly accept something curious and new on as many days of the week as possible?

Which leads me to today’s story.

There is little else to say about it asides from the fact that it’s a good thing that people are born with brains and can work things out for themselves because that’s some serious layers of shite that Kacey was forced to wade through in order to find ‘the truth’. Aka, her truth, the only truth that matters and not someone else’s agenda to push gender relations back to the Victorian era. Big up to Kacey for putting pen to paper and sharing it with us.

‘Hi Kate! I love your blog. Reading about other people's experiences is amusing and interesting. So I wanted to share mine. I am Kacey. I was born in 1995 and I'm from the United States. 

I come from a conservative Christian home. I was raised to believe that your virginity is special, only to be given to your husband and also that no good guy wants a girl that's already had sex. Youth pastors used horrible analogies to get this point across: "Would you want a present that's already been unwrapped? Exactly." 

So this scared me a lot. I've always been intrigued about sex from the time I got "the talk" in fifth grade, but I didn't think I wanted to do it until I was married. I even had a purity ring (which sits, dusty, in my jewellery box as I type this). I had also been told by many people that you would experience immense guilt after doing it before marriage. So I felt pretty confident in my virginity pledge. 

I met Justin when I was 16. He was so easy to be around. I never felt uncomfortable or judged by him. Soon after we started dating, the topic of sex came up and it turns out he had a pretty crappy experience with it at first. He had been kind of talked into it by a girl he was dating for only a few months and he didn't enjoy it. We decided it was in both of our best interests to wait. 

Fast forward two years later; we were on his bed, getting hot and heavy. He asked if I wanted him to "go down there" I reluctantly said yes and I didn't regret it.

It was bliss. 

After about a year of doing everything but intercourse, a few weeks ago, we tried it. 

This huge experience that everyone told me about was finally here. I was anxious to see what my own "first time" would end up like. 

It was pretty bland. It only lasted about four minutes, neither of us finished, and it was very uncomfortable, and slightly painful. Afterwards he held me and kissed me and told me he loved me like, thirty times. I was excited to have done it, and I can't wait to get more practice in. 

The thing is, I don't feel guilt like I was told I would. I don't feel this big emotional connection either; I was already so emotionally connected to Justin. He's the love of my life, and it was simply one of many first experiences we have shared together. 

That is my theory. Sex is what you make it out to be, and for me, it's an experience to share with someone. Don't get me wrong; I'm glad I waited to do it with Justin. But honestly, we had been ready to do it for a long time! Our relationship is so strong and solid, with or without sex. And that is what my youth pastors left out: Sex does not make or break a relationship. People do.'

*the painting depicts 'The Temptation of St Hilarion' (who doesn't look like he suffers an over abundance of hilarity) but you can read more here. He's in the Wallace Collection in London. 

Masculinity 2.0

Years ago, my car mechanic, a man I’ve had many interesting conversations with sitting under the arches of his Latimer Road ‘shop’ asked me ‘but Kate, does a man even lose virginity?’

Probably not in the same way a woman does. There aren’t physical ramifications for men (don’t get me started on the ‘cultural’ ones) but one thing I do know is that men spend a lot of time thinking about it. Not so much in the ‘I’m desperate for that to happen’ way.  That’s a given. I’m talking about the multitude of anxieties and questions that go through a man’s mind as he teeters on the brink of sexual communion for the first time. I may never have known this until I decided to write a book and a blog about it. I definitely didn’t think men would queue around a virtual block to enlighten me about their insecurities, heartbreaks and desires. I was so wrong.

Men have been some of my greatest, most forthcoming interviewees and if I’d ever stopped to think about it, why wouldn’t they be? Women have all sorts of opportunities to share their inner worlds. I have been encouraged to express how I feel my entire life. It doesn’t mean I do it but that’s not the point. The option is there and I’ve never been asked to quash my emotions in favour of ‘being a man’. I have not been told to man up when I am under duress.

I am as angry as the next woman about gender inequality. I’m angry on behalf of my mum who didn’t get to do half the things in her life that I’ve got to do in mine (although she has given it a bloody good bash). I am cheesed off about the mingy playground I played in at school whilst the boys got a big yard because ‘boys need to let off steam’. I’m still irritated by the way that some men were happy to intimidate me out of taking to the pool table as a teenager because it was deemed male territory. Play by all means, their faces said, but we are going to stand here and smirk at your attempts to connect the cue to the ball (until the day I played a lucky shot at a traditional smoky boozer and wiped the table out in one go. My smirking opponent, a stranger who had clearly thought he was going to show me the error of my ways threw his cue to the floor and flew out of the door muttering expletives).

All of this stands, but its important to say that for me at least, it is not at the cost of my empathy for men. In my mind, these two sets of thoughts and feelings can sit side by side and deciding that one is right and the other unquestionably wrong is not constructive. We won’t travel anywhere new by refusing to try and understand each other’s plights. I don’t need to cease being angry in order to try and give men a platform. Because the more men understand how I feel, and the better I package that up and communicate it, the more this translates in to real-time thoughtful behaviour. And vice versa.

Writer Matt Haig met with a barrage of vitriol when he proposed something along these lines earlier this week and that’s a shame. Everyone has got something to bring to the table and suggesting otherwise is unimaginative. Lets lick our respective wounds by all means. I have not stopped licking mine since the day I read this – but lets continue the conversation and attempt to evolve at the same time.

In the meantime, The Virginity Project has been moonlighting on behalf of masculinity. I’ve been back to my interviewing roots and talking to guys of different ages and backgrounds about how they experience being men. In doing so, I hoped to discover something about the way that masculinity has evolved over the last 75 years. As ever, my men folk knocked it out of the park. No one held back. Conversation flowed. Tea was drunk. Feelings were expressed. The (very edited) results are published in The Independent today.

I am also re-publishing a peep into the life of a young man, a virgin who wishes his life were otherwise. I will say no more.

‘I grew up in a very religious house. And I went to religious schools. When I started secondary school, someone asked about sex ed and was told that you would have to do ‘Leaving Cert biology’ to get that. At no point did we get any kind of sex ed prior to that. I did biology (for honest reasons!) and the talk could be boiled down to: ‘Sex happens between married couples. That was the talk. Nothing about safety, nothing about pregnancy.  And if you have sex you will be punished. That was my sex ed.

Making matters worse, when I was fifteen, I developed psoriasis, a very unpleasant, genetic but noncontagious skin disorder, which didn’t help my growing interest in girls and my desire to look cool. I learned how to hide it, by growing my hair long and wearing long sleeves/pants all the time. I kept trying with different girls, but was incredibly self-conscious and would often find myself unable to talk to them about anything more than ‘nice weather, innit?’

When I reached college, having finally freed myself from the shackles of small town life, I decided that was a whole load of crap and resolved to get cool clothes, meet interesting people and try sex for myself. It was a bit of a shock to learn that I still had no clue about talking to women. In hindsight, I can see several situations that I could have possibly turned into something more. Maybe. But I kept trying to break out of the repressive programming of 19 years. And then I had a minor freak-out in a club. Under the strobe lighting, the psoriasis on my scalp and upper body stuck out like day-glo dandruff. And this happened every time I went to a club. I still had the bars and events and college. While studying for my masters, I moved into a house and found myself sharing with 7 girls (all with boyfriends). It was an education and I learned a great deal about women. But always, at the back of my mind, I kept remembering how bad the psoriasis could get.

Ultimately, I finished college without ever having a girlfriend. This is despite my friends, frequent trips out and the numerous societies I took part in. The psoriasis was a constant burden. I learned to cover up a lot of my problems in college.

After college, I was in search of work, and found myself in a few strange places, including India and Russia. The jobs and language barrier made it quite difficult to find people my own age. I eventually found employment back home, in the city I went to college. I knew the streets, I knew all the names, the doormen, I knew the bands; I was set. My job was hard and time consuming, but worthwhile. I ventured out several weekends a month, to different gigs or bars. I got a job with a music magazine, and would often get in for free. I started kick-boxing, along with volunteering at a soup kitchen twice a week. I was spending my days working, my nights hanging out with my new friends, and my weekends getting into gigs for free. It was great.

