Brutally Honest

[girlplayer34]

So... I have posted a few of these on here and I've been honest through out most of them I do leave details out from time to time buts thats for personal reasons. So now I've just decided to be brutally honest and to put al my feelings into one post so please be nice. I have a lot of trouble with love, relationships and sex. I know I'm not the only one but my issues are a lot deeper. So I've never had a real girlfriend nor have I had sex or anything close to it, my friends don't know I'm a virgin I lied so I wouldn't get made fun of but its just as worse. I have a hard time with feelings just being able to have crushes on people its hard for me, I use to tell myself that love didn't exist so that way I could cope with not having it but truthfully I'm scared of the fact that no one will ever love me and I will spend the rest of my life alone.

[Sofi]

Hi girlplayer34,
I'm sorry to hear you're still struggling with this. I know it's been hard being the single friend, and also still being a virgin. Fear of ending up alone is valid, but please try to be a bit less pessimistic about it! You are going to find someone for you, it just might take more patience and more going outside your comfort zone (such as, perhaps, online dating). I do have to ask - is romantic love something you actually want, or do you just feel pressured by society to have it? Same with sex? I want to make sure it's something you really want, not feel like you need.

[girlplayer34]

It's something I think about constantly I told myself for a long time that its just wasn't going to happen so I let it go I stopped trying its hard. Online dating scares me I mean I know a lot of people do it but I don't want to meet someone online and I guess that is because of my parents. They met in college on the New York City subway so I guess in some ways I wanted to have a story to tell my kids if I ever have any instead of I met your mom on a dating app. I you think this is being pessimistic but to me its not its real and sometimes it hurts other days I can keep it at bay but lately I've been thinking about it more and more. I guess I feel the longer I wait the worse it will get.

[Mo]

You know, I honestly don't think meeting someone on an app is any worse or less romantic than doing it any other way. The feeling of connection or chemistry with someone when there's a mutual attraction is, in my mind, the more exciting or important aspect of a relationship, not how two people managed to find each other. Now, I don't say that because I think you have to try online dating; it's fine if that isn't something you want to do.
How are your connections with people in your life, generally? It sounds like expressing your feelings and being vulnerable with friends might be difficult for you, and I can understand why dating would feel out of reach if that's the case. Love can be scary, for sure; to get close to someone you have to get vulnerable, sometimes, and that's difficult for a lot of folks. Do you think there are people in your life who you'd be open to talking to about any of this, just to get some practice in expressing these deep feelings to someone else?

[girlplayer34]

Honestly I don't talk to my friends about this kind of stuff or anybody, i'm a private person so I don't share my feelings and I don't always feel like I have to. Being vulnerable isn't my strong suit letting a complete stranger judge me is not the most romantic thing in the world. There are two types of people in the world the ones that hate to your face or hate you behind your back so I'm not so trusting of people I've never given my heart to anyone. In some ways I can be paranoid or be called pessimistic, my friends tell me I come off as cold and distant they say it's a Capricorn thing but I think that is total nonsense my zodiac has nothing to do with my personality I am the way I am because of life experiences and environment not my zodiac. So as you can see finding a partner is not likely for me I've even done the math, there are 7 billion people in this world if you count women thats 3,864,824,776 of those that are gay thats 1,786,560 if you look at the US thats 26.6 million people the odds of meeting someone or at least an ideal match is about 100 to 1 which means I would spend the next few years dating and never meet that person.

[Urna]

Hey girlplayer34! It does sound like you've put quite a bit of thought into this. From your last post, I inferred that you've had some bad life experiences with betrayal and letting your guard down around people who ultimately didn't care to respect your vulnerability. I'm truly sorry if that's the case. Trusting is one of the hardest things humans must do, but it's also the most natural thing for humans to do, and I think that your cynicism (which, btw, is not a bad word. It's not a word I'm using to dismiss your views of the possibility of romantic love, in fact it's a perfectly valid standpoint to have, and it's a standpoint that most of us adopt, to some extent, as time goes by and personal disappointments and frustrations inevitably accumulate) makes sense if that's how your life experiences and environment have been. What you have some amount of control over, however, is the connections you will make in the future. And the issue with holding cynical views (no matter how safe they keep you from betrayal) is that they usually foreclose the possibility of your identifying potential intimacy and then putting in the work required to build a spark into a flame into a steady fire.

