(Picture: Erin Aniker for Metro.co.uk)

There’s a general consensus that the first time you have sex won’t be that great.

You don’t know what you’re doing, your sex buddy doesn’t either.

Chances of an orgasm are slim. The risk of awkwardness, extremely high.

It feels like the best we can hope for is that we do it with someone we like and it isn’t so awful we’re mentally scarred.


But new research suggests that a rather large portion of Brits don’t feel they were ‘ready’ the first time they had sex. The reasons for this are varied, ranging from not feeling like they had control of the decision to not knowing whether their partner had had sex previously.



To find out more about the reality of having sex for the first time – and to hear people’s regrets – we asked a bunch of Brits to share their tales.

Ron

I was 16 and it happened at Newmarket Racecourse.

Relationship is probably too strong a word but we knew each other. It was a Sunday. August. We just headed there. We weren’t drinking or anything as far as I can remember. We did it on the racecourse. Quickly!

It was forgettable! I was so nervous that I didn’t come. I don’t think she did either.

Ava

I lost my virginity aged 30 and it was with a guy I’d met on Tinder – it was painful, uncomfortable and forgettable.

He also smelled of nothing – like literally no scent at all – and it was all I could focus on the whole time. Never slept with him again and it put me off trying again. Happy to say things improved later down the line and am in a happy and satisfying relationship now.

It was the right time in my head as I was fed up of not being sexually active – I wanted to know if I was missing anything

I don’t regret it – for me it was just to get it out of the way. I wanted it to be with someone I didn’t love – it was all about the act, not the emotions.

I come from a culture where sex before marriage is frowned upon – so I waited and waited, and was like: is this it? It wasn’t worth waiting for.

Jenny

Was at T in the Park when I was 16. I got wasted then went to watch David Guetta… ended up kissing a guy I was sort of friends with.

Ended up going back to my tent, losing my virginity (our wellies were still on because the tent was too small to take them off) and as SOON as he finished, he got up and ran out.

Turned out he had a girlfriend of two years who I knew nothing about.

Didn’t feel any particular sense that I had ‘lost’ anything but it was my first experience for sure of guys being total pricks. Didn’t try to make it romantic like a lot of my friends did, so I like that it was a bit rock n roll considering how square I am now.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Emma



I had been with my first boyfriend since I was 14 but we didn’t have sex until I was 16.

We’d done everything else so by the time we actually came to it, I just remember being totally underwhelmed, it didn’t last long and I remember lying there thinking – ‘Is that it????? We may as well have done a year ago!’

But now as a grown up I’m glad I waited and didn’t rush anything as it was with someone I loved and really trusted. I would have hated to have felt the way I did and it be with someone I didn’t care about.

We also had no idea what we were doing and unfortunately I probably didn’t actually enjoy sex until about a year later.

Amy

At 17, I was the last one of my friendship group to have sex.

I’d done other bits with a boyfriend, but we broke up before we actually went all the way, so I wanted to just get it over and done with. I ended up having sex for the first time with someone I hated while off my face on mephedrone (remember when that was legal?).

I was definitely ready, but the set-up was not healthy. I did a lot of things that I wouldn’t have been comfortable with if I had been sober.

I don’t really regret it because it hasn’t had a horrible emotionally scarring effect on me (as far as I know). I wanted to have sex, I had sex, then I was able to date without that internal pressure of needing to not be a virgin anymore.


I don’t think sex for the first time needs to be a huge deal. As long as you’re ready and it’s consensual, go right ahead. It doesn’t need to be super romantic or done in the perfect way, it’s just a physical act that you’ll likely go on to do many more times with other people.

James

I was 15. I don’t really remember it, to be honest. It was unmemorable… not in a bad way.

It was in bed, with a girlfriend, tried a bit of sex, that was it. Genuinely have no outstanding memories.

I probably did it too early.

Sophie

So, I was 15 and had been with my high school boyfriend for around six months. Weirdly I’d only had my first kiss the month before with him. Talk about moving fast, but we really wanted to give it a go and our mates had done it and didn’t hate it so what was the big deal, right?

I reckon the majority of my friendship group lost their virginity in the same month I did. What a time to be alive.

We were on holiday with his family, staying at his grandma’s house up the coast (romance isn’t really in the teenage vocabulary) and literally one night, when everyone went to bed, we just thought, why not?

We had to do the ‘sneak into one another’s guest rooms’ as we were not allowed to share a bed. He already had a condom handy, because he was a 15-year-old boy keen to have sex, and it was really quite a nothing act. No offence to the guy.


It didn’t hurt (we even checked for the telltale blood on the bed… nothing). It wasn’t awkward. It just…happened. And then it was over and we were like, ‘cool’.