I was and still am generally happy with my lot in life. Yes, I would sometimes wonder what it was like to hold someone in my arms as they slept, but I would just remind myself of the numerous good things in my life and just say it will happen when it happens. I kept myself out there and did things I enjoyed and believed in. I have few difficulties socially, and can talk to most people, but when I try for something more, I fall flat on my face or miss the cues to act.

After an absolutely hellish week at work, I returned to my flat ready for a nice long weekend of sleeping, listening to music and watching TV. Instead, my flat mates had a few friends over and I got talking to a girl who I’m going to call Jess.

She was pretty; she was funny, she had similar hobbies to mine. After a few hours of listening to increasingly bad music, she looked me right in the eye and said: ‘This is getting a bit much. I bet your room is a lot quieter.’

As I led her up the stairs, all I could hear was the theme to Chariots of Fire. She stopped in the bathroom to do whatever arcane magicks women do to prepare, so I classied up my room a bit. The door opened, and a beautiful lady in just a bra and shorts entered my room. We haven’t even kissed yet. She begins to open my shirt, then paused. ‘What… the fuck? She stepped back, vomited on my bed, and asked ‘What the hell is wrong with you?!’

Psoriasis.

She pulled her top back on and walked out. After everything, after getting my life sorted, after getting someone who wanted to be with me because she liked me, and this was how it ended. I didn’t leave my room for the weekend. I didn’t eat, I just slept and watched porn and slept and watched porn. She was the last girl I approached. I haven’t tried since then, about 6 months.

I only ever told one friend of mine about that night. He recommended I see an escort, and gave me a list of his ‘go-to’ girls. Talking about escorts and prostitution opens up a whole other can of worms, I’m not the biggest fan of it, but I’m not going to condemn the ladies involved, and I can understand why some (not all) people go. He then told me to try the ‘pump and dump.’ Take a guess what that is. If someone, man or woman, wants a string of one night stands, I got no problem with that. As long as whatever happens is between consenting adults who use protection, then you can do whatever.

Trying to bring me around to his way of thinking, he told me about the ‘unholy abomination’ he woke up beside earlier that week. I’m sure there are plenty out there, men and women, who can tell similar stories. Go out, get drunk, go home with someone, cold light of day it’s a Hammer Horror. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be someone’s funny sex story, and I don’t want to have one myself. I’m not looking for true love, or waiting until marriage. I just want someone I care about, and who in turn cares about me. I want to bake cakes for someone. I want to hold someone in my arms until they fall asleep. I want to be with someone who wants to be there, not because they have an obligation or for money.

So that’s me. A 26-year-old genetic abomination who never kissed a girl.

Born in Wales'

Coke is the real thing

I’ve been brewing this metaphor for years. Or perhaps the word ‘season’ might be more appropriate. Because its usually around this time of year when, in a fit of pre-winter dread and the realization that my summer short/sandal combo is going to make me look a bit simple within a matter of weeks, I panic buy an item of clothing that I am convinced is going to make me look like a French fashion editor for the entirety of winter. Only to discover shortly afterwards that 1. I hate it and 2. It doesn’t suit me. It doesn’t transform me in the way I imagined. The fashion police are not high fiving me on my way to work. It was a sartorial chimera, purchased in a moment of impulse and insecurity in the belief that it might change my life. In much the same way we sometimes believe a flashy new boy or girlfriend can change our life. Which occasionally they can. But mostly the world doesn’t work that way.

To put this into perspective, a few years ago, I was browsing a cheap high street shoe store when I happened upon a pair of white loafers.  Lets just be clear that up until this point in my life, ‘white’ and ‘loafer’ were two words I would not have enjoyed putting together in one sentence. I come from the 1980’s. White loafers conjured up the wrong associations for my people and I but something about this particular shoe whispered ‘Take Me’.

Or at the very least…‘Try me on. You might be surprised.’ 

So I relented and what do you know? I was transformed into someone I had no idea I could be. The effect was astonishing. I looked polished….but casual at the same time. They looked cool with scruffy jeans. They looked marvelous with a dress. The whiteness – and they were WHITE – lifted and complemented virtually any outfit you care to mention. People commented on them wherever I went. Sometimes they spotted the shoes straight away. Other times they would just look and say ‘You look different somehow Kate. Better. Actually you look really well’.

And to think I could have sailed right by those shoes and never even given them a second glance.

And so it is with relationships, I feel, as I flit amongst the rows of autumn allure in the high street stores.  I often get asked in the emails I receive from young men and women….’how do I find’ - in the manner of someone searching for a needle in a haystack, because that’s how it can feel – ‘the person who is right for me?’ Here is my answer.  You need to look for the human equivalent of the white loafer. Which is to say, expect to be enthralled by the unexpected.

Keep your mind wide open because in my experience, the person who turns out to be ‘right’ is often to be found underneath one’s finely tuned-to-search-for-a specific-type-of-person radar. Which is a tough call in the age of digital romance.  In an era when you can literally swipe someone off the screen of your smart phone and move quickly onto the next individual based purely on a 2 second appraisal of their ‘qualities’. It’s a challenge because what I’m suggesting to you is to think beyond the very thing that catches your eye in the first place and focus on what might give you a more long lasting sense of pleasure. Some of you might be thinking, well, DUH? How else is one going to sustain romance than by looking beyond the obvious? If so, congratulations. If you’re under 30 and you’ve got that sussed then you are ahead of the game because honestly? This was not a concept that was clear to me way back when. I get it NOW. Now I’m older (and only marginally wiser) but mostly I would have thought you were talking a different language if you’d suggested such a radical idea at the age that a lot of my correspondents are.

Now I can speak from experience because a few years back, I got it on with a man I might not have picked out of a line up (of potentials. Not criminals obvs although I’ve had my moments with the latter). Don’t get me wrong, I was physically attracted to Non Line-Up Man but on first blush, he didn’t fulfill my limited idea of whom I thought I should be with. I liked charming, scruffy, rock n roll boys who over imbibed. Non Line Up Man had charisma in bags but he didn’t drink. I spotted a pair of dad sandals in his hallway.  He didn’t care about going ‘out’ on a Saturday night (a.k.a. coming home on Monday morning).  But he did have, I discovered upon close inspection, bigger and much more interesting fish to fry. A life, in short and a purpose beyond the next party. Reader, several months in I realized I was happy with him and it was a shock to me.

I won't lie. Every so often I would – literally. He was a cycle courier – see my past, the most recent waste of space I’d wasted my time with ride by and I’d look wistfully at the dust trail kicked up by his back wheel. But it didn’t take long to realize that I was 100% happier not being spun into someone else’s web of self-destruction and, ultimately, tedium. Whereas this. This was interesting. This was inspiring (and sexy) on a level I’d not experienced before and all because I’d dared to dig beneath the surface and please what felt good inside instead of entertaining my slightly insecure and attention span deficit outside.

It is a curiously contradictory dance that I am proposing to you in order to find something similar. I’m not knocking tinder, Guardian Soulmates or online dating as a concept. I’ve served time at the coalface of online dating and known success in this field but take time to look beyond the obvious. To use the metaphor I began with, I wouldn’t recommend jumping at trophy pieces whether they be human or fabric. Short cuts rarely work, or last. Save your money for cashmere. Of course that may not be what you want, in which case, proceed with abandon!

In the meantime, here is a *story that has very little to do with today’s sermon. It is painful, but it is funny. When I say painful, I mean painful in the ‘I lost my virginity when I tied my dog to my bike, the dog saw another dog, legged it and I fell onto the cross bar’ painful (this actually happened to someone I interviewed for my book btw). But the finish makes me  L O L.

*This story was first published on nerve.com but its owner emailed me and bought it to my attention recently. I’m so glad she did.