Also, I get that you're a private person, and that you don't let "complete strangers judge" you, but your friends aren't strangers, right? And it's highly possible that your yearning for romantic connection comes from a lack of satisfying friendships in your life, which is exceedingly common. I don't know whether or not you're familiar with the term amatonormativity, which refers to "the assumption that the traditional view of romantic relationships: a monogamous relationship where the parties are married, live together, and have children in a nuclear household, is the highest form of satisfaction one can achieve in life, and that all people strive for this type of relationship". Amatonormativity is the social construct thanks to which the vast majority of us mistakenly believe that platonic relationships are inferior to romantic relationships, because apparently your romantic partner is the only other human being on this earth who understands you completely, who knows you completely, and in front of whom you can magically be vulnerable. That's a bunch of nonsense, of course. The thing is--practically every single informal relationship in the world starts with friendship. Even if you meet a stranger on the train and there's an instant "spark" or whatever (which is just sexual attraction, mind you, coupled with a good deal of projection, there's nothing cosmically significant about it, unless you CHOOSE to make it significant), building that spark into something meaningful takes friendship, or at least friendly behaviors and activities. If you leave it up to the cosmos/fate/chance, you're going to be waiting a long time for a love interest to show up.

I speak from experience when I tell you that yearning for the official Romantic Experience™ is futile and damaging, because it's nothing more than a product that's been packaged and sold to you by other people and media, and it's also preventing you from building a version of romantic connection that's authentic and all yours. Human relationships are built through choice, and through labor, and over time. "Ideal matches" are as flimsy as those nonsensical daily horoscopes in the paper, until both individuals choose each other, on purpose, and then build their matchy-matchiness into something more substantial than that phrase. Sure, sometimes we meet and just click with certain people in certain settings, but that's never an indication that your temperaments/needs will be evenly matched in every aspect of existence. Sounding like a broken record here, but I want you to remember that good relationships of any sort are constructed, brick by brick, through layer after layer of trust, affection, loyalty, and all that other good stuff. Those calculations in your last post--where did you get them from? The values seemed kind of arbitrary, and you don't deserve a bunch of random numbers making you sad! Please ditch those digits, because the view that there's a limited number of ideal matches in this world is a capitalist myth. There's an abundance of love out there. All you have to do is choose it, and take it as it comes, instead of trying to fit it into the amatonormative cookie-cutter mold that's been shoved down our throats since we were little.

Last thing--you mentioned being afraid that your friends would make fun of you for not having had sex yet. Have their previous actions proved that they'd be that shitty? If yes, then I totally understand why you lied. If not, then would you like to talk about why you think not having had sex yet is shameful? I'm here for that conversation.

[girlplayer34]

Hello boosterseat,

Thanks for the post. I don't think I'm a cynic I think I'm honest which most people don't have the decency to do anymore. I trust and like my friends they tell me deep and personal things I just don't tell them like I said i'm a private person and feelings are tough for me. Now my math is correct I work in physics and robotics I own a tech startup so I pretty good with even won a math competition, well technically got second place but I personal think the whole the was bias but I should have won. Back to the subject my friends are great honestly I they probably wouldn't make fun of me but like I said private person I usually keep people at the surface and they usually don't get any further, there is only one friend who knows are my secrets but we've been friends since middle school so she's seen it all with me so I can't hide much from her. When it comes to sex I just never did it I mean I don't trust anyone enough to let them touch my body like that then just hurt or leave me, I do think its shameful just because once you start dating and people ask questions it becomes a red flag especially at my age even though I'm only 23.

[Urna]

Hey girlplayer34!

I hear you re the honesty part, and I hope that your feelings get lighter to bear. I genuinely think that a lot of your intimacy needs would be fulfilled if you trusted more than one friend enough to reach out to them and get vulnerable around them (especially because they trust you enough to get vulnerable around you, so there's little chance that they'd betray you). Being an intensely private person is only a good thing if it keeps you happy and secure, but from what I can tell, you're harboring feelings of loneliness and frustration on that front. I worry that your preference for privacy may turn into a cage of your own making. The thing with loneliness (and solitude more broadly) is how easy it is to lean into it and solidify our habits around it, no matter how much we may actually long for intimacy. Intimacy is often messy, as it requires a good deal of courage to open up your heart and your life to another person, whether that's a platonic or a romantic lover. Alongside courage, there has to be active work on your part to confront your emotional baggage and intimacy hang-ups, because no lover is magical enough to come sweeping in and solve those for you. Romantic love is traditionally about being comfortable expressing vulnerability in front of your partner. Tell me: do you see yourself shedding your intensely private persona around your future partner? How do you predict that that will go? Do you think vulnerability will come naturally once you're in love?

