Editor’s Note: Getting Horny with the Horns is a weekly column about sex from columnist B. Jones, who goes by a pseudonym. Reader discretion is advised.

I remember sitting outside a hookah lounge with one of my first college friends as she described how she taunted her former roommate:

“So, you’ve never seen a penis before?!”

She recreated the moment with such disbelief that I felt the need to keep it a secret that I hadn’t either.

I was a freshman in college with close to no sexual experience under my belt, and while that’s far from abnormal, this and many encounters like it made me feel like I was losing some hypothetical race. So I decided to try harder, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been trying.

I knew my chances of scoring with my first and only high school boyfriend were near hopeless when he told me we should stop using tongue because it was tempting him to do “other things.” The worst part of his explanation, by far, was this sentence, which is forever etched in my memory:

“It’s not like I want to have sex with you or anything, but …” I stopped listening after the first half. He broke up with me a week later because he thought I was using him for his body. I was.

I don’t blame the guy, since it was deeply ingrained in us since childhood that we should wait until marriage, and I don’t blame myself for wanting more than I was getting. I saw the breakup as an opportunity to explore my high school sexuality more fully.

It didn’t go too well. More accurately, it failed miserably, ending in a three-year physical touch hiatus. Not even a romantic hug was granted to my yearning corpse.

I went to a pretty small high school, so pickings were slim and not too many were willing to be picked. 

At the beginning of my first semester at college, when one of my friends moved to Austin and asked if I wanted to come over and drink, I saw my chance. I prepared the only way I knew how — showering twice and putting on the closest thing I had to lingerie — and was on my way.

What followed was alcohol, and a lot of it. What followed that was smoking outside with one of my other friends. What followed that was the worst sex of my life — I wonder why, right?

But I had gotten what I wanted, and as I drove to Walmart the next morning to buy a Plan B pill — yeah, stupid, but I had not had any sex education whatsoever — I felt somewhat triumphant. I had defeated the odds. I had done what everyone dreams of doing. I had at least caught up to everyone else in the race.

About a week after, I sat at the hookah lounge again and the same friend asked me if I was a virgin. I proudly, yet shyly, said no, and she looked shocked.

“Really? I still am!” she said.

At first I felt cheated, but then I didn’t.

It had taken an extra push for me to act on something I’d wanted for a while, even though that push was a lie. If it wasn’t for that initial hookah lounge conversation, I wouldn’t be writing this.

So if you’re scared, remember this: Sex isn’t a big deal. I was taught all my life that my first time would change me as a person and that my eyes would be opened to a world of sin. It turns out, the world is exactly the same as it’s always been. I just found another activity to occupy my time.

Just have fun and be safe, but if you need to, get a friend who’ll lie to your face at a hookah lounge.