Ok so Im (22f) and my sexual experience is dog shit. When I was 15 I was in an abusive relationship which ended when I was 17. It was mostly emotional abuse, as well as him pressuring me to have sex when I didn’t want to, which is rape. I sort of dismissed the trauma for years and when I got into a next relationship at 18, I wanted it to be different. It ended about a year ago because he realised he was gay, it wasn’t a sexual relationship and it was more of a romantic friendship. (I’m still friends with him now and hes a great guy). I never orgmased with either relationships and I feel like I never had sex for myself but more had it to keep that partner, out of fear of abandonment.
After years of therapy, i feel like I healed a lot of my wounds, for the first time I feel happy to me despite everything Ive endured. I have good self esteem and I wanted to give dating a go, so i signed up for different sites and got talking to this one guy, he’s wonderful and we’ve been chatting for months and went on a few dates with him. But I’m terrified of having sex because i’m scared he’s just not gonna care about what I want out of it and is gonna get self conscious when I try to constructively critic him on it. I’m scared of just the vunerability and the expectations of sex. I’m terrified about it even though I really really want to have it. I know that I’m not in a committed relationship but it looks like it’s getting to that milestone and I wanna shag him but I don’t want him to view me differently for what happened to me in the past and my fears about sex and intimacy. There’s so much expectations of sex, I think because its so glorified that people say how euphoric it is, instead of discussing the awkwardness of it. How you have to awkwardly adjust your body during it to be comfortable, that you could fart during it, how its not as picturesque as porn videos. I don’t know what to do, I really like this guy and I wanna have sex but trauma is being cheeky and holding me back from having fun. I just don’t wanna feel so alone when discussing how scary it is.
1 comment
1st off, well done you for getting out of the abusive relationship and getting the help you needed to heal a bit, that takes a lot of courage.
I would say the best policy is to always be honest with whomever you meet, though rejections will be hard to deal with, it is also your safety net too.
If a guy can’t handle you having boundaries and limits and wanting to direct him in the best way to give you pleasure, then he’s certainly not going to listen to you when you say no to something and will most likely try to coerce you into something like the abuse you suffered in past.
Also: though abuse is something you would rather forget and wish never happened, I would take some time to think about all the red flags you missed or ignored back then and write them down in a list, and keep it on your phone and next to your monitor, then whenever you are talking to a guy and things are happening in real time, if at any point your spidey senses kick in and something not feel quite right, you can look at that list for confirmation of what you are feeling.
At end of the day, you are not having sex for him, you are having sex for you, your pleasure and your mental health must always come first, and any guy that can’t understand that straight off is not for you, put them in your rear view mirror and move on.
You are worth the wait and always remember that. 🙂