I didn’t feel like I’d changed in any way. The only thing that changed was that I was swiftly put on the pill right as I turned 16, despite not dishing all the dirty deets to my mother previously… so perhaps mum was wiser to any differences in how I acted.

Sarah

I had just turned 18 and was desperate to lose it before I went to university. I had been seeing my boyfriend at the time for about three months.

He was 24 – which looking back, is way too old to be dating a 17/18 year old – but he had a car and a job and he would get me in to clubs. I didn’t fancy him, but I didn’t really fancy any boys at that point – that came later – I just felt like I was supposed to have a boyfriend and be going on dates, and he was always really nice to me.

It happened one night in his flat. I feel like I knew it was going to happen that night, but I also remember I was wearing a pair of Snoopy knickers so I can’t have been that prepared.

It really, really hurt. He was rather well endowed. He asked me – ‘am I hurting you?’ and through gritted teeth I said, ‘nope!’. But he was trying really hard to be gentle.

After, he scurried off to the bathroom and asked me if I needed any tissue – which at the time I didn’t understand at all, and I was like… ‘no?’

I remember rolling over and thinking, oh god – why do people do this? But I don’t regret it.

No, it wasn’t romantic. No, I didn’t love the guy. But he was kind, and my aim was to lose my virginity before uni – that’s all I wanted out of it. And I don’t think you’re ever, truly ready for the first time you have sex anyway.

Pete

I lost my virginity at a popular rock music festival in Berkshire after I turned 19.

At the time, it felt like I couldn’t have gone one more day without finally losing my V.

I like to tell people it was ‘intense’, because, yes, my friends, it was in tents.

It was reconciliation sex, as I’d completely fumbled my first attempt to bone only two weeks earlier in the passenger seat of her car.

We agreed to try the act again at the festival, in a close semi-circle of our nearest and dearest friends nearby.

I did not cum, despite my best intentions. You might think that this’d mean that at least she had a jolly good time from my ability to last, but in hindsight it was the most unrhythmic jig wildly spasming above her, and maybe the first time I’d used my hips for anything.

We mutually agreed to call it a day, and we never did it again.

It kickstarted a chain of drunk, one night sex where the person and I would go our separate ways afterwards. I barely remember my second time, and the third time is blackout.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Naima

I’d been with my school boyfriend for about a year – we were proper serious in my eyes, the couple of the school.

The first time we were going to have sex, my mum twigged and wrote a letter to my boyfriend telling him to respect me (and not flush the condom down the toilet), which naturally embarrassed both of us to hell and we were too ashamed to go through with it. Ten years later I still don’t think I’ve forgiven her for that.

We finally committed to it on his 16th birthday – we’d had a wonderful day out in London, had gone and seen a play, etc etc. Mum somehow let us stay in the spare room in a double bed so we set some music up, candles, the full cliché.

But in the build up to it, somehow it came up that he’d been smoking for the past month or so – something I’m really against due to, you guessed it, my mum, who did it constantly. That caused a bit of an argument, but because we’d already hyped ourselves up, we had sex anyway.

I don’t regret losing my virginity with him at all, but I wish we’d done it at another time to save tainting it with me being upset. We stayed together for another couple of years but broke up a short while after he went to uni.

Rebecca

I had sex for the first time on a beach in Biarritz with a man who I thought was a Vanderbilt but turned out to be a very distant cousin of the Vanderbilts.

I was 18, there were literal fireworks, but I got sand in my vagina and found the whole experience quite undignified.

I really was quite upset that he wasn’t a proper Vanderbilt.

Adam

I was 17 years old when I lost my virginity in 1993, but I had been lying that I had already lost it since I was 16.

My made-up virginity loss ‘was with a French girl on holiday’. I am pretty sure no-one believed me.

I lost my virginity in the upstairs bedroom of a house party, which smelt of Thunderbirds Blue, teenage excitement and petty theft.

My mate was in the other room and we lost it at the same time. He never saw his girl again but I ended up going out with mine for five years. We met at sixth form, had been heavy petting for a few weeks and then both did it drunk at the party.

I had no idea what I was doing but had seen a porno called Alex D’Renzy’s Easy Way (the VHS label said ‘World Cup 66’ the week before) so I copied some of the moves I had seen from there.

It did not last long, I think I used a condom, and tucked in a plant pot in the bedroom afterwards.

We were doing it on a pile of coats, mine included, it was green corduroy coat, and it was wrecked by teenage fluids. A few weeks later we did it properly, on my girlfriend’s living room carpet, just two of us without the soundtrack of someone shouting ‘I’ve got 3 fingers in’.

I am glad