Sex, to me, was never a big deal. Not in a repressed way, nor a rebellious way. It just wasn’t. Of course, at fifteen, it scared me in the same way it scares every girl: not morally so much, but physically. The logistics of it. The idea that I would have to get naked in front of a boy, that he would touch me, hold me, see me in a way that was too close for comfort. That alone was enough for me to make a firm decision: I wasn’t going to have sex in high school.
Time passed in the way it does when you’re young, quickly for everyone else, slowly for you. My friends started having sex. My younger sister did too. It became a thing that existed in conversation, in jokes, in group chats, but not in my life. It didn’t feel like something I was missing out on, just something I hadn’t gotten around to yet.
I did, however, go on the pill at fifteen. I realised around then that I had only had ten periods since I was twelve, which statistically seemed off. Of course, the first thing Dr Daniel told me, without any formal testing, was that I had PCOS and needed to get on the pill immediately or risk indefinite infertility. I didn't know much about it besides what I had overheard the older girls say at school: Wait, but are you on the pill?. I didn't really get it at first, the correlation between the pill and sex. Doesn't it just make your cycle regular and stop cramps? Part of that meant I didn't know how much the pill suppresses your sex drive. Looking back, I liked to think my disinterest in sex came from a quiet confidence, as though I just knew I was above the status quo. But when I came off the pill at eighteen, it felt less like a personality trait and more like a chemical plot twist.
Suddenly, things shifted. Boys’ opinions of me started to matter in a way that felt intrusive, almost embarrassing. There was this low, anxious pull in my stomach that made me act in ways that didn’t feel entirely like me: wearing more makeup; holding eye contact a second longer; hoping to be chosen in some small, visible way as evidence that I was desired too. Sex, suddenly, became a thing. Not a big thing, but a looming one. Something that was approaching. The problem was: I knew almost nothing about it. Going to a single-sex Catholic high school hadn't helped. The “sex talk” we got was that it's really bad to do it, but if you're a slut and do partake in such sinful behaviour, please wear a condom so that our school doesn't make a bad headline on the North Shore Facebook page. All I knew was that it hurt like hell the first time, and as someone who had conveniently avoided period cramps thanks to the pill (the one benefit), the idea of vaginal pain felt deeply unsettling.
On top of that, I didn’t like my body. Nothing dramatic or unique, just the standard discomfort of being a girl in a body you haven’t quite made peace with. Sex meant getting naked, and that felt like the real barrier. Being fully seen. I couldn’t quite imagine what that would feel like. I figured eventually I’d meet the right person, it would feel right, and everything I was anxious about would soften into something manageable. So, I waited for that person… and then got drunk and realised “right” was apparently negotiable for an absolute stranger.
And so it had happened. Not dramatically, not even particularly recklessly. It just happened. The kind of situation where you look back and can’t quite trace the decision-making process, only the fact that you moved through it anyway. After all that time thinking, avoiding, analysing, convincing myself it had to mean something because I’d waited so long, it was over and meant less than it did the day before. And that’s the part no one tells you. It’s a slightly messy, quite painful, very underwhelming experience, not lacking, of course, all the insecurities you bring into it.
I had started to believe sex would be this big, defining threshold, but crossing it didn’t resolve anything. It just made me more aware of the things I still didn’t understand, the things I didn’t even want to start knowing about myself, about men, about my body, or what I wanted in life. I often find myself envious of the girl I was when sex didn’t mean anything to me. Because it doesn’t, not really, not unless you decide it does. It only becomes significant in the way you choose to carry it. Maybe I just miss the me that didn’t carry anything.
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