Don't laugh.

GuyanaPrince

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I didn't get any real action until I was 23 either, and the girl didn't even look that hot. Major bummer, but nothing to be ashamed of. I was fat and gross for a long time, so I guess I took what I could get.

Sure I poked around, when I was younger, but that stuff doesn't really count. It's a sad, sad thing, when you're eighteen or nineteen talking about something that happened, when you were fourteen - that always cracked me up. Ask me, nothing you do before age fifteen counts. :rolleyes:
 

headbang8

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Mike,

Let me agree with many of the other posters. Don't force yourself into sex just for the sake of it. You'll hate it, and it will end badly.

That said, let me disagree with some of the posters here. And forgive me for the confronting tone I'm about to adopt in this rather long post. Maybe your situation doesn't parallel my own as closely as I assume. But I suspect that our backgrounds are not dissimilar.

Sex ain't the issue here; it's intimacy. We're programmed to want to be intimate physically. Skin-to-skin touch (beyond the demure "pseudo-sexual" activity of massage) with another human who knows your body as well as you do, surrendering yourself sexually to the beauty, passion and energy of another human being. Is the "surrender" part difficult for you, Mike?

I hate to say so, but the description of yourself as a 22 year old virgin might have been me. I convinced myself that I was above it all; didn't need sex, it all seemed too sordid and silly. People in love behaved with no dignity or self-respect.

Had my first girlfriend, a short-lived affair, at 22. And I did so just for the sake of it. It was kind of like having a tooth out--been there, done that, another chore accomplished, I'm not a virgin anymore, got that problem out of my hair.

It didn't really make me happy. The sex was perfunctory--she said so. She felt I couldn't let myself go, even when she watched me masturbate. Emotionally constipated, she said.

I was curious to see debating in your list of hobbies, Mike. I met this woman in law school because we were both champion debaters. She said the atmosphere of the debate fit my stunted character; passion squeezed into a six-minute speech, no unfair rebuttal, any frankness severely fettered by rules and protocol. And an outside judge declaring a winner in every point made.

You might get the impression she was a bit of a bitch, and you'd be right. But she was the right bitch at the right time, for me. She made me think about some tough issues in my life.

I found it quite threatening to open myself up to another human being. In my family, intimacy was manipulative. "Love" meant control the people close to you, and my parents eventually divorced because neither could bend the other to his or her will. I'd swallowed that message, and shied away from intimacy because of it.

Little by little, I learned to love good people, who loved me back. I relaxed my fetish for compulsive self control (and the subtle manipulation of others if they threatened it) without losing my sense of self in the process. I had a relationship with a woman I loved for a number of years in my late 20s. And in my early thirties, I worked out I was gay.

Mike, I'm not saying you're gay (or straight, for that matter). But you're right--sex DOES change people. Love, even moreso. In ways they don't expect, and can't control. At 48, I'm not the man I imagined myself at 22. And if you had confronted the 22 year-old-me with the current headbang8, I would have done anything to avoid becoming him. But I'm a better man than the young headbang could ver have imagined. Love did that.

Your friends are right, sexual opportunity will come naturally. You can't make it happen, but you can feel it happening. If you had a strict upbringing, it's sometimes hard to know what the feeling is when it hits you. You need to be open. And prepared to surrender a bit of yourself.

It won't happen overnight. And you learn to do it by...well, doing it. There will be good experiences, and so-so ones. Relax.

Sorry for rambling on. Trust some of it helps.

HB8