Female, 14, New York

The story of when I first had sex with a man and the story of how I lost my virginity are actually different stories. The sex with the man is typical and boring so instead I am going to tell the story of how I popped my cherry.

I was fourteen and had recently struck gold when I found out how to give myself an orgasm. My ventures into masturbation had been non-penetrating up until that night, but like anyone exposed to any addictive pleasure, I looked for a dragon to chase. 

I had inherited my room from my older sister who had moved away to college. There were many phallic objects to choose from, but my sister’s collection of Classic Coke bottles drew my attention. The neck of one such bottle seemed small enough not to do any damage but large enough to qualify as a dragon.

The Coke bottle stood at attention on the floor while I straddled it. After a few up-and-downs, I had an orgasm and finished the exercise unscathed. I concluded that having something to wrap my kegels around while enjoying spasms is much more ideal then just tickling the kitty. I hopped into bed excited that I discovered a new technique within the creative hobby of masturbation. I should have just stayed in bed and fallen asleep, but then I wouldn’t have this story to tell.

I decided to do it again. So once more the bottle stood at attention. This time I felt a little more adventurous so I increased speed and doubled up on the rhythm. But like all zealous and inexperienced teenagers, I had abandoned caution. At one point the bottle slipped out, and as I came back down it hit my pubic bone and bounced its way inside at an aggressive speed and angle, ripping through my hymen.

I had remembered hearing about bleeding once your hymen is broken and how sometimes there can be a lot of blood. Sometimes women panic, but it is actually normal and there is nothing to worry about. But I hadn’t accounted for my hymen breaking under such reckless circumstances, so I immediately didn’t think it was normal.

It was dark in my room, so I didn’t see but felt warm blood gush down my legs. I thought I was going to die. I threw on a robe and stuffed a towel between my legs. I knew I needed help. I went out into the hall and called downstairs for my twin sister but there was no answer. Alas, the only person home was my poor father.

The unsuspecting man was in the shower when I knocked on the door and opened it a crack, asking if I could talk to him right now, because it’s really important. Like a good father, he told me to hold on for one second. He got out of the shower and put on a white towel that he had to hold together with his hand.

He was sitting on the toilet when I came in. I honestly don’t remember what I said, but he definitely understood that I broke my own hymen while masturbating. My father sighed deeply and rubbed his temples. He told me that I was going to be fine. I didn’t think he understood the damage I had done to myself so I showed him the blood-soaked towel so he would realize the emergency. He looked at it and still assured me I was going to be fine.

All I had to do was wear a pad and not put anything else up there in the meantime. I realized that this emergency was not an emergency and that I had traumatized both of us for no good reason. We both sat there in the bathroom silently for a moment. But then the awkwardness became unbearable so my father tried to remedy the discomfort.

I cringed as he told me stories about sex and blood from his experience. Like when he was a teenager he had dry-humped a girl until his penis bled, some of which got on the girl’s jeans. He also told me that his one girlfriend, who had lived with us, was a virgin when they first had sex and it had looked like a massacre scene. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands. I was mortified and I felt sorry for both of us.

I don’t remember exactly how our exchange ended, but eventually I was sitting downstairs in the kitchen by myself, eating pasta. I had put on underwear and a pad. I felt like crawling into a hole somewhere. My brother came home and sat down at the table with me. I remember thinking he has no idea about the horrific event that just happened to me. And then I burst out laughing. It startled my brother and he asked me what was so funny. I continued to listen to him while smiling.

This has happened to me a couple of times. When I am so mortified that I can’t imagine life beyond that moment, because of the embarrassment that I have to carry with me, but then the whole thing turns into a comedy, which makes life easier, as though it were some kind of evolutionary mechanism. Without this mechanism, embarrassment would drive human beings off cliffs in herds, like lemmings.

That following weekend I was staying with my mother. I pulled her aside and told her my humiliating secret. My mother did something she does only once in a great while that always entertains me. Her face turned red and she covered her mouth. Her whole body shook and very little noise came out of her except once she took a deep enough breath, she squealed with laughter.

My mother got on the phone with my eldest sister and told her the story. My Coke bottle incident spread through the family like wild fire. I remember lying on my grandmother’s bed the following Christmas Eve with a large group of my female cousins, recounting the story while they all laughed. My sister Elizabeth (the previous owner of the Coke bottle) told the entire floor of her dorm room. I was visiting her once and a guy I had never met handed me a can of Cherry Coke. 

I like the idea that I lost my virginity to myself and not to some dickhead.

Welcome to Camden

This story seems fitting for several reasons. One: its teller comes from North America, home of the USA, where my book has just been published (WOOHOO) and two; he lost his virginity not 500 yards from the desk I sit at as I write this. Chalk Farm. Or the Borough of Camden to you.

If you are ‘a punkish arty kid’ as Tom paints himself, there could be no more appropriate backdrop than the beer stained (amongst other things) streets of Camden Town. As an aside, I took against Camden for the longest time but I’ve come to slyly like it. As gentrification saps the life blood from London, Camden remains as it ever was. It’s grubby. At least once a week I’ll mutter ‘welcome to Camden’ as a topless man walks past me in 12 degrees of freezing cold. There are more piles of vomit here of a morning than any borough in London but……I like its vigor. I like its honesty. I like the fact that it’s never boring. It’s such a cliché but Camden is packed full of larger-than-life characters. It’s no surprise that Amy Winehouse made it her home and I love Camden for making her their un-official queen.

Today’s punkish arty kid spins a good tale. Kudos to his 17 year old brain for ‘not exploding right then’ and despite the fact that nobody would blink if such a thing happened, it would be a shame because then we wouldn't have heard this story. Here we go.

'Hi Kate. Here's a story for you :)

I was born in 1983, and I'm from Canada. My first time was, well, pretty great. It was fluky and crazy and hot, and if I had to go back and do it again, I'm terrified I wouldn't be able to make the perfect sequence of events occur again.

I had recently turned 17, a punkish/arty kid in high school on the outside of Vancouver. I had been a quiet nerdy type for most of my childhood but a deliberate and drastic period of self-transformation at the end of grade 10 turned me into someone I never thought I could be. Specifically, someone who girls who liked, so I had to make up for lost time. This story takes place only 9 months after my first kiss. 

At the time, I was dating a girl named Hayley, a green haired punk girl. We'd been dating for 4 months and loved each other in that intense way you do as a teen. It was the beginning of summer vacation. My father, a thrice-divorced businessman was travelling to Germany and London for a business trip and offered to bring me along. I was reading Trainspotting obsessively at the time, so a chance to go across the pond was amazing.  After taking my final exam, I said goodbye to Hayley and took off for Europe for the first time. 

Fast-forward 4 days into the trip. We'd driven through Germany and were now in London. By this time the patience level between a teenage son and his father was stretched as thin as you'd expect. After we'd had dinner and grumped at each other for a bit, we wisely decided to hit up a pub to smooth things over. We were several pints in, getting along great again when this woman walks in. Gorgeous, with short black hair that reached just to her jawline. She was by herself, and seemed a little awkward and uncomfortable about it. I remarked on this, and my dad jokingly said ‘well ask her over then’ not thinking that I would actually do it.

But when I went up to get the next round, out of nowhere I actually got the nerve to do so, leading in with a (lame) joke about whether she was trying to pick up the nearly comatose drunk leaning against the bar, then explaining that we were visiting from Canada and would enjoy the company. She took me up on the offer and I led her back to our table.

Now, my dad had always been a bit of a skirt chaser, and had numerous affairs and dalliances throughout his many marriages. My bringing this beautiful woman back to the table suddenly piqued his interest, and he went into full flirt mode. The two of them chatted for a while about business (she was an accountant for a large auction house) while I drank and zoned out until the conversation turned to music. She and I had similar tastes, and it turned out she had come to the bar to see a punk show that was happening soon in the basement of the pub. She asked if I wanted to join her. (It turns out she had been making eyes at me leading up to this, but since I was 17 and dumb I hadn't actually noticed). I asked my dad if that was cool, and in that weird strained moment, you could almost hear our antlers clacking together while David Attenborough narrated this unexpected competition between males.

