How to Lose Your Virginity

I haven't added anything to this in ages. So, here is a "diary entry" I wrote just over a year ago, detailing the story of how I lost my virginity.

Step one. Concoct a dinner party for your bestest girlfriends under the guise of an important event. I was free on January 6th, so obviously, I was to host a post-New-Years-slash-three-weeks-before-my-seventeenth-birthday bash. Of course, this was because I fancied a boy, and I wanted a coy excuse to see him. As well as the fact that I simply could not (I still can’t) get enough of a man cooking. Anyway, I planned it perfectly: asking him if he was free before I even considered talking to my mates about whether they could come, buying spaghetti and tender-stem broccoli from the TESCO down the road and asking my mother to buy me some Prosecco from the shops. My plan had succeeded. Food, drinks, a cute date and a fun excuse to see my friends after the winter holidays.

Of course, by this point, the boy and I were FaceTiming every night and talking pretty much constantly throughout the day. And, he was the first person I had even wanted to really go the “whole way” with. Nevertheless, I am (and fear will always be) a very awkward person when it comes to romance, and I had no idea how to explain to my mother why an older boy, whom she had never met or heard of before the past week, was now coming to her home to help her sixteen-year-old daughter cook for a dinner party in some peculiar quasi-cosplay of adult life. Spoiler alert: nothing about that night was anything close to “adulting”.

The boy in question, Shiwhu, came to the door, looking like he was dressed like his take on an Italian mobster; he was wearing a tight black T-shirt, a flannel white shirt, black jeans and a long tan (maybe suede?) jacket. I chuckled to myself. Greeting him with a hug, I invited him in and led him down the stairs to the kitchen where my mother and stepfather were excitedly awaiting to have another conversation with the mystery boy (the first one I had ever introduced them to). They had met him five days prior when he had come over, and my wonderful mother, being who she was, was desperately curious to have another conversation with him. I felt my cheeks burn as my stepdad, Tom, handed him a glass of champagne, remembering only ten minutes ago when the expectant and excitable couple had cocked their heads and asked me repeatedly in shrill and joking voices whether “This Shiwhu” was my boyfriend— to which I profusely denied in a meek tone and ran off to cool down before he came. I was nervous enough already. We drank a glass with the parents, making small talk through the jesting yet knowing glares of my mother. When my mother and Tom walked upstairs, he embraced me and planted a loving and affectionate kiss on my forehead, then my lips, telling me it was nice to see me again and that he had missed me (we had met up two days prior). We then got to preparing the meal I had planned, sporadically taking another sip of our third glass of champagne and making jokes. But nothing could cut through the mutual understanding of what was going to happen next. It was like we were telepathically communicating with each other: as soon as the last broccoli was chopped, seasoned and left to wade in the spaghetti sauce we would run upstairs and rip the clothes off each other (my God, did I have no clue how sex worked).

When we did finally arrive in my room, my heart was racing. At the time, I thought it was from the intense nervousness that I was feeling, but I cannot imagine that traipsing up four flights of stairs helped my case either. I turned around to put some music on, but from the corner of my eye, I saw him subtly down his glass of champagne, subsequently leading me to down my own as I wanted to show him that he was not alone in feeling nervous; I was right there with him. Strange, what you do for the people that you love. I touched his heart with one hand, which at that point he could have had run a whole marathon with the speed in which it was beating, and caressed his hair to relax his nerves with the other.

The actual act was as amateur as you would expect it, I will withhold from being graphic but it’s safe to say neither of us knew what we were doing and there was a lot of static-sitting on my end involved— if you can catch my drift. I will say, that that night set off a chain reaction of events that pertain to condom-wearing for the duration of our relationship. He said they were uncomfortable, so we took It off midway through. The next day I walked to the Sexual Health Clinic ten minutes away from my house (God bless the NHS) and got myself a shiny box of pills which, unbeknownst to me, would lead me down a spiral of depression and violent mood swings for the next eleven months. All so he could have a slightly more pleasurable time during sex— a mistake I made again two years later, too. Don’t sacrifice your mental health for the comfort of a penis, and always be in tune with your moods; I didn’t realise that I had spent almost a year in a needless cycle of sadness until I finally stopped taking the pills. Interesting how hindsight works when you wade through the love-tinted daze you were once in.

Back to the funniness of the story: he had brought over 70cl of Tequila which we (admittedly equally as idiotic as each other) decided to share via pure shots. The whole half-bottle was guzzled down neat by sixteen-year-old Eleni. Safe to say, the rest of that night was a blur. I do remember screaming to my friend Jess across the table, whilst my mother was standing behind me, that "I HAD JUST LOST MY VIRGINITY". So embarrassing. Furthermore, by the time it was time to actually cook everything we had prepared, I was far too drunk to even stand, let alone display my budding culinary talents. My two friends had to cook for me (subsequently burning themselves)-- at my own dinner party. By the end of the night, my house was filled with half our school year whom I have no recollection of inviting, and absolutely did not run by my mother, who was expecting a nice tame dinner for seven ladies. By the end of the night, the (equally as drunk) ex-boyfriend of mine had come back around, and he and I were raw dogging it on a counter over a sink. Talk about 0-100, right?

Anyway, that night I got my first boyfriend. Obviously, we were absolutely not meant to be, but the 6th of January 2020 is undoubtedly a pinnacle memory of my ongoing adolescence.