A letter to a young man hoping to lose his virginity

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Well done, you’ve made it: you’ve been accepted to a university. It doesn’t matter which one; the fact is you’ll be leaving your parents and heading off to live alone, to party and spend your days studying (trust me, you won’t realise how much you’ll enjoy this part until it’s gone), and perhaps most importantly, you’ll be hoping to get laid.
It’s quite all right: many have gone before you with this idea and many will come after you. Perhaps at school it didn’t work out for one reason or another. You feared you might never lose your virginity or that you weren’t desirable even though you tried ten creams on your acne. Or maybe you did have sex and just want to experiment further. All perfectly normal.
At a certain point, when I was 17, I believed I would be a virgin for ever. There’d been moments when it almost happened, but either I’d been frightened for some reason (what was I supposed to do down there?!) or otherwise circumstances had played against us (is your dad home already?!). It didn’t happen and I wondered if it ever would. Yet Cardiff University remained on the horizon — a prophet cannot be a prophet in his own land, after all.
“I couldn’t wait to get to Southampton,” says Dan, a friend of mine from school with whom I’m still close. “It was like starting over, except this time I’d talk to women and finally have sex.”
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Fast-forward to the second night of freshers week. I, stumbling with my new friends who had been thrust upon me by the roulette of university housing, went out on to the smoking balcony for fresh air. I passed an attractive woman introducing herself to someone. “Sian,” she said. “Sian?” I said, butting in uninvited. “I’m Sean! Sian, Sean. Nice to meet you.” That was my line and suffice it to say it didn’t work. There would be many other times just as bad or worse after.
No bother. Next day, another freshers night, another woman — this time a third-year nursing student. I bought her a drink and we chatted, cupping our hands to each other’s ears so we could hear one another over the music in the Students’ Union. Then she asked me to dance. She took my hand and we danced together for a bit and laughed, but when I went to the bathroom and came back, she was gone.Clearly university was not what I thought it might have been. It turns out I was not the ladies’ man I was foretold to be (admittedly, foretold only by myself). I spoke to Dan. “Any luck when you first got to uni?” I asked him. “Not really,” he said. “Why break the habit of a lifetime?”
But eventually I did have success. There was one Halloween when I was dressed as an undead monk, and then there was one night on my birthday. There were others, mostly nice, sometimes not. One time I went back with a woman and when we got there she opened a drawer full of vibrators, lube and condoms. I was so intimidated I felt I was a child who thought sex was just two people pushing nipples together.
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And so I lost my virginity not with a bang but in a drunken minute’s scramble in a single bed at my university halls. The very same bed in which I had grown accustomed to waking up cuddling a fire extinguisher my housemates so lovingly placed with me night after night (wherefore art thou, fire extinguisher?). “Mine was much the same,” Dan said. “I barely remember it to be honest. Isn’t that sad?”
I only just about remember mine. Not that there was all that much to remember. I also remember the time after Halloween — I was scared about missing lectures so I went the next day with the remnants of face paint still scattered across my face, my brown robe tucked into the shorts I wore beneath, and a borrowed Cardiff University jumper, and I listened to the lecturer — or rather I didn’t, but planned what I would do should I need to throw up. Luckily I didn’t. Afterwards I went back to her house to return her jumper. When she opened the door, I didn’t recognise her without the costume, and so I awkwardly handed the jumper to her, not sure if it was her or a housemate. “Last night was fun,” she said. And then I felt like a legend and walked quite happily home in my monk outfit.
For the first year or so I was obsessed with trying to get laid. It didn’t happen very much (most of my friends say they watched more porn at university than actually had sex), but that was what I thought I was supposed to do. That was the point of going out, wasn’t it? But I never really enjoyed it and I realised that actually it didn’t matter. That no one cared. That those demons I had at 17 had been vanquished. All the pressure on me was not from others, but myself. But what I really liked was just being with friends.
And every now and again you’ll meet someone, perhaps in no special circumstance, and you will look at each other and feel, you must know this person more. That’s the good stuff, that’s the real fun — it all comes easy then. Everything will be different, and if it doesn’t happen at university, so what? You’re there to study anyway, aren’t you?
• Always have condoms, and use them• Laugh off rejection. It will happen time and time again• Relax and have fun with it• Porn is not sex; no one expects sex to be like porn (and it’s usually not)• Remember Shakespeare: alcohol “provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”
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