“Never Have I Ever” Had Sex. And I’m 33.
I’ve also never had coffee. The things I’ve never done don’t mean what you think they do, Ellen McRae.
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Like Ellen McRae, I’m thirty-three and female. Unlike Ellen McRae, I’m single. I’ve also never had sex. You could say that I’m an anomaly. A social misfit if you will.
I haven’t done everything that I “should” have. At some point, in the not too distant future, I will probably get married and have sex (hopefully in that order, but one can never be too sure), the last step to completing the thirty-something rite of passage as prescribed by modern society.
I didn’t plan my life like this. It sort of, just, you know, happened.
I did not set out to have an iron-clad grip on my virginity and wear my chastity belt forever. It just so happened that sex did not happen in the two previous relationships in which I have been involved. Not that it is anyone’s business, but I’ll tell you why — one was long-distance and (thankfully) very short. The other was during a worldwide pandemic with someone who is a frontline healthcare worker, lived with roommates and wasn’t as serious about COVID as I was. *stares disapprovingly*
That said, I have had my opportunities. Plenty of opportunities. But I was never in the place in either of my relationships where having sex felt right to me (or safe). I did not have the security and the level of connection I needed to…well…drop my panties. And because I identify as demisexual, one-night stands and brief dalliances hold absolutely no appeal to me.
Perhaps it is a vestige of my religious upbringing (I know y’all saw that coming). My motives for abstaining have changed (evolved?) from “I want to honour God with my body” to “Yo…STD’s are very real and there’s a lot of them out there and I deserve to have sex with someone I love and who actually loves me.” I’m willing to wait for that, however long it takes, because it is the least that I deserve. I actually think sex is a significant act and not just scratching an itch and exchanging fluids.
I’m glad the author never felt the societal pressure to seek out a boyfriend. I’m happy she always “found herself with them” by happenstance. It is not lost on me that if it were not for Plenty of Fish (or “Plenty of Foolishness,” or “Plenty of F*ckery” as my sister calls it), I would be just like your friend: thirty-one (at the time) and never having been in a relationship, let alone vaginally penetrated. In many ways, at thirty-three, I am your friend or would have been on track to being your friend.
I was not one of those people for whom I woke up and fell into a relationship. My crushes on men are few and far between, and the ones who have been interested in me… well, I often wish they weren’t. It was the fear — proffered by people like yourself — that impelled me to that dating app. It is not lost on me that if I never felt so out of place, so alone in inexperience, I probably wouldn’t have met my last two partners. I now recognize the constant vacillation, the wondering, the self-criticism, that impulse, that hollow in my chest as loneliness mixed with shame.
What I needed at that moment was empathy. I did not need friends who were happy to pontificate about my love life (or the lack thereof) and write a Medium article about it. To quote the great twenty-first-century professor and thought leader Brene Brown, shame cannot survive empathy.
Your friend most likely feels like a social outcast like I did/do. A never-been-in-a relationship thirty-five-year-old already knows that she is “odd” — or at least perceived as odd in a society that pedestalizes coupledom, especially by a certain age.
What she needs from her friends (and particularly her married friends for whom marriage came by easily) is radical empathy, sans judgment, and a side order of ample restraint in unsolicited advice. We get enough advice. We don’t, however, have enough people to help multiply our non-love-life-related joys, divide our sorrows and stumble through life with us.
For many people, relationships don’t just happen — or have not yet happened. Just like how for many people, getting pregnant wasn’t something they fell into. Some people have to wait. Some are still waiting. Some have to work for it. And for some it may never happen.
And none of that means that the person at the centre of a dream delayed or a dream denied has anything wrong with them.
If we, as individuals and a society, were more honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that many things in life are out of our control. But we are reticient to admit this because it’s completely antithetical to the lie that we have been sold (and bought). It would confront the comforting narrative that we’ve all adopted — the one that says that I control my life and I am the captain of my ship and anything that has happened to me is a direct consequence of my actions and hard work and so if bad things happen to other people, or if they are not getting what they had hoped for, they must have done something wrong or they are just plain wrong as a person. Inherently, of course.
And that’s what’s wrong.
To admit the contrary — that many things may not be in our control — would force you to admit that very possibility for your own life. It would mean that the correlation between hard work and result is more tenuous than we care to acknowledge. It would mean that effort is not always commensurate with outcome. It would mean entertaining the absurd notion of serendipity and luck and chance and timing. It would force you to realize the precarity of the blessings in your life and your life itself.
But yes, that won’t happen. No one wants to live in the uncomfortable knowledge that the very uncertainty that plagues others can also visit them and that some things are indeed uncontrollable and inexplicable.
So that’s why people write stuff like your article. Not only is it incendiary enough to provoke engagement and boost your earnings on Medium’s Partner Program, but it helps us self-soothe and gives us a false sense of security.
