Comedian Aparna Nancherla has made a career out of being anxious. When she’s not appearing on shows such as Master of None, Love, Bojack Horseman, or Corporate, she’s making jokes about awkwardly navigating the complex world of social interactions. So it’s no surprise to learn that her early experiences with sex and dating were somewhat fraught. “It was hard to not be in my head a lot about it,” Nancherla tells me. “If I’m kissing someone, how do I know it’s going OK? How do I know they’re enjoying it?”

Raised in northern Virginia by Hindu Indian immigrants, Nancherla was the younger of two daughters. “My sister was the more rebellious one,” Nancherla notes. “She started dating in high school, and she created a lot of friction in our household. I saw that and was like, ‘I’m going to toe the line and not raise any waves,’ because I was very conflict-averse.”

We chatted about the anxiety of being a late bloomer, why pairing sex education with anti-drug lessons might be a mistake, and what gets lost in the shuffle when schools forget that the emotional side of sex can be just as confusing as the biological facts of the act.

What are some of your earliest memories of hearing about sex?

My parents are both doctors, so my sister and I grew up in a household where there were a lot of medical textbooks lying around. A lot of those have pretty clinical approaches to the human body, a lot of naked photos of people with black bars over the eyes.

It made the human body a lot more accessible, in terms of not being this forbidden thing. Because it was just my sister and I, we didn’t have a male POV, so we went off the books in terms of learning about what a guy's genitalia look like. But it was also funny because all the photos would be of abnormalities, so it would be the worst-case scenario of what something might look like.

The first formal sex education that I remember: My mom got a book when I was 8 called Where Do Babies Come From? and we sat and read it together.

I don’t feel like it was a forbidden topic in terms of talking about it in a scientific way. It was like, “Human bodies do these things.” In that sense it felt more accessible to my parents to be like, “This is another process that humans do." But it wasn’t really explored as much in a “these are the feelings you might start to have” way. It was more from the biological end.

Did you have sex ed in school?

In fourth-grade science we had a unit on sex ed. I remember that they went over the basic differences between guys and girls, and how sex works. We had a thing where you could submit questions on index cards to ask anything you might want to know that you might be embarrassed to ask in front of the class. I asked something about how you know when to start dating. I was a pretty sheltered kid, my parents didn’t let us go on sleepovers or do a bunch of stuff, so I felt very unequipped to deal with all of those social things. Someone in the class was like, “That’s a dumb a question,” and the teacher was like, “No, no, you can’t say that.” But I felt horrible, I was like, “Oh my God, everyone else knows and I don’t know these things.”

When did you start dating?

I feel like I was a late bloomer. I think maybe in all of high school I had a date to one dance. And I acted really strange because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was not even really sure what it meant to have a date to the dance.