Things I Wish I'd Knew About Sex When I Was Young

When I'm having sex with someone, I often think about a poem I composed called "As Distracting As A Condom." At my summer lifeguarding job, I was reading a book by Barbara Kingsolver when I came up with the poem.

I had to put the book down at one point when the main character and narrator of the novel described something as "distracting as a condom," and I had to stop and write a poem about it.

The essay is about how a condom does, in fact, cut weirdly into sex routines, but that you don't often realize. It tackles my perplexity at a point in my life when I had just begun to scratch the surface of having sex, and it describes how my mother fell pregnant with me since she's only human.

Years after composing the poem, I still find myself thinking about it and trying to stop myself from speaking it out loud when distracted by a condom.

It's funny to think about sex, condoms, and how basic it all is, isn't it? Years before I was kissed, I recall dreaming about being kissed, but I didn't spend much time thinking about intercourse until I started having it.

I became a girl who was actively having sex all of a sudden, and after a few weeks, I felt it was time to talk to my mother about birth control. It's not like I was given a detailed explanation of what to expect.

Nobody warned me that it takes a long to get used to doing it without music to drown out the sounds you and whoever you're doing it with would eventually produce.

No one warned me there was a significant difference between doing it with the lights on and doing it without them. Nobody warned me you can't physically tell the difference between being safe and risking pregnancy. At the time of conception, your body does not inform you that you are pregnant.

No one warned me that you, like your spouse, feel fatigued and sweaty at times. Nobody informed me that if you're not completely at ease with someone, you'll see all of their physical defects while they're within you.

I didn't realize it until it happened to me that during sex, you can see how someone's skin isn't beautiful everywhere and how their nails feel uneasy when they hold your naked shoulders.

No one warned me that, at its heart, having sex is something you naturally know how to do, but that it may also be something you're incredibly lousy at.

Occasionally you just won't be able to get into a rhythm with someone, and you'll notice how your hips and their hips constantly appear to be moving in opposing directions, which is annoying and makes you want to stop moving your hips altogether.

Nobody warned me that occasionally you'll be in an elevator with someone and start kissing them as the doors shut, and your body will press you into them in a manner that makes you want to strip off all your clothes right away, but you can't, won't, because you're in public, so you simply pull away and let the doors open, and get out on your level.

No one warned me that once I started having actual sex with someone I was seeing on a regular basis, I'd want to do it all the time and everywhere, and that I'd wind up doing it on two red lifeguard tubes on the dusty cement floor next to the employee refrigerator at one of my jobs. I didn't realize how accomplished and grimy I'd feel afterward.

I wish someone had informed me sooner that you might be in the ideal circumstances to have sex but yet not want to. That you may be in the thick of things one minute and then realize you don't want to be doing it the next, and your body will tell you so.

I wish someone had informed me that sometimes you don't want to have sex in the first place, but you're so young and innocent that you wind up having it anyway, and you'll wake up the next day wishing things hadn't turned out the way they did. It's going to hurt sometimes, and it's going to hurt a lot.

I wish someone had informed me that having sex with someone does not always make you dependent on them, but it may and does. And sometimes it makes you take a train at midnight to get back to school on time, and sometimes it makes you skip class entirely because you're afraid of being alone after becoming accustomed to having another person around you, and sometimes it'll make you feel insignificant and unwanted like water feels insignificant and unwanted when it runs straight down the sink.

I wish someone had warned me that people don't always expect you to have sex with them, but when they do, it's incredibly unpleasant when you reject.

I wish someone had informed me that one day at a home in South Africa, I'd be sitting calmly on my phone, scrolling through Instagram, while someone else's fingers were in places I didn't want them to be.

I wish someone had warned me that my apathy to the prodding would lead to something I was responsible for.

I'm happy no one informed me that having sex can make you feel like you've been transported to another dimension for a brief while and that kissing someone can make you feel like you've vanished until you realize you're a creature that has to breathe and so must surface for air.

No one warned me that putting condoms on maybe both distracting and attractive. That was something I had to work out on my own.