The author mentions trying for a baby in the very near future and I wish her luck. I also hope that the path from childlessness to parenthood will be so seamless and straightforward for her such that she won’t have people years from now wondering what she did wrong to the extent she never became a parent just as she thought.
God forbid the timing of your life went askew and was not how you imagined. I would hate for you to be the subject of assumptions about your fertility.
And so, to respond to your pretensions:
When you start dating, people are going to assume things about you
“We, as humans, are assumers. It’s what we do. For varying reasons, we make our own conclusions about the world and the people in it.”
True. I have thought about this and grappled with this. Statistically speaking, there are reasonable reasons to assume that I or others would have had certain experiences by this age.
And then I realized that I am awesome. And I’ve read enough love stories and heard enough love stories and done enough living myself to know that I am enough for the person meant for me. It sounds a little cliche, I know. But just as the same characteristics in one person can repel some and endear others, I truly believe that my experiences (or the lack thereof) will be endearing at most or a moot point at the very least — to the person(s) right for me and meant to be in my life.
When you’re really attracted to someone, you don’t care about their sexual history or their relationship history. You don’t care whether they’ve kissed a lot of frogs or been inside of a lot of frogs or have never even seen a frog (that just got weird; stay with me here). You’re just happy that they are here with you in this moment — that they’re yours.
I want to be with someone emotionally mature and open — someone who isn’t content to (be lazy and) rely on basic assumptions, like:
People will assume you must be doing something wrong
Those are not my people.
People will assume you’re emotionally stunted
Those are not my people.
People assume you’re impossible to please
Those are not my people.
People assume you’re bad in bed
Those are not my people. (And why assume when you could find out for yourself? *awkward wink*)
When I say, “I’ve never had sex,” so many judgements are made:
She thinks she’s better than other people.
She must be religious.
She’s a prude. She’s uptight. She’s sex-negative.
She doesn’t like sex.
She doesn’t have sexual urges.
She must not be a sexual being. She’s like cardboard.
How?
She’s ugly. She’s unattractive.
She’s “religious.”
She’s overly picky.
She’s waiting to have a mind-blowing experience.
She’s saving it for the “one.” Well, good luck. She’s going to have vaginismus and be disappointed.
…as opposed to it being just a simple experience I have not yet had. All I did was say I haven’t had sex. And sex-positivity works both ways; it means that we don’t shame people for the sex they are (or are NOT) having.
If I said I have never had coffee (and I haven’t; burnt beans don’t look appetizing and I can do without the caffeine both for health reasons and based on personal preference), no one would say any of these things:
She must not have coffee urges.
She thinks she’s better than people.
She’s a coffee-snob.
I am not stigmatized for being a “I’ve-never-had-coffee” drinker in the way that I am for other experiences I have not have. And it says nothing about me.
Whether it’s being a relationship or sex or coffee, they are culturally ubiquitous, yes. It’s also okay if you’ve never done these things.
Yet there is the most concerning assumption of all; relationship virginity
The right people for me will treat me with curiosity and not judgment, empathy and not suspicion. Who I am is enough for the person who is meant for me.
I keep thinking back to Sarah Eckel, in one of my favourite essays of all time “Sometimes It’s Not You, Or the Math”. When she dated other people and told them about her relationship history, they regarded her with suspicion. When she dated her now-husband and relayed her relationship history, his response was, “Lucky for me. All those other guys were idiots.”
I think about Laura Behnke, who never had a relationship until she was 35, got married at 38 and now has built a whole life-coaching business around the idea that you don’t have to live your life according to what is considered “normal” by society (and society itself is kinda messed up, so I won’t be taking advice from them any time soon).
The beauty of life is that things happen when they are meant to happen, and we all do things in our own time and when they are right for us.
In closing, I think back to something annoying my first boyfriend used to say: he would call me his “little virgin” as if that was my identity.
We are so much more than the experiences we have not had, and none of us, not even you, my dear Ellen McRae, are defined by the things you have not (yet) done. And people who assume ill of us because of it do us the favour of helping us find our people.
“Oh you’ve never been in a relationship?” “Oh you’ve never been single?” If we are going to make any of these experiences a red flag, I think the latter is the biggest one. Many people (myself included) wouldn’t want anyone who has never been by themselves.
Normal is overrated. Your friend’s love life is not just “non-existent” or “boring.” It’s interesting. It’s intriguing that she’s been single for so long. Instead of what’s wrong with her, I’d hasten to guess that there’s a lot right with her, and someone worth knowing would want to know that as well, as opposed to making assumptions.
But if we must normalize:
Let’s normalize not seeing people through the lens of something they have never done. Let’s normalize not treating people like there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Let’s normalize different life paths. And let’s normalize empathy.
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Simone Samuels is a writer, diversity, inclusion, and equity expert, and body-positive fitness professional, among other things. You can join Medium to read all her essays, here.
