Millennial sex
Why I’m still a virgin at 26
If you met me in a coffee shop and struck up a conversation, these are the things you would probably glean: I have a decent job in digital marketing; I have a few close friends plus a wider group that I socialise with; I write a blog; I have a fondness for avocado on toast; and I spend way too much time on Twitter and Instagram. So far, so millennial, you would conclude. And you would be right. But I also have another trait that has been growing among my generation. A new study that has tracked 16,000 young people has shown that this group is not only having less sex than any previous generation before them but also that one in eight of the 26-year-olds interviewed are still virgins. I’m not that surprised. After all, I am one.
The first thing you should know is that this is not through lack of opportunity. I’m not hideously unattractive; some may say I’m actually fairly attractive. It’s not due to religion either. While I identify as “Christian” when I have to tick a box on a form, I go to church about once a year, and there is definitely no purity ring on my finger. I don’t have
‘Sex sounds great, and I do want it to be a part of my life at some point’
crippling social anxiety or body confidence issues. It’s not through lack of interest in sex either. Sex sounds great, and I do want it to be a part of my life at some point.
I thought it would have happened by now, but I have just never met the right guy. I was the awkward kid in school, the one who desperately wanted a boyfriend but was too tall, too thin, and too quiet to be of any interest to the opposite sex. At 16, I blossomed but was still too shy to catch the attention of any of the boys I really liked. I got admiring glances in my direction, drunken kisses at house parties, but the genuine attention always went to the louder girls. When guys liked me, it was always the ones I didn’t like. I can count the number of crushes I’ve had in my life on one hand. Ultimately, I’ve just never found anyone who I’ve really clicked with.
By the time I started university, I started to panic. I felt like I was the last person on earth to not have done anything more than kissing. But I had also lost interest in just pulling guys on nights out, and was looking for a boyfriend – this didn’t endear me to my fellow students. If I didn’t want to kiss a guy in a club, I’d get interrogated by the other girls as to why not. The guys told me they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t just go for “a bit of foreplay”. But I didn’t see hooking up with random guys as essential to my “university experience”. I went there to get a degree. And I didn’t just want sex, I wanted love too.
In my second year, I got a parttime job at the student bar and became more confident with my decision to wait – not for marriage, but just a boyfriend rather than a casual encounter. I found new friends and, in my third year, I finally got into a relationship that I thought would lead to sex. A couple of weeks in and he changed his mind and it didn’t end up happening. I took it as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be. I graduated, went travelling and began my career – and did a bit of dating as
I went. Plentyoffish, Tinder, Bumble, speed dating – I’ve been on first dates, a few seconds and a couple of thirds, but each time the spark wasn’t there.
I’m now 26. When my birthday approaches each year sometimes I wonder, “Am I too old?” But you can’t put an age deadline on life events. Although it may be easier to find sex than ever before, it’s often harder to find the sex you want to have. Every twentysomething virgin has their own reasons. One friend went from one disastrous fling to another until she finally clicked with the man of her dreams on a dating site for like-minded people, when she was 25. Another guy I know is probably one of the kindest people on the planet, but just isn’t great at taking opportunities with girls.
There are plenty of nice men (and women) who lack the confidence and the ability to talk to women (or men). Perhaps this is becoming more prevalent in our generation, brought up on digital media. We’re so used to taking the time to craft an image of our best selves on social media, or arrange dates via Tinder, that we’ve lost sight of how to approach someone, or even how to have a conversation face to face. Perhaps we over worry about how people will perceive the real us, with all our flaws on display.
Ironically, our generation is also seen as one that is “hypersexualised”, with millennials making up 60 per cent of Pornhub’s traffic, and dating apps where men and women are available at the swipe of a phone screen. We are seen as the “hook up” generation for whom nopromise “booty calls” are just par for the course. Yet as sex becomes easier to get, love becomes harder to find. Some of us feel a need for a deeper connection before getting naked with someone. Even those of us who aren’t averse to the idea of casual sex may still require genuine flirtation rather than crude sexual messages on a dating app.
So the current dating culture, despite being more sexual than ever before, has caused a lot of us to inadvertently opt out of sex. It has simply become a turn-off. However, despite it being revealed as increasingly normal, being a virgin at my age is still seen as going against the grain. In the past few years I’ve never got to the stage with anyone I’m dating that I would tell them, and sometimes I wonder how they would react if I did.
While it’s now unacceptable to criticise a woman for sleeping around, there is a double standard when it comes to judgment over those of us who choose not to. As the “sex positivity” movement becomes more vocal, the people who complain about “slut shaming” have become the first to pour scorn on more conservative types.
Often the men who think it’s awful for a woman to be judged for having sex on the first date would leave if there was no sex by the third.
And this leads to a difficult dating environment. I went on a Tinder date a couple of years ago that was going well until he started asking me questions about what I was into sexually.
I told him I wasn’t comfortable talking about that kind of stuff with someone I’d just met – suffice to say, a second date didn’t happen. It seems as though previously standard behaviour, such as not discussing your sexual preferences with people you’ve only just met, is now unacceptable.
Some experts have warned that a rise in young people who haven’t had sex signals a fear of intimacy, but I disagree.
It’s not to do with worrying about how we are going to perform, but has more to do with it being harder to find a suitable partner. We need to offer advice, rather than ridicule. Nobody should attack someone for making different choices, and that goes in both directions – promiscuous or conservative.
I don’t define myself by my sex life, or lack thereof, and I don’t feel that it should affect anyone’s self-worth. To quote a recent blog post I read: “Whether or not you are having sex says absolutely nothing about whether you are worthy of it.”
Yes, sometimes I worry that I’ll never meet the right person or I’ll meet my dream guy and my lack of experience will be a deal-breaker. But it is important to do things at your own pace. For me, it’s something I want to get right, even if it happens a little later than planned.
‘On my birthday each year I wonder am I too old?’