My First Time

Female • 15 • Kansas

Boys with drive really got me — my parents were lazy hippies who could barely keep their shit together, so I clung to people I viewed as dependable. I needed someone who wasn't emotionally challenging. Jim's engineering ambitions crossed the line into obsessive and, I would come to learn a decade later, were characteristic of his high-functioning autism. He was a consistent, predictable, hormonal teenager and I was a tempestuous, insecure, hormonal teenager who happened to be in the same school at the same time.

We never had a class together and only saw each other after school three days a week.  He lived on the other side of the county and neither of our parents approved of our mingling; we dated for over a year and saw each other outside of school no more than seven times during the whole relationship. This made us "that couple" you'd see making out at every opportunity; all of our intimate interactions were very rushed and, in a lot of cases, completely undignified. We would wander to an abandoned house adjacent to the school and fool around in what used to be the house's dog kennel, because it was made out of privacy fencing. (Somehow that seemed better than wandering into the house itself and doing it there.)

Predictably, being engineering folk, we traveled with the freaks-and-geeks crowd. About two months into our courtship, the king of our misfitted clan turned eighteen, coincidentally the same day I turned fifteen, and he threw an all-out rager on some land his family owned out in... well, all I know is that it was still in Kansas. I think it was west of our hometown, but I can't be sure; the birthday boy rented vans to drag us into the middle of nowhere, so the spot where I lost my virginity is subject to a 218-mile margin of error.

I planned for this party for weeks, knowing it would be my only shot at finally losing my virginity. (In retrospect, barely fifteen, and we're talking barely, was too young to feel like virginity was a lead weight.) I brought a tent that would end up housing five people, so our timing had to be right. Everything previous to this point was clothes-on, so there was no gradual process whatsoever. His first real handjob, blowjob, and lay happened on the same night, and vice-versa with their appropriate equivalents. 

At first we stumbled into this ridiculously picturesque meadow (complete with wildflowers as far as you could see) and tried to lie down, without a blanket or towel, to proceed with our oral adventures. It may look soft and comfy in the movies but there is nothing comfortable about being bare-ass naked in a field of grass, a plant that has evolved specifically to make me to break out in rashes. Defeated, we wandered back to camp. Then we lay down in the tent and, hundreds of grass-cuts be damned, summoned up the courage to give it another go.

This is where the situation gets strange. He had apparently been reading about sexuality obsessively for quite some time. Not just sex, not porn, but in-depth journal studies done by researchers in the field of human sexuality. What proceeded to happen set me up for years of sexual disappointment. My first time, there was no pain, it lasted for hours, and it would be the first and only time I had an orgasm during sex for seven years. He set the bar at Olympic gold when the reality was far, far bleaker.

Furthermore, I didn't like that I enjoyed having sex, as strange as that sounds. I was ready to be uncomfortable with it, but I wasn't, and that somehow left me vulnerable in a sense I wasn't prepared for. I didn't regret it — we were close even before we started dating — I just felt like I had walked into the wrong movie. 

We never had sex again. I broke up with him a week later, and it would be another two years before I let myself get intimate with another guy. Jim was oddly at ease with my decision to break things off and we've even remained friends. He's now married, and works as a sex therapist. Go figure.

 

We're looking for stories about the first time you had sex. Email with 500-1000 words. (Don't worry, we won't print your name — but please do make sure to include your gender, where you were, and how old you were.) Submissions may be edited.