But he acquiesced, handed me some cash, and told me to be back at the hotel by midnight. The girl (Her name was Alex, she was 27 and had moved here from Australia) and I headed downstairs to see the show while my father finished up his pint. 

Here's the next amazing and fluky occurrence that I'm forever grateful for. There was no punk show downstairs that night. There was just a DJ setting up and he explained that the radio had played the wrong ad that day. Thank you, whoever messed that up and for making sure that Alex ended up at that pub that night. She asked if we should go up and rejoin my dad and I said I was happy for the break from him, so I asked if there was anywhere else we could go. She suggested a nearby club, so the two of us headed out into the night. While we chatted on the way, I asked if I could hold her hand. She told me: ‘Go for it’ and I did. 

We got to the club, grabbed some drinks, and grabbed a booth to chat/yell into each other's ear over the music. Obviously it only took about five minutes before we were making out hard. After about 20 minutes, she suggested we go back to her flat. We traveled up to her place near Chalk Farm station. I chatted with her roommate Dave while she made coffee and then she asked me ‘Want to head to bed?’

Kudos to my 17-year-old brain for not exploding right then, because it sure felt like it did.

As I got undressed, I explained that this was my first time. She told me that was fine, and mentioned that I should always take my socks off first. And then we proceeded to drunkenly fuck/fool around for four intense and hazy hours. Once we'd finally finished and lay down together, we got to chatting. She had asked me earlier in the night how old I was, and I'd told her 19. Now, post fuck, she asked ‘are you really 19?’ and I admitted no, I was only 17. She asked when my birthday was, and I told her it was in May. It was currently June, so I was just barely 17. She laughed to herself, and I asked if this was a problem, and she leaned into me and said ‘nope.’

Finally, it was time to head back, so she loaded me into a cab, and gave me her number and an invitation to come back the next day for a BBQ she was having for the World Cup. I got back to the hotel by 4 am. My dad had waited up for me. He didn't seem mad, but he didn't ask questions either.

The next day I was in a complete daze. An old friend of my father's had driven down to London to meet up with us, and the three of us toured the Tower of London with me lagging a few steps behind, trying to process what had happened. I had mentioned the BBQ to my dad, but he didn't seem keen on the idea, until finally his friend convinced him to let me go. He was a little more insistent that I at least get back by 1 this time.

So I made my way back to her flat, and hung out with her and her friends (all of whom teased her relentlessly about my age, and when I reached the age of 27 I could totally see their point). We watched the World Cup, and after her friends left we fucked again for a few more precious hours before we finally had to part ways. I could have made out with her in front of that gypsy cab forever. 

The next morning, we flew back to Canada. As we drove home from the airport, my dad said to me ‘don’t worry, I won't tell Hayley a thing. That's your business.’ Oh right, my super serious girlfriend. My 17-year-old brain had shoved any thoughts of her right out of the way once it saw the chance to lose my virginity to this woman a decade older, and to this day I haven't been able to summon any real guilt over what had happened.

Life tossed me this experience, and I took it, and I've never regretted it. But, since I was still 17 and shitty, I didn't tell Hayley what had happened. The relationship fizzled out of its own accord part way through the summer anyways. Eventually she found out what had happened; information tends to travel in high school. She was probably right to punch me in the stomach the way she did when she found out.

So that's it. That's my story. Right place, right time, right city. 

Cheers. 

Tom’

Losing It in the USA....

It’s not all doom and gloom over here at The Virginity Project. On the contrary, it is a great day. A long held dream comes true. My book,’ Losing It: How we popped our cherry over the last 80 years’ has travelled all the way from two people randomly sharing their virginity loss stories on El Matador beach, followed by a ‘that’s a good idea for a book’ moment….to actually holding a book in my hands that gets published in America today. WAHEY!!

To celebrate, here is a story that does actually involve a moment of comedy, not an overly popular theme in your stories over the last 7 years it must be said. And it is sandwiched between a side order of poignancy... but I think you’re going to like it. For once, some lucky young man gets exactly what he has been dreaming of. Not only that, but it goes on to define the rest of his sexual life, in the best way possible.

Here we go…

Taylor, Pennsylvania, USA, Born 1981, Lost virginity first week of August, 1997, age not quite 16

‘My therapist says I have a very feminine mind. This, as you may imagine is a strange light for a burly, bearded, balding construction worker and general outdoorsman to see himself in. As a Brit might say, I am of ‘the hairy chested sort’. What follows, at least in part is a story that had him laughing aloud during one of our early sessions. Few of these stories involve a hilarious physical injury, but mine does.

When I was thirteen years old I was in an awkward phase. I had removed myself from a group of ‘friends’ and classmates whose physical and emotional abuse I would no longer take. I found a love of writing, mountain biking and girl watching. I was, by all accounts an outcast. My daily routine after school involved biking a few miles to a nearby lake where, sheltered by the shade of a big old dogwood I would write stories and poems in a large leather bound binder. It was on one of these outings that I met Sarah, who approached me while I was writing one afternoon. Believe it or not I was so flustered and shocked a girl was talking to me that I didn't notice how pretty she was. She was academically brilliant, just moved to the area, lived away from town and attended a private school. She had no preconceived notions about my reputation as an outcast. We had similar interests and became fast friends. Suddenly I was no longer riding to the lake daily to get away from a painful childhood, but going because I wanted to spend time with Sarah. We were in many ways each others salvation. I made a friend who wanted to know me for me and I was her shelter from a boring life away from her schoolmates.

I had feelings for her as soon as I met her, but kept them under wraps for want of not ruining what had become the most important and formative friendship in my life. However my romantic intentions became rather overpowering and shortly after my fifteenth birthday I took the risk of confessing them. I remember how utterly terrified I was at the time I told her. After I finally got my stuttering, nervous confession out, she kissed me and we were a couple from that point onward. The next six months were a joy and probably the most carefree and innocent days of my entire life because we spent every available second together. Her aunt and uncle were having marital trouble and neither wanted to stay around the house, giving us quite a bit of time and privacy, during which we cultivated our relationship further. Not much changed between us other than we had become physical, making out frequently although fully clothed. One day in late March, around her birthday we were browsing a book shop together when she made me leave the store, coming out with a bag containing a large book, claiming she bought herself a birthday present but wouldn't let me see it.

About a week later we were cuddling on the couch in her living room, watching NYPD Blue when she pulled out the book. It was a pictorial lovemaking manual who’s title escapes me but it was based on ‘The Perfumed Garden’. I was shocked that a generally proper girl bought such a book, but I knew little of women then. We started looking through the book, blushing at the pictures of couples engaging each other in various positions, naughty thoughts running through our heads. We had never discussed how we would lose our virginity although I'm certain we both knew we would be each other’s first. We talked about this and although I regularly dreamed of having sex with her, I said I wasn't sure I was ready. She made me take the book home with me, where I read it in its entirety.

July had come to a close when she asked for the book back. She had gotten a birth control formula from the clinic and had been on the pill since shortly after buying the book! I still wasn't sure I was ready for sex but Sarah was, asking about it or alluding to the subject almost daily. Thinking back, I can't believe I didn't act sooner, but I had severe performance anxiety, was worried about hurting her and all those first time jitters. How often is it that a perfectly average looking guy like me has his own personal living fantasy asking to have sex with him daily? It has certainly never happened to me since. Both her aunt and uncle would be out of state on the coming weekend and she declared her intentions to give me an early birthday present. I knew this would be it so I lied to my parents and told them I was going with a friend's family on a trip to New York City which they thought was a fantastic idea.

