The first time we had sex, it took us over two months to get the job done.
Finally, we were at college together. The last year we had been apart, him still a lowly high schooler and me the oddball girl with the younger boyfriend. There had been visits, of course, but they were as supervised as his parents could make them without physically coming along. The visits during that long year apart had felt conjugal — 8 hour visits that began by awkwardly mentioning to my roommate that my boyfriend was coming up from 10am until 6pm, so, could you…leave…?
Now, we lived in the same building of dorms, just one floor and the length of a hallway away from each other. We saw each other every day, between classes, during every meal, and spent every moment possible together. Our favorite activity was to get together when our 1pm classes let out and go back to my dorm room. My roommate was taking O-Chem, so she’d be gone all afternoon in the lab, giving us until 5pm to experiment in my Twin XL bed and then take a nap in the nude. It was an amazing life (and let’s be honest, none of us know how good college life is until we’re out, full force in work mode).
You’ll notice that in my previous paragraph I say “experiment.” We hadn’t yet had sex…well, intercourse, anyhow. It’s certainly not that we didn’t want to, and yes, we had definitely considered it. Many times. It was actually quite a topic of conversation among us for some time, but I give us credit. Despite our raging teenage hormones, we had decided to wait until we could do it “right.” We fell in love fast and hard, but young. We obviously weren’t ready to be parents, and we’d both been raised to believe that sex was best when done in a marriage. We were only seventeen, so we figured…what’s the rush? There were other things that could be done to quell our urges.
Despite our raging teenage hormones, we had decided to wait until we could do it “right.”
And quell them we did. We began with what’s probably best described as groping, but the nice thing about groping with someone you are falling in love with is that it’s still pretty arousing, and there’s an odd familiarity that leads to a quick level of comfort with voicing what you want. I’m not saying we were perfect or even great — you’ll see from this account of our first times that we were far from it — but we did get very good at hand jobs, oral sex, and fingering over the course of the two years that we abstained from actual intercourse. To say that we were satisfied for those two years would be an understatement.
But after two years, we knew that we were finally ready for the next step. We craved more than cunnilingus and blowjobs. We craved a sense of togetherness, of mutual pleasure that might allow our faces to be near each other. The threat of pregnancy was still an issue, but now I was away at college with a health center that gladly handed out the pill like M&Ms. We were nineteen years old, horny, and in love. It was time for sex.
After two years of buildup, we didn’t want to just do it in our dorm room. It felt seedy and cheap to begin what should be a meaningful part of our relationship. We knew that sex was important. We didn’t want to take it lightly. And part of that meant that we didn’t want to do it somewhere that a roommate could burst in, or where we’d likely be hearing drunk, sloppy college kids eating pizza out of trash cans in the hallway outside (yuck, but yes, true story).
Did we go classy, then? At the time, we thought so. But looking back, a Best Western in a different college town forty minutes away isn’t exactly swoon worthy. We splurged for the room with the jacuzzi. I bought lingerie. We went out to dinner at the Olive Garden. We were nervous, trying to act natural, and we were killing the mood.
By the time we got back to the hotel, sensually stripped down, and used the jacuzzi, we were completely not ourselves.
By the time we got back to the hotel, sensually stripped down, and used the jacuzzi, we were completely not ourselves. It really didn’t help that on the way to the hotel I realized that I forgot to pack my birth control pills, and nonchalantly threw that little tidbit out during our already strangely awkward car ride. We had visions of consummating our relationship in an epic way. This was bound to go badly.
You know how it was supposed to go…wine, bath, strawberries, candles…nope. Did you know that guys don’t get aroused when they get nervous? Or when there’s a ton of pressure to get aroused? This is not something that nineteen year old girls really understand, even if they’ve been in a relationship with said teenage boyfriend for years. Do you know how girls feel when they can’t turn a guy on? That’s right…vicious. Bitchy. Emotional.
After our jacuzzi bath, we spent what felt like hours trying to arouse Jack enough to physically complete the act. He was nervous enough, and now he had visions of pregnancy floating through his head thanks to my pill comment. I had such high standards for him, and he knew it. We wanted extra protection, so we brought condoms and spermicide…but they were like little deal breakers themselves. Every time he got hard, putting a condom on took away all the fun. The spermicide felt funky in my lady bits. Obviously, “it” didn’t happen.
We fought. I cried. Wasn’t I good enough? Was I awful for not respecting his nerves? Sex became a task to complete instead of an act to enjoy. It became less about love and more about a checkbox. We talked it out, and agreed that this wasn’t going to be our story. It wasn’t going to happen like this.
We arrived back at Jack’s dorm, defeated, the next morning. “Too much buildup?” his roommate asked immediately when he saw our faces. He’d been in a serious high school relationship, and he’d had sex before. To his extreme credit, his tone and comments made us feel better. We were still us. We were still in love. We’d do it when we were ready.
The holidays and a break from school made the time pass quickly, and we got back to our old selves, together. We still didn’t want to do it for the first time in a dorm room. Heck, we didn’t even have our own bathroom…we’d have to use a community restroom after the act if we did that. Instead, we made plans, again. We were cautiously optimistic about a Take Two. For Valentine’s Day, over two months later, we booked another hotel room in the same nearby big college town, sans Jacuzzi. (Those Jacuzzi rooms aren’t cheap.)
The minute we walked into our run-of-the-mill hotel room, Jack pounced on me. “Just let me do it now, and we’ll have a great night,” I remember him saying. I saw no reason to drag it out any longer. He slapped on a condom for about three minutes, then we took it off. I was on the pill, after all. He came. I don’t remember if I did. It was great.
There was laughter. We were proud of ourselves and happy with what we were doing. There was pleasure, and it was a little different than any other pleasure we’d had before. No matter how you looked at virginity, we were not virgins after that evening.
After sex, we ate dinner at a Macaroni Grill. We talked nonstop and laughed a lot, too, because that’s what we do. Then we went back for more sex that evening and into the night. The next morning, housekeeping banged repeatedly on the door while Jack banged repeatedly into me. It didn’t matter. We were just having sex.
The big thing is love, and we already had that the whole time.
It’s just sex. But it isn’t. You can build it up to be this huge thing…but sex isn’t the big thing. Sex is just an act, and yes, it’s a dangerous act if you want to avoid STDs and pregnancy. But really, it’s just this crazy thing that we do with our merely human bodies. The big thing is love, and we already had that the whole time. Once we figured out how to bring sex and love together, well, that was when the fun started.