Scarleteen

i have the opportunity to have my first time but i'm a bit confused of whether i should go along with it. personally, i don't care abt my first time being special as i don't exactly believe in virginity kind of. but the guy is kind of an acquaintance of mine, we talked a few times and he's friends with one of my friends but i don't know him too well. i'm also scared that i'll bleed, or my body / vagina looks weird, or it'll just be awkward. i do think i want to have sex, i'm just afraid i guess. what should i do??

Hi there.

So, if by this, you are talking about sexual intercourse, my advice for any potential sexual partner, whether it’s your first time at this or your 500th, is to first see if you like other, much lower stakes, ways of being sexual with them.

For instance, why don’t you first see how you feel making out with them. Does that feel good to you both? Are the vibes good? Are you good at communicating together with something like that? Do you feel comfortable in your own skin with them doing that? Do they feel like someone where if awkward stuff happened, you’d feel okay? If not, moving forward to genital sex is likely a mistake. If doing that IS good, then how about taking steps from there are seeing how those things go?

Genital intercourse is in the deep end of the pool. You wouldn’t dive into the deep end before you learned to swim, and the same goes here: spend some time in the safer, shallower end first to see how that feels.

One more thing! Bleeding with intercourse is something that usually only happens when people are not using enough lube, if you aren’t turned on enough (including because you don’t feel comfortable) or when a partner is being too hasty, moving to intercourse before spending plenty of time doing other sexual activities.