That Friday after work I met Sarah at the house. We ate together, drank a bit of wine, watched TV, made out and eventually ended up undressed on the couch. At first I was so nervous I couldn't keep an erection for more than a couple minutes.. We lay together, cuddling for a while before trying again. Sarah insisted I be on top. Now...this couch was a beige leather clad monstrosity that had a large glass topped coffee table positioned in front of it. I tried to penetrate her a couple times but she was very nervous now that the moment had come. On what I think was our third try I got in a little deeper and was gently pushing when I could see her wincing in pain. I tried shifting my knee only to have it slip off the couch and as I attempted to catch myself before falling my left hand slipped off the edge of this overly complicate- to-make-love-on-piece of furniture. When my hand slipped, I fell sideways, banging the ole' family jewels on the edge uncovered by cushions and slashed my scalp open on the corner of the glass coffee table. At first I lay on the ground, one hand clutching my balls, the other clutching the top of my head. Sarah peered over the edge of the couch, caught in uncontrollable laughter, which made me start laughing. It took me a minute or two to realize my head was bleeding quite a bit. Off to the local medical clinic we went, her driving faster than the speed limit, me holding a kitchen towel to my head, both of us breaking out in fits of giggles. Overall the cut wasn't very bad, but nothing bleeds like a good clean head wound. It only required two stitches and we were back at her house within two hours. We cleaned up the blood on the floor and packed everything away, still occasionally laughing at my clumsy misfortune.

That night we slept together for the first time, partially clothed. We went to sleep after talking away the rest of the night, her head on my shoulder. Despite my sore scalp I was light headed and elated. When we woke in the morning we ate breakfast in our underwear and made jokes about the previous night. I decided I could use a good soak and she ran me a bath. I was in the tub no more than a few minutes, enjoying a steamy soak when Sarah walked in, slowly undressed and climbed in the bath with me after scrubbing my back. We kissed a lot and washed each other slowly, exploring each other’s bodies in the hot water. We didn't get out until the water was getting cold. I will remember that as one of the sexiest, most sensual and enjoyable activities and have always requested this with later lovers, few though they may have been. We towelled each other off and moved to her bedroom where we continued our love play. ‘We need to be more comfortable’ was the theme and it was working well. Sarah wanted her birth control pills be our only contraceptive for our first time. We caressed and explored each other for what must have been another hour until it just seemed right. She wanted to be on top this time. Here is where we found that slow and steady was the way to go and it was much easier this time but I could see that as we slowly got more and more of me inside her it was causing considerable pain.

One last push and she gave a yelp that startled me, tears slowly filling her eyes. I remember being surprised at the fact that she wasn't simply warm inside, but hot. I pulled her to me and just held her there, kissing her shoulder and neck. I could feel her breathing, her every movement, every little shift in weight from inside. It was the most magical series of sensations. We cleaned ourselves up, cuddled and when we tried again it was much, much easier. We tried several movements, her rocking back and forth, or me thrusting gently as I held her to me but neither of us came. We tried a few more positions, but always with generous foreplay beforehand. We found she enjoyed doggy style quite a bit and she asked me to not stop when I would slow down. I still couldn't come until we ended up back in missionary, her legs wrapped around by back, moving with me. I will never forget my first climax inside her, her hips rising to meet me. After wards we lay in each other’s arms, her stroking my chest and belly, me running a hand around her hip and the small of her back, whispering I love yous, talking, laughing. I can't imagine a better way to have lost my virginity. For once the reality was better than all the dreams and ways I had fantasized about the experience.

So many other people I knew said it was over so quick that it wasn't really enjoyable but our experience was anything but. Perhaps because my first experiences with sex were slow and gentle but also very pleasurable and emotionally fulfilling I have always preferred it that way. Perhaps this is why I don't lust after random women and try to get them into bed. In fact I probably wouldn't know how. I have always thought of sex not as something simply mechanical and lustful to reach an orgasm, but also something very emotionally fulfilling. Maybe it is because I have always sought out people in general but lovers in particular that made me feel wanted, welcome and accepted. In fact I would say I cannot have sex unless I feel I am wanted as a man.

The rest of the day was spent walking around the lake, talking under the old dogwood where we spent so much of our time together and enjoying being young and in love. We had another long session the next day, trying different things and getting ideas on what we liked. We talked about how every little sensation felt and were completely open with each other. It was an amazing weekend during which I learned more about love and intimacy than I have in the almost 14 years since. I remember coming home and my mother asking me ‘so how was your weekend’ and declaring honestly that I had the best weekend of my entire life up to that point.’

Funny bone...

So, to celebrate the launch of my book 'Losing It: How we popped our cherry over the last 80 years’ in the USA, if you go onto Goodreads right here, you can win a copy of it today.

But to up the ante further, I will personally send a signed copy of my book to the person who can send me the best comedy virginity loss story. I’m thinking parents/friends/family walking in at inappropriate moments, people falling off beds that have been covering in plastic sheeting and olive oil (possibly an urban myth but I did hear it once in reference to a sexual encounter. They had to wait for a parent to come home after breaking a limb), that kind of thing.

You’d think after 8 years of story collection I would have heard something vaguely similar but not a whisper. There are obvious reasons for this. Virginity loss is rarely funny. But if I know one thing it is this: a good story is in the telling. So what might have been anything but hilarious at the time could be deemed amusing years later whilst entertaining your friends around the pub table. I should mention that you could easily replace the word ‘funny’ with 'embarrassing’.

The Virginity Project can be a serious place at times. As it should be. Your first sexual experiences are not to be taken lightly. But laughing is good for your health too so if you have a story to tell, mail me here: [email protected]. If its a really good story, I'll ring you up and read you my own (not particularly slapstick) tale down the phone.

The Sunday Sermon OR why you should try, even when you don't know what you're doing.

It’s a truly great day for The Virginity Project because in under one month, ‘Losing It: How we popped our cherry over the last 80 years’ will be published in the USA. Needless to say, that also makes it a great day for me, Kate Monro.

Full disclosure: I never had plans to write a book. I never had plans for anything much beyond having a good time and going to a lot of parties for most of my teens and twenties. It wasn’t until I hit my thirties that it occurred to me that 1. I might be good at something else and 2. I better find out what this elusive ‘something’ was because time wasn’t standing still.

Without wanting to pen a CV of my entire working life, I’d done a lot of ‘interesting’ jobs up to that point (mixed with a bunch of pointless ones it must be said). I’d worked in the music business way back when, assisting maligned Blur manager Mike Collins as his handsome young tykes recorded their first album (caveat: a tear trickled down my face as I watched them at Hyde Park, almost 20 years later in 2009. Who knew this ‘indie’ band would play to 50,000 people in the heart of London one day? I always loved Blur but I admit I hadn’t foreseen that). Later, I worked with some of the most talented photographers, stylists, writers and artists during my tenure at Dazed & Confused Magazine. I was always drawn to creative spirits but only ever in the capacity of assistant or marketer. It was too much to dare think that I might create something of my own. Instead, I aligned myself with bright clever people, got the kind of jobs that people said were ‘amazing’ and hoped that something might rub off.

To anyone who has ever considered doing something vaguely creative, I have one piece of advice for you: start doing it. It doesn’t matter how shit it is. Every mediocre, good or even great piece of art began with one tentative stroke of a brush, a clumsy collection of words and someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. There is no short cut so let me save you the time because for the longest stretch, I genuinely believed, albeit in a subconscious manner (the worst kind!) that any worthwhile creative endeavour appeared on the page as a fully formed idea and if you couldn’t think of something show-stopping and spew it up as a perfectly conceived piece of art immediately then you weren’t that creative. I couldn’t be more wrong. Creativity is a process. It is also the net result of graft.

Those fabulous fashion stylists I used to work with at Dazed? Their work took weeks of preparation mixed with large doses of spontaneity and creative risk on the day of a shoot.  For the longest time, I preferred to believe that they possessed something that I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. We all have an aptitude for something. I wouldn’t make a great fashion stylist but it turns out that I’m pretty good at collecting people’s stories and curating them into intriguing social documents. Again, who knew?