My advice to you would be to take a long hard look at the ways that your attitude towards intimacy might be preventing fruitful connections from blossoming. It's true that there's no guarantee that people won't hurt you. But if you want to feel loved, and love someone in return, that's a risk you (and everybody else) have to be willing to take. How do you feel about that?

As for the shame you're feeling regarding not having had sex yet: you said that you haven't found a person you trust enough to have sex with, and there's nothing shameful about that. Your body is your own, and I'm so glad that you haven't let weird social expectations around sex take away your ownership of your body. First-time sex isn't a finish line, and 23 is very young. The Western idea that people should start losing their virginity (which is such a problematic term) as teenagers is seriously messed up, and there are more people than you think who don't go through that supposed rite of passage. We can talk more about this if you'd like.

P.S. oh, and about the calculations: I didn't mean that they were wrong, but that the values you used were arbitrary. I'm going to be straight with you--the possibility of intimacy cannot be distilled into a mathematical sum for many many reasons (monogamy isn't universal! most people in Western societies have multiple romantic partners over the course of their lifetime, so it's not like once someone is off the market, they're off the market permanently! there's no conclusive figures showing that a neat half of the world's population is gay!), but most importantly because finding love isn't a game of musical chairs. Capitalist myth, remember? The truth is that most people in this world are intensely lonely and long for human connection. If you're in pursuit of love, you've got to abandon your preconceived notions regarding what it should look like and how it should act, and just take it as it comes.

[girlplayer34]

Hey boosterseat!!

To answer some of your questions I don't know if I'll have a partner or fall in love I mean like you said could I shed my privacy expectations to be in a relationship and trust someone I honestly don't know nor do I do I think I'll figure that out anytime soon. When it comes to risk I pretty good with(math) I know you say I can't be literal about things like that but to me they make sense and their rational most people aren't rational when it comes to love thats why they get hurt. I would love to talk about virginity more I kept mines and truthful I don' think someone would want to be with me if I wasn't experienced plus most if my friends lost it in highschool so 23 is kinda old. Truthfully if there are so many lonely people in the world then how com I can't find them?

[Sam W]

Hi girlplayer34,

I want to touch on something you said about rationality and love. In my experience, love and relationships aren't purely rational OR irrational; they're a mixture of things we make decisions about and things that feel outside of our control. For instance, things like chemistry or attraction often have a component that's hard to describe rationally; you click with this person and not that person for reasons you can never quite pin down. But lots and lots of things, like whether our partners needs line up with our own, what kind of relationship structure we want, etc, involve a lot of thinking through pros and cons.

All that's to say that the majority of heartbreak doesn't come from people being irrational in relationships; it comes from the fact that being close to someone, or loving someone, means putting the vulnerable, squishy parts of ourselves where they could get hurt. And, given that most relationships end at some point, that means we get our hearts broken now and then. I'm not saying that to be glib, because heartbreak sucks. But I wonder, do you feel like you need to find the most optimal, least risky relationship because you feel that doing so will keep you from getting hurt?

To you last question, something that gets left out of a lot of conversations about finding love and romance is the fact that there's a lot of chance involved. Things like the size of the available dating pool, when and how you meet people, or a global pandemic that means meeting new people or dating is suddenly very hard, can all influence when or if you meet a partner. The reason I bring this up is that often people take their singleness as a sign they're unlovable or doomed to never find a partner. But there are so many things that go into finding a partner that are out of our control, that's a far more likely explanation for being single than someone being inherently undatable. Does that make sense?

We may have touched on this before, but the vast majority of people don't care if a partner is inexperienced when it comes to sex. Any decent partner will be excited to be having sex with you, rather than freaking out because you've never done this before.

