State your hypothesis in the form of a prediction that can be verified by the results of the experiment.

Even in his kidding, he wasn't kidding. As if my natural detriments scrawny build, buck teeth and pimples weren't enough, I chose to exacerbate them with a bad attitude, a Bret Michaels-style hair tsunami and a wardrobe purchased from the merch table at metal gigs. While this look may have flown on the Sunset Strip in 1988, in the suburbs of London in 1995 it was natural selection at work a crushingly effective method of contraception.

I remained a virgin until the age of eighteen. In fact, I didn't even kiss a girl before then. Okay, well, that's kind of a fib. When I was fourteen, I went to an older friend's "soiree" which involved a gaggle of posh, horsey high school seniors from a more affluent town. That was the first night I got wasted. It's all kind of a blur. All I can really remember is that I woke up next to a Rubenesque eighteen-year-old girl called "Sticky" Vicki and had to make a stealthy escape. Safely back in my bedroom before dawn, I ruminated upon the coup of sleeping with a woman four years my senior. Imagine my dismay when the abandoned woman told my friend — and, in doing so, the whole town of Corringham — that I possessed "the lovemaking skills of a demented muskrat." "Muskrat" was my nickname at school for the next several semesters, and it ensured that the rest of my adolescence was spent chaste.

Okay, so here's why all this backstory is important. That entire time, while I was pulling my peter and lamenting my unpopularity, the air at school was full of the sound of cherries popping. It was like a kid with ADD got ahold of fifty yards of bubble wrap. By the time I was eighteen, it seemed that all of the girls without physical deformities had had sex. Not only the ones in twelfth grade, but almost all of the juniors and most of the cuter sophomores too. (Unfortunately, chatting up fourteen year olds would have sealed my social status.) So in the same way that I had to accept that I never got the chance to see Nirvana live, I gave up hope of ever "breaking someone in." This was a window of opportunity I'd missed completely.

Or so I thought.

I started hanging out with a girl — not yet a woman — last fall, a few months after my move to L.A. Catherine is beautiful, artistic, smart and funny. She had lived in Los Feliz for the two-and-a-half-years since she graduated from design school back east. She and I were introduced by mutual friends and instantly got along great, even though she had to keep asking her friends to confirm what I did for a living. "I can honestly say that's the most bizarre occupation that I've ever heard of," she declared after I told her about some of my sexploits. We weren't set up per se, but my friends were all, "You are going to love this girl" and wore smug, I-told-you-so grins when they saw us cracking each other up at the bar.

Catherine looked beautiful: dirty blonde hair; dark, dark eyes; a lean, athletic body and a little belt of freckles on the bridge of her nose. What I liked most was the way she wore her hair; all long, tousled and wild, like Jennifer Aniston on the cover of Rolling Stone. Before the evening was out she gave me her card. She's a sculptor.

After we had hung out with friends a handful of times, Catherine invited me to her studio to look at her work. Although I was thrilled to hang out some more, I dreaded having to comment on her artwork. Asking my opinion on art is like asking Ray Charles what color to paint your bathroom. My descriptors of choice are "wicked" and " brilliant." I worried that without a more substantive vocabulary, I'd be exposed as the cultural cretin that I am. Nevertheless, I called the next morning. We decided to get brunch before heading over to her studio.

In Los Angeles, people are funny about seasonal clothing. You wouldn't know it was December by the weather — seventy-two degrees and sunny — so everyone was accessoring their jeans and tank tops with wooly hats and oversized scarves. That's what Catherine was wearing when we met up, but it looked less silly thanks to her massive expanse of toned midriff. After a wonderful meal, we went back to her studio, where she showed me some of her pieces. They were both brilliant and wicked, as I told her at some length.

We sat on an old, plaster-encrusted couch and started talking. Then, in a move that surprised us both, I kissed her. I don't usually do stuff like that, but it was one of those moments in which you just feel compelled to act, consequences and art be damned. After a few minutes of making out, I shucked her out of her tank top and we fooled around a little bit. I waited for what I thought constituted a gentlemanly amount of time before unbuttoning her fly and then . . . everything stopped. "I have something to tell you," she said, and for the next ten seconds her face switched between an embarrassed half-smirk and grave frown. Being ever-so-slightly neurotic, I flipped through the mental Rolodex of awful bombshells that she could drop. Possible contenders:

1. " I have mono."
2. "I have a boyfriend."
3. "You have terrible breath."
4. " I have a boyfriend with mono and terrible breath. Is it okay if he comes out from his hiding place and joins us?"

"Yes?" I said, about to vomit from the tension.

"You might think that this is weird, but...." Just then, her cellphone started ringing, and she ran across the room to delve in her bag and turn it off. A nervous wreck, I started looking for my shoes. " Listen — " she said from across the room. "I'm a virgin."

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah." She plunked herself on the couch two feet away.

"I thought that you were going to tell me you had something contagious," I said, trying to make the situation a little less like a scene from 7th Heaven. "I would be extremely surprised if that were the case."

She sighed with a resigned smile.

A pretty girl in her mid-twenties who hadn't had sex? I didn't think it was that odd. But the way Catherine presented it made me wonder if I ought to. I wondered what could possibly be wrong with her. Had I overlooked a club foot or webbed fingers? Did she use her breadth of knowledge about a range of subjects to distract me from false teeth or a third breast? No. Not only was Catherine charming in every way, she had a great-looking body on which hung the briefest of garments. I scoped her out, wondering if that tube top or denim mini was covering some sort of ghastly chemical burn.

She seemed like she wanted a reaction from me, but after the five seconds she spent searching my eyes I could only utter one thing.

"Wicked," I said.

"Look," she asserted, all huffy. "I'm telling you this because a lot of guys are weirded out by it, and if you feel that way about it, I thought I'd better tell you now."

"I'm not weirded out," I said, hurt that she'd lumped me in with everyone else. (But then again, we'd spent a few hours in each other's company, so who else was she supposed to lump me in with?) We kissed some more, though it was more subdued. The virginity conversation was a pink elephant for the next hour.

I arranged to see Catherine again two nights later, hoping my not-sketched-outness was implicit.