Along the way, I had to learn to string a sentence together. It wasn’t always comfortable. Pressing the ‘send’ button on my blog for the first time was a bit like the literary equivalent of passing your driving test and not knowing whether you’re about to take out ten pedestrians on your inaugural drive. I’m being dramatic but it was unchartered territory and this is what I’m getting at. You have to keep trying, even if your output isn’t that impressive. Creativity is a small act of personal bravery, nothing more. Setting out and not knowing what direction you’re going to travel in is perplexing. What drove me forward was the belief that I had something to say. I still don’t write on a regular enough basis to be great. But I’m ok with that. I’m half way through my life - god (with a small g) willing - and optimistic enough to feel that the best is ahead of me. But in the meantime, I can be cock-a-hoop about the fact that a book that I never anticipated writing about a subject that has resonance with most people will be published in America. This is way beyond the expectations I had for myself.

Another small but not insignificant detail, along the way, one gets ‘the signs’. The seemingly random quips or comments from friends or even virtual strangers that spur you on…the friend that emailed me apropos of nothing one day with ‘one day Kate, you are going to find something that you like doing and you are going to be really good at it’. That surprised me. That he saw something that I only mildly suspected. The intern who included me in a round robin creative challenge and mailed me back a few days later with ‘your contribution was by far the most imaginative’ - total shock on my part - to the boyfriend who constantly chided me for ‘being creative but not doing anything about it’. Take note of this shit and use it to push yourself forward. It isn’t just ‘the universe’. It is people who recognise something tangible. From someone who flunked school, blew out university but got an A+ in wasting time, read the signs and make a promise to expect more of yourself.

I may well be preaching to the converted. The teenagers I encounter these days are far more self possessed and expectant than I was at that age. Possibly because they didn’t grow up with parents who remember rationing and The Second World War (‘when we were young we ate whatever we could get so EAT IT’ was the soundtrack for anyone who grew up in the last part of the 20th century). Today’s storyteller grew up with a different soundtrack. For the younger amongst you, picture ‘Mouse’ from ‘The Carrie Diaries’. Bright, of Chinese American heritage and holding the expectations of parents who have given up everything in their lives to make hers better and draped those expectations across their daughter’s slender shoulders. I would not have lasted 2 minutes in this household. On the other hand, I might have written my first book a bit quicker (but with much less entertainment along the way).

'I'm Mei. I was born in 1991, in China. I am Chinese American. That means I grew up with strict parents, perfect grades, and not surprisingly, a very conservative view on sex, alcohol, drugs, and the like. When I was in 4th grade, a friend wrote me a note explaining the health processes related to puberty and sex. Apparently, her mother had given her ‘the talk,’ and you know little girls…they're eager to share. When I approached my mother about it, she told me that it was all a lie. It wasn't till middle school that I really found out about the whole she-bang: kissing, French kissing, groping, SEX.

I went through most of my high school years without having even a kissed a boy, which wasn't for lack of wanting. I just wasn't allowed to have boyfriends. You wonder why I didn't go behind my parents' backs, but this wasn't just a rule...this was The Rule. For Chinese parents, a boyfriend means distractions which mean bad grades (like B's). There is no influence more evil than Boyfriends.

But at the end of junior year, an Asian boy from Canada transferred into my school. We met, and in a few months, I was in love. After weeks of coercing, begging, nagging, and making absurd promises about studying hard, my mother miraculously allowed us to date. Maybe she saw how desperate I was for this boy.

We dated for two and a half years. For the first year, we were in total, loving bliss. Senior year was one of the best years of my life (so far, at least). I got my first kiss, my first make-out session, my first grope…the only thing we never did was make love.

I had always been taught to save my virginity for marriage, but honestly, I didn't care too much about the whole save-yourself bullshit. I was 18, and I had grown pretty tired of my parents constantly roping me down with stupid Chinese rules. If Wai had wanted it, I would have made love to him. And that's the thing; it would really have been making love because at the time, we were completely right for each other.

But he was much more Chinese (and Christian) than I was. He was a virgin and planned to stay that way until marriage. In fact, he wanted to marry a virgin. He said he couldn't possibly marry a girl who had already had sex with someone else. I was pretty disappointed inside when I found this out, but I loved him and respected him, so I let it go.

After senior year, I left for college across the country in California. We somehow stayed together for another year and a half, long distance. Wai was very straight-edged, and out of fear that he would leave me, I stayed away from those freshmen beers, weed, and parties. We chatted every night, and saw each other during breaks. I would wonder sometimes if I were missing out on other people and new experiences but I really believed that I couldn't get anything better.

Things changed my sophomore year. I started rock climbing and I met the most incredible group of people. They are my closest friends now. In that group was a boy, Jamie. We were incredibly comfortable with each other from the moment we met, and our group of friends was amazing. I began to question my lifestyle. Yes, I had been brought up to stay away from drugs and alcohol and sex, and yes, my boyfriend would flip a shit/break up with me if I did any of it, but I really wanted to experience all of it. More than anything, I wanted to experience it with my rock climbing friends. I knew I could trust them. And...I wanted to keep seeing Jamie.

I started going out regularly with my friends, to drink and smoke and hang out, to just be a college student. I talked to Wai less and to Jamie more and predictably, Wai and I started to have problems. After being asked why I wasn't ashamed of the way I was living, I broke up with Wai. 

I immediately started to date Jamie. Maybe that was callous, but we gravitated toward each other. He was everything that my old life was not. He smoked and drank, and didn't think any of it was a big deal. He was the most hilarious person I'd ever met, and was completely solid in who he was. He was happy, thought that other people should be happy, and didn't believe in controlling what other people did. He was everything that I wanted to leave behind….all the suffocating rules and guidelines that would keep me ‘pure.’ All that my parents and Wai stood for.

After we had dated for two weeks, I decided to have sex with Jamie. Thinking back on it now, I wanted something to erase all the stiffness and Chinese-ness that had defined my life for 19 years. It wasn't because I genuinely wanted sex, or because I was in love with Jamie (although, we liked each other quite a lot); I thought losing my virginity would be some kind of fresh start, symbolic of all the ways I had started to change.

Surprisingly, Jamie was also a virgin. We didn't really know what we were doing, I was tense and nervous, and it hurt like hell. We didn't get much of him into me, and I didn't really know if that counted as losing my virginity. After a few failed attempts, we gave up. That night, I lay in his bed, sore and frustrated, wondering what I was doing. If I was this tense, I probably wasn't ready to be having sex. Maybe my parents and Wai were right. Luckily, Jamie was incredibly sweet and understanding about it. He knew I had just gotten out of a serious relationship, and to him, the sex wasn't that big of a deal. It was about what I wanted, about being happy.

We stayed together, and spent many days and nights just enjoying each other’s company. Then one night, when we were fooling around, I realized that I really did want Jamie. All of him. The thought caught me off guard, but I knew then that this was how it should be. I was going to lose my virginity unplanned, without any rules or guidelines to restrict me, and that was completely right. I was much less tense, we went slowly, and this time, we succeeded. I remember looking into Jamie's eyes as he came in me, and thinking I had never been more happy about a decision. I had never felt so good. Before, I had been afraid that my parents and Wai might turn out to be right, that I would regret losing my virginity so...casually, but I knew then they were wrong. It's not about the rules, about using sex to seal some marriage contract. It's about what feels right, and being with Jamie felt right.

Jamie and I are still together. We have a lot of sex and we love it. I am so happy about my decision to sleep with him that it's like I have negative regret - it's made me feel better about other decisions I've made in my life to bring me here. There's something physically and emotionally free about being with him. Losing my virginity (and I guess he lost his to me) has come to represent my liberation from the fear and timid-ness that my parents and Wai had instilled in me. I'm not that much more wild than before (although I do drink and take a few hits now and then), but I am happier. And I have no regrets about my first time. I can't ask for more.'

