I lost my virginity in a not-quite-one-night stand and I suspect that my ability to separate sex from love was informed as a result of that moment. I barely knew the man, who was in his early twenties. I was seventeen at the time and my best friend had lost her virginity many years earlier, and I felt hampered by the fact that I hadn’t yet lost mine. It was on a school field trip to the Old Vic Theatre, and an introduction to the crew that had been working on Hamlet (starring Derek Jacobi) that I met a guy who was in the lighting department.
I barely knew the guy - he was in his early twenties, and I was a precocious 17-year-old with a checklist. My best friend had lost her virginity years earlier, and I felt like the last player on the bench, waiting to get in the game.
What happened next, in a dingy black-painted squat overlooking Regent’s Park, not only changed my perspective on intimacy forever but also set me on a path of self-discovery that would shape the next four decades of my life.
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