SF: And what was it actually like when you first did it?

T: Pretty crappy. Pretty - pretty crappy. Yeah, it didn’t happen completely the first time, so I had to - which made it worse, because we had to keep going back to it, so that just killed any kind of romance that we might have been trying to create in that first time moment. So yeah, i was very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t want to do it again.

I waited ‘til I was with my then-partner, the first partner that I had. And I waited ‘til l was in this long term relationship before I did it, because I felt like that was the best thing for me, sort of, mentally, to be with someone - to experience that first time sexual relationship - with someone who I really trusted, and that definitely made the experience better I think, in retrospect. But, the first time was really uncomfortable, and we were both really young, and, I think we were both trying to live up to this expectation of each other, what we thought the other person expected in us. And definitely, I think we both had these romantic illusions of what that person was supposed to be like, so I think we were also trying to live up to that expectation. So it made things very uncomfortable.

SF: What was uncomfortable?

T: Umm, being naked in front of someone. Like, completely naked. And, being completely naked in front of someone is, especially for a young woman who had, you know, body issues, body image issues, and a bit insecure about herself, it was a very vulnerable experience, so...

SF: What do you think is the most vulnerable element of sex?

T: Mm, for me, the most vulnerable was - is the trust, I think, like trusting that your partner is not going to hurt you, especially on that first time. Trusting that your partner is going to try to please you as well as themself, and in that very intimate moment not be selfish.

SF: Sometimes trust is broken during sex, so I’m curious about whether you’ve ever had an experience where your trust was broken?

T: I mean with this same partner that I had, this long term boyfriend of mine, we had a breakup during our relationship and at that time he had gone away on vacation somewhere, and then when he came back, we were trying to sort of rekindle our relationship. And I mean, sex at that time of my life, having body issues and being insecure, and so young, having these sort of, this idea of what I should be like as a woman and what I should be like as a sexual partner made me even more so insecure. So sex, for me, represented this way where I could connect with him. This like really honest, this honest experience, where we were giving part of ourselves to each other, and that was that one place we wouldn’t lie to each other. In my mind, that was what sex represented in that relationship. And so, when he came back from his trip, and we tried to reconnect and rekindle our relationship, we started off our sexual relationship again, and I asked him if he had slept with anyone else, and he said “No, not at all”. The entire time we’d been broken up, he’d only thought of me and pined after me. And then after we’d started up our sexual relationship again - I’d asked him that before we did - only after did he tell me that he had. And I felt so betrayed, I felt so unclean, because I felt like that was that one piece of our relationship that was, like, sacred, right?