Happy Endings and how to have lots of them

When it comes down to it, what is the constant theme in our lives, the thing that we pursue in the belief that two hearts are better than one, the inspiration for so many people to open up and tell me – and you - stories on this blog, the noise that occupies songs, poems, books, films, advertising, your Facebook news feed and the reason that some of us exist in the first place? I’ll tell you. Its love, the discovery of…and hopefully its endurance.

Our intimate relationships are central to our daily lives. When I interviewed people who had ‘not found love’ for the Guardian several years ago, the stories and the resultant comments on the Guardian website were astonishing. Therefore, it is slightly ironic that I trotted down to the British Library last week to listen to the very first piece of government-funded research into that which affects us most meaningfully. It was titled Enduring Love? With a question mark thrown in at the end because as we all know, there are precious few guarantees when it comes to the big L.

And it is big, this idea of enduring love. It’s not just about love hearts and afternoons slumped on the sofa together. Its about society at large because the one thing that is well documented is that happier relationships produce happier children and happier children become more contented members of society and that works for all of us. This shit matters.

I love that principle investigator Jacqui Gabb was harangued with the request to ‘Just give me 3 tips..’ by a journalist writing a feature about the study results. As if two years of research into the intricacies of British love lives could be reduced to three tips and that love were ever even that straightforward in the first place.

Something was also made of the fact that it is hard to produce research, much less data about something as complicated as enduring love. Culture references the idea of love the whole time. Sociology not so much. To this end, as the research principles talked us through two years at the coal-face of our personal lives, we heard about the delicate rigor applied to the gathering of information. Research was ‘multi sensory’. It involved biographical interviews, ‘couple collage interviews’, diaries and emotion maps.

And of course the great big fat question, for me at least, is how do we even know we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love? Maybe I’m nit picking but back in the 80’s, do you think my teenage boyfriend, the one who phoned my house in the middle of the night for weeks after we broke up making veiled threats to ‘end it all’ if we didn’t get back together know anything about what it really means to love another human being? He thought he did. Vociferously. See what I mean? It’s a tricky business trying to quantify love, let alone how we go about making it last. But it doesn’t really matter what I think. What counts is that the powers that be deem it important enough to pour time, expertise and of course love, into the production of a piece of work that is intended to make life better for upcoming generations. I was tempted to try and reduce what they told us down to three useful tips but instead, I am going to tell you a few things that stuck.

The younger amongst you might be comforted to know that it is the simple things that count. Those of you who have had a few trots around the block will nod your heads sagely. In no particular order….

Couples are islands in a way that older generations were not

Lots of us don’t have children and as a result, we are prone to put pressure on our shared coupledom to provide absolutely everything that we need: a best friend, a lover and a 24-7 sounding board. Being glued to someone’s side – anyone – is not healthy. Furthermore, this Western ideal of coupledom is not ubiquitous. People do togetherness in all sorts of ways so lets not believe that ours is the best or the most effective.  Lots of cultures are integrated with extended family for example, therefore providing a buffer and different people to be interested in. To counter this, people spoke about, *gasp*, spending time apart pursuing individual interests. One woman just got straight down to it and said ‘keeping a distance is important’.

I particularly liked the case study of the woman who had what she called an ‘introverted’ partner. She recognized his need to retreat. She didn’t take it personally and by the same token, her partner was happy to allow her to draw him out when she deemed he’d had enough ‘cave time’. A true two-way-street. That’s a love that could endure right there. Which segues into this intriguing fact:

30-40% of couples sleep apart

And this wasn’t a biggie for the people concerned. It was just what works best for, as it turns out, quite a lot of us. We all like sleep and we don’t appreciate the oft-mentioned-in-research ‘duvet thieves’. The point being that whatever makes your relationship work, even if its not what some might consider ‘conventional’, sod them and good for you. As long as people weren’t using their nightly separation as a negative yardstick by which to measure their relationship, all was well. Which leads into another blatantly obvious but somewhat challenging meme…

Creating ‘mess’ and then tidying it up together is a good thing

Not physical mess but the mental spaghetti of life and the acceptance that mess is part and parcel of a relationship. Or, as one panellist put it, ‘if you want a harmonious life, go and live with a car battery’. We all say and do stupid things. It doesn’t mean the relationship is bad, doomed or hopeless. For conflict haters like myself, this is a tough one but in the end we are human beings and actually, the more we tussle, the more we realize that it is our ability and our willingness to navigate the tussle together that really counts. And finally…

The 3 big tips that I’m not giving you

The biggest theme of the day was a triumvirate of tea, ‘love bombing’ and the shared inclination to tear up the dance floor together from time to time, even if said dance floor was the living room carpet.

‘There is something peculiarly important about a cup of tea in our culture’ said Jacqui Gibb which is no surprise to anyone has have ever lived in the UK but I love the fact that it featured so prominently in research. Time and again it was ‘the cup of tea that he/she makes for me every morning without me asking for it’ that kept things ticking over. But dig a little deeper and it was those who were able to perform acts of kindness even when deeply irritated by their partners who were the real game changers. ‘Love bombing’ is an iffy term but the idea behind it is not. If you want a different result, i.e. a happier partner, change your own behaviour.  Those who could think beyond the latest humdinger of an argument and still hold out the white flag and say something nice were the ones who stayed the course. And then there was the dancing.

This took me right back to an extraordinary set of stories that I titled ‘the happy ending’ and placed, unsurprisingly, at the end of my book, ‘Losing It: How we popped our cherry over the last 80 years’. All the interviews I did for my book were told from one person’s perspective. Except for Peter and Susie who I interviewed one after the other about an experience that they had shared over 40 years ago.

Peter and Suzie danced together when they were teenagers, ‘we still do in fact, if we get the chance and we can stay upright!’ I will say no more except to say that this is an epic tale of enduring love that gets me every time I read it…with a twist. Lets twist again. Like we did last summer. I give you Peter and Suzie.

Peter. Born 1942. Lost virginity aged approximately seventeen

'It’s hard to imagine, when one of the problems today is superfluity of everything, that after the Second World War there was absolutely nothing. It was very stark, there were frequent electricity cuts and it was cold.

Everybody spent their holidays at eight, nine years old, doing things which would today be considered anti-social behaviour. The staple diet for reading was escape stories and there were a tremendous amount of guns around. But the biggest difference was that you were turned out of the house at nine o’clock in the morning and you didn’t see an adult again until six o’clock in the evening. Totally free roaming, on bicycles, everywhere, because there was nothing else to do.

There was no formal sex education in schools but then you can tell people a lot of stuff and draw them diagrams but they’ve still got to actually experiment and get feedback and change the way they behave so it doesn’t really matter. The watershed was learning to dance. Dancing was the basis of night-time entertainment. All the kids went. So you had a hundred people, a band, a ballroom and that was it. That was where you started and if you were good, then girls wanted to dance with you.

The jive was the dance of the time and you very soon got to know what people were like, because it’s extremely physical. It’s very rhythmic and if you’re embarrassed or can’t throw yourself into it with somebody, you just can’t do it. And it’s the most surprising thing. You can have all sorts of very elegant and interesting-looking people, and then you’d try to jive with them and they were hopeless, they hadn’t got a clue. So if you found somebody that you can do it with, it’s almost a model of sexual activity, which is what made it so popular.

I met Suzie when she was fourteen and I was sixteen. She was extremely outgoing and anti-authoritarian and one thing quickly led to another. Suzie and I jived together a lot, still do in fact, if we get the chance and we can stay upright! She could pass for sixteen and seventeen at any time from her fourteenth birthday. And did. Later on, we’d go to London for a dance and we were meant to be staying with friends but we would go and stay in hotels and get away with it. I didn’t realise how ridiculous it must have looked, walking into a smart hotel and announcing that we were Mr and Mrs. Totally absurd. But we got away with it.

