I lost my virginity to Nick when I was eighteen and for months I wondered what all the fuss was about.
He was my first proper boyfriend, the first one I’d brought home to meet my parents, and that first time in my empty home, with my parents out with my brother and sister, we had painful and awkward sex. It had been something he’d been pressuring me for months, and as time had passed I had gotten increasingly excited about the experience I was about to share. Friends had spoken of sex as this wonderful moment of bliss, of connection with the person you loved.
Instead I just remembered wondering whether that was it.
Reading stories online had told me that it was something that would get better, that lovers learned each others bodies as time went on. But while we kept doing things together, each time I didn’t ever feel myself get close to orgasm, and that awkwardness never seemed to pass even as time stretched on.