I just turned 17 yesterday and lost my virginity back in March.
I'm not totally sure if this explains, or is even an excuse for, my behaviour, but I've been trying to figure out my feelings for a long time.
Just over a year ago (summer 2013) I moved from a place that I had come to call home. Because of my dad's job, I've become accustomed to moving every 2-3 years, as it's what I've done for my whole life. However, the friends I made in 9th grade before moving were the best friends I've ever had in my whole life. Leaving them was absolutely the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
I don't want to say that I was depressed until January, but I was definitely not in a good place. I was "friends" with a group of people that weren't very nice to me and didn't include me in things. It was definitely very lonely.
This is where things got much worse. On January 3rd, my parents sat us down and, completely out of the blue, told us that they're getting a divorce. I have never seen my parents fight in an unhealthy manner and it came as a total shock to my siblings and me. To be honest, I never really thought about it as reality until a few weeks ago, when my dad told us he is dating someone else. In any case, he was out of the house in a matter of three days.
To me, it was too many changes to happen at once. I had moved countries, I had no friends, I was missing my old friends, and my dad was out of the house and divorcing my mom. My dad was also going through a hard time too, because he was doing a very difficult (yet temporary; it's over now) position for his job. I remember just breaking down after school in the bathroom on occasion. After a while, I found myself doing things I never did, like ditching class. I have become very good at getting away with murder.
A lot of me still feels this way, and I think I was feeling this way back then and was unaware of it, but I feel like love can't exist. It can exist for a little while, when it's new and exciting, but it can't last a lifetime. I've developed an irrational fear that nobody will love me through my insecurities and bad qualities, just as I've seen my dad act around my mom and vice versa.
Like I mentioned before, I'm not sure if this is even a remotely good excuse for my behaviour, but I'm just trying to figure things out. In October of my sophomore year (before my parents told us they were getting a divorce), I told my crush that I liked him. He said he had a girlfriend and let's just be friends. I handled it very well, smiled, and moved on. And we did end up becoming friends. One day, in March, he texted me saying that he broke up with his girlfriend and could he come over. We live in the same apartment complex, so he was over in 5 minutes. We then started making out. The next day we had sex and it was my first time.
It's super unlike me to be so willing to give myself up like that. We continued having sex for about a month. It was funny because he didn't really ever want to do anything else except have sex. I asked him if we were dating, where was our relationship at, etc. He would say "don't fall for me" and that's it.
Even so, I believed I could trust him, until my friends (who I had developed at this point, thank goodness) pointed out that they had seen him being flirty with other girls. I confronted him about this and he would say, "they're just friends".
I kept an eye on him for a long time and realised that he was not the person I thought he was. His parents were divorced, too, so he was a big confidant for me. I really opened up to him and thought I was special to him when really, he was doing the exact same thing with a bunch of other girls. At the time, I didn't think much of it. I stopped talking to him, and that was it. I focused on other things, like helping my siblings get through a tough time, programming, and talking to my old friends.
It wasn't until two nights ago that I started to get panicked. I haven't run into him all summer until two nights ago, where he was outside by the grill with a bunch of his friends. I was on the way to the complex's gym when I ran into him. I was embarrassed, first of all, that he and his friends had to see me for the first time in months at my most unattractive, but I was REALLY embarrassed when he came up to me. As he came up to me and started talking to me, I saw and heard the rest of his friends looking at his and snickering. That's when I knew he had told them that we had done it. I was just another girl he had sex with.
Now is when the panic is striking. School is about to start. I consider myself a smart person; I really do not want the fact that I had sex with this guy going around. I know there's nothing anybody can do about it, but I also feel like I have nobody to talk to about this. I not only regret that I gave up my virginity for him, I regret that I did something I wouldn't do. I'm so scared of being labelled next year as a slut, or easy. I am unbelievably panicked. Any advice?