[girlplayer34]

Well when it comes to sex its a whole other story. I know people say that any decent partner would be happy to have sex with someone who hasn't before but I couldn't understand why? I mean what do they get out of it other than an inexperienced partner who has no idea what they are doing. I don't feel like I have much to offer someone. I was scared of sex if I'm being honest, most of my friends got their hearts broken in high school and i had some bad experiences in college I eventually just gave up I figured whats the point now whenever someone brings it up I get nervous and anxious and it never ends well.

[Elise]

Hi girlplayer34, I am hearing two themes arising in your latest reply: 1. your question about the dynamics of a sexual relationship between a partner who hasn't had sexual experiences before and a partner who has; and 2. feelings of anxiety around sex that you experience.

To start with the first part, the way that sex is framed in your question "what do they get out of it?" poses it as a transactional experience undertaken only for the personal gratification of each the partners, rather than an act of intimacy and a part of a caring and trusting relationship. Whilst very short term casual encounters may have slightly different dynamics, in this thread and your other topics you have been speaking about sex in the context of a relationship, so we will continue discussing this within this context here .

Ideally, sex in relationships has a lot to do with exploring mutual physical attraction between the partners involved and one element in the deepening of intimacy of a relationship. It is likely that any sexual partners will have had different sexual experiences to each other, in amount and time in between experiences, and the kinds of sexual activities they have done. We all also are different in what we find physically pleasurable and arousing; there is no single 'correct' way to have sex, so the first few times any sexual partners (regardless of prior experience) are sexually intimate with each other is an exploration of what each person enjoys together. Even when you find your "rhythm" together, the learning continues throughout the relationship where curiosity and communication allows it to. Also, it is important to remember that bringing pleasure and finding out how to bring pleasure to someone you care about brings is own kind of pleasure and enjoyment.

Hopefully this explanation is beginning to unpack why not having prior sexual experience is not a major roadblock to exploring romantic and sexual relationships with others. What is important in any relationship is to be able to talk about and explore sex together in a manner that is open, caring, with patience, curiosity and good humor, regardless of experience levels. Part of this for yourself and future partner(s) could be approaching these discussions and explorations with the understanding that you are exploring what you like for the first time, and your partner can demonstrate and communicate what they like with you with words, responses and touch.

The below articles expand on the above and offer some great practical advice in these areas, please give them a read and let us know what thoughts and questions arise from them for you:

• Embracing Newbiehood: How to Approach Dating and Sex in Your 20s With Little or No Experience
• The Sex Goddess Blues: Building Sexual Confidence, Busting Perfectionism (this is a really comprehensive article which I encourage reading in its entirety, noting the sections titled 'Concerns about sexual prowess' and 'Communication, communication, communication")
• Be a Blabbermouth! The Whys, Whats and Hows of Talking About Sex With a Partner

Regarding feelings of anxiety around sex, this is an experience that many folks do have you are not alone here, particularly with the way that sex is portrayed in the media as something people are 'good' or 'bad' at automatically, which is as far away from reality as you can get, being such a pervasive idea in our culture. There is quite a bit in the above articles that speak to and offer advice on this, however I understand that emotions and anxieties in particular can and often do persist even when we have the knowledge that tells us they are not useful feelings to be having (and can relate to from personal experience).

I noticed in your earlier thread that you have been seeing a therapist, which is great! Have you discussed this topic and anxiety with them? If so, what did they say and what did you think about that? And if not, would you be comfortable speaking with them about this?

[girlplayer34]

I'm trying to have that mindset when it comes to dating believe me but I haven't been on a date ever I 'm a very. nervous person when it comes to dating I'm confident in other aspects of my life but dating and sex were always hard for me. It doesn't come naturally like it does for most I'm to scared I can't be generous with my heart like I destined to be alone for the rest of my life, I know it sounds dramatic but thats how I feel sometimes.

[Urna]

Hi girlplayer34,

I'm noticing a trend in your replies: they tend to gloss over a lot of the information and assurances that we've written out for you in this thread, only to circle back to some point that we've already covered. Like Elise said, I know that anxieties and emotions do persist, even when we know that they aren't useful. But at the same time, we can't really help you if you insist on moving in circles. I think it would benefit you to try answering some of the questions that we have left for you, for example Elise's very pertinent question about whether you've discussed these intimacy-related worries with a therapist.