Suzie will tell you that at one point her grandfather’s chauffeur used to drive her backwards and forwards to assignations. We’re talking parents being out all day, maids cleaning the house and the place being empty. I had a whole floor of the house for my records and books and stuff. And so we would go up there during the day for hours, no trouble at all without any interruption. Nobody thought for a moment what we were doing. They’d have been horrified if they’d known.

It was a big deal to risk getting pregnant and managing the risk was very, very important. I remember when a girl arrived from California with the first contraceptive pills, and thinking, oh my god, you know, after all this hoo-ha, there they are, just this round pack with all these pills in and that’s that. If you were intelligent, you knew the anatomy, you knew the biology, but we courted disaster all the time.

I never, ever, conceived of a man as having virginity. Because there was no definition of, ‘this is sex’. I remember it as a process more than one point in time when you could say, OK, yes, I’ve done that. We did all kinds of things which fell short of full intercourse and I wouldn’t know at what time it actually passed from one to the other. I think virginity is more about naïveté. There’s a certain point that you’re no longer innocent, and we lost innocence very early on, at boarding school. So it did happen, but not with any sort of medievalism about it, no red sheets and all that sort of thing.

We went out for a couple of years and then my family moved to Cornwall. My parents were keen on splitting from Sheffield and putting everything into this new life and so we saw each other once in Oxford and then Suzie went abroad. You know, it was ultimately my responsibility, but they did break it up, my parents, by not supporting us. We drifted apart and she got married very soon afterwards and so did I.

There’s no doubt at all that if you have a very satisfactory first full sexual experience with somebody and you allow that to drift off and then go off with other people, they’ve not got a cat in hell’s chance. It just doesn’t work. Unless by miraculous coincidence it’s even the better than the first one. But I think that’s asking too much. No, it was disastrous. There’s the awful, awful realisation that actually, that is quite rare'.

Suzie. Born 1945. Lost virginity aged approximately fourteen

'I think I was encouraged to grow up. I remember my father, when I was twelve years old, looking at me and saying, ‘You look awfully dull. Go and buy yourself a lipstick! You really ought to make an effort.’ And that was at twelve. I was definitely encouraged to make myself look more attractive.

I was born ten days before the end of the war, so I’m officially a war baby. I can remember rationing being over because Mother was so thrilled that you could suddenly get golden syrup again, and of course you were not given articles to play with and toys the way children are today.

The first thing I can remember, how old would I have been? Perhaps seven years old, was getting a scratch on my very undeserved breast and being so depressed in case anybody saw it. That’s a huge, I suppose you’d say, sexual awareness because I fancied the boy next door, we used to go climbing trees together, and I fantasised that he would have seen this scratch. Which is rather a strange thing to remember, but it must have been so vivid because that’s the first real sexual awareness that I recall.

I was very interested in sex myself, presumably because I didn’t have anybody who’d made me feel self-conscious, my parents certainly didn’t. My parents were not disciplinarians at all. They allowed you to develop in your own way. But although they were very open-minded, they didn’t tell me anything about sex. Not a whisper. Things were only ever implied as in, if you’re going get up to any mischief, you be careful what you’re doing. I think it would have been difficult to stop, in my instance. Not because of the boys, but because of the way I felt. You know, I actually wanted physical contact with them, and I found it.

I met Peter when I was fourteen and three months. My sister had asked me to fill in the numbers for a theatre party. So off I went and walked into this private house. I was very shy. Extremely shy, but you wouldn’t have known it because I had a sort of bravado. Peter was in the kitchen; I can see him now, this little thing by the Aga. A very good-looking boy, Peter was. And still is, in my opinion, so there! And he came over to me like a bee to a honeypot and then we went to the theatre, he sat down next to me and took my hand and started tickling my palm. We were drawn to each other very immediately and very sexually. The following evening he arranged to meet me again, I can’t remember where but we stopped in the lanes and that was where Peter and I had a good old tussle in the undergrowth and that was very nice!

I think we saw each other as frequently as we could in those days and it became the chauffeur’s job to take me over in the car, sitting in the back, he in the front with his cap on, to Peter’s house to drop me off. Peter lived in a three-storey house with a room at the top; I suppose it was called a den in those days. We would be left alone all afternoon to explore and the chauffeur would arrive at the appointed time to pick me up again and take me home.

Peter is absolutely right when he says that there was no defining moment of virginity loss. I remember the house painter – and I would be sitting on Peter’s knee and he’d be actually inside me, because you had big voluminous skirts covering everything up – coming to the window and sort of smiling at me. But I absolutely can’t pinpoint one moment. Peter would say, ‘Oh, well let’s just try inside a little,’ so it was actually going inside the vagina but certainly no ejaculation or anything. You had to be terribly careful. Lots of little handkerchiefs that could probably have stood up on their own all over the room. It was very funny.

I was lucky because Peter is extremely bright. It wasn’t as if I was being bonked by some local yokel who didn’t know anything about sex. Peter had gone off to his textbooks to discover the anatomy of a woman, so he knew where all the bits were. We were extremely careful. Otherwise we would really have had a problem because he was going off to university and his parents then decided that they were going to sell the family business and move to Cornwall. It was awful. I was sixteen by this point and we’d been together two years, but his mother was determined to get away from the area and he just said, ‘Oh, we’re going to Cornwall, it’s going to be lovely.’ I didn’t say a thing. I just said, ‘Yes, that’s lovely,’ and nearly died inside. I never told him. Mmm.

Peter actually says now that if I had expressed the way I felt, he would have reacted differently. But I didn’t. I can tell you exactly why; because I was so traumatised by boarding school that I had got into a frame of mind of thinking that I had to tolerate everything. I had this artificial armour of coping. So when he said he was going, I just told myself that this was another thing I’d got to put up with.

So off he went. But we still wrote to each other and I was pretty bloody-minded. I can remember him writing and saying, ‘You must come to Cornwall in the summer,’ and me writing back and saying, ‘No, it’s the same distance for you to come to Yorkshire if you want to see me.’ I was blowed if I was going to trot after him. I wanted to be padded after and chased by men, because you didn’t chase after people in those days.

The last time I heard from Peter was just after I had my first car and his letter came through the post. My sister came running and said, ‘Oh, Peter’s written to you, Peter’s written to you!’ and I opened it up and it was to say he was getting married. I nearly died. I had to swallow that one. And that was the last time I heard from him until he rang 32 years later.

He always knew where I was. He had a cousin in the area and he would ask the cousin how I was, and she would always say I was very happily married. Which in a way I was, you know? So he stayed away. But he’d always promised himself that when he was 50 he would get in touch with me come hell or high water. So he went to stay with his daughter in the South of France and went on a diet – although he’s never admitted it – and got himself all bronzed up and then he rang.

The odd thing was, he rang and he said, ‘Oh, hello, this is ...’ you know, giving his name. And I said, ‘Do you know, I haven’t spoken to you for 32 years?’ That was absolutely off the cuff. I’d never even thought about how many years it was but it was true, it was 32 years. So subconsciously, somewhere, it was on my mind.

When I went to the station to pick him up, the first thing he said was, ‘You haven’t changed much,’ which I have, so that’s a lie! We went back to my home and we sat very staidly in the kitchen and I cooked an omelette and talked in a very stodgy sort of way. Literally, you know. And then he said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get the train.’ He was actually going to some conference. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll run you up to the station. I’ll just go into the loo and I’ll be out in a minute.’

He was in the hallway when I came out and I looked across and I suddenly saw the person from years ago. I literally said, ‘Oh, Peter.’ And I ran across to him and we were completely back to square one. It was very weird. We got in the car and I have never driven up a motorway at 40 miles an hour before. I was emotionally blasted, as was he. We sat in the car, hand in hand all the way to the station. Anyway, he was back again the next day and now we are married.

I do believe that your first experiences are very influential, but it could be badly influential, couldn’t it. Actually it could scar you, as opposed to enhance your life or your ideas about men, or women, or sex. So I was just very lucky but we were also extremely compatible and sex was an incredible experience. Absolutely extraordinary. Yes.'