I was in love with the idea of being in love with a woman way before I was actually in love with one. It's a tough one when you're at school, that infatuation - I couldn't swagger into having a girlfriend, I was too awkward. Women were quite terrifying until I was older. I think that's partly down to confidence. That therapy bullshit is true - you have to love yourself before you get anyone else excited about you.

It was also partly religion. I was a Christian. I didn't want to have sex before marriage, I was a bit uptight and not very self-confident. I was a virgin until I was 26. I said that on a Channel 4 advert, but I'm not sure people believed me. A surprising amount of my jokes sound very implausible but are true.

But I don't think it's that big a deal. It wasn't so clear-cut that as my religious beliefs changed I therefore felt able to have sex; it all just happened around the same time. But I'm now fundamentally an atheist. The reason I don't mind talking about it is that if you watch Hollyoaks or Skins you'd imagine everyone now has had a threesome by the time they're 12. That's not necessarily the case. I don't think I missed out on an awful lot. I've always liked and craved female friends. My mother was always a friend, she's a very funny, larger-than-life Irishwoman and she is a lot of fun to be around.

I like who I am in female company. When we write 8 out of 10 Cats we always want to have a woman there. Partly because it calms us down a bit and we're not as boisterous, and partly because men naturally try to be funnier when there's a woman in the room. I view the idea that a man and a woman can't be friends as just the height of sexism. You might as well just call women a vagina. It's nonsense. I think we tell jokes in different ways. Men are like children when it comes to telling jokes. They're not laughing, they're competing with each other. Women tend to be more inclusive.

Until I was 20 I thought women were more mature, infinitely so, but when you get into the real world you see women are at such a disadvantage in the working world. People just don't take women seriously and I sometimes get a sense that women's worst enemies are other women. Women are incredibly bitchy about women in a way that men aren't. Men are very upfront. It's that thing where you hear someone in the office slagging someone off but in a very innocuous way, like saying, 'Oh, she looks very healthy.' It was years before I realised that meant, 'She looks fat.'

I've been in a very committed relationship for nearly seven years. We met at an audition. I went away from the meeting and called my manager and said, 'I can't work for that company because that girl is too attractive and I couldn't concentrate on saying something funny.' She went away and wrote a note saying, 'He's got one joke, he's very misogynistic and he's rubbish.' Then I saw her at a gig and I asked her out. People ask why we're not married but it's just not something that I'd like to talk about. Karoline is a wonderful girl and it upsets her and I'm not prepared to do it.

I think it sounds misogynistic just talking about women generally, I think it's very patronising to generalise about women. I don't like the term women, I don't like the term lady, the term I like to use is double bum. And women love that. The dirty cows.

· Jimmy Carr's Comedian is out now, 4DVD