Losing My Virginity Taught Me to Trust the Timing of My Life

When I started writing this essay a few years back, I opened it by calling myself a “late bloomer." I think I've written the same in past newsletters, but in reality, that's not a title I actually identify with. The label “late bloomer” implies that we have all agreed to operate on the same schedule in life. I certainly made no such agreement. There are people who find success at 25 and people who find success at 55. Some people start a family at 21 and others do it at 40. I would love nothing more than for all of us to find acceptance in the fact that we don't have to play by culturally prescribed timelines, because each of us has our own timeline, and no one is better or worse for reaching a milestone before anyone else.

I was a late bloomer in life. My first real kiss (if we don’t count a silly game of spin the bottle) was the night before I left for my freshman year of college. The guy attended my rival high school, but I would always see him around town, often outside of a local salad spot that my friends and I would go to. I couldn’t tell you how many times I went there just hoping that I would see him. I had been crushing on him all summer, and he finally asked me to hang out two days before I was leaving for school. I have little memory of the actual date, but I know we ended the night kissing on the trampoline in his backyard.

I was not in any rush to lose my virginity, even though my high school friends had done it by the time we graduated. I always assumed I would wait for my first long-term relationship to have sex for the first time. I’m a true romantic at heart, so I wanted it to be meaningful and all the things that losing your virginity typically are not. But I actually enjoyed being a virgin—it felt like a secret source of power. I was in complete control of whether I would do it and with whom. 

The first time I attempted to lose my virginity was the summer before my junior year of college. The guy wasn’t actually my boyfriend, but a friend with benefits that felt as close as I was going to get to a boyfriend at that time. We’d known each other for about a year, talked every single day, exchanged music, had inside jokes, and had sleepovers. When he insisted that I try his favorite Sierra Nevada beer, I tried to convince myself that I liked it even though I wasn’t that into alcohol. A part of me definitely thought if we had sex, it would get him closer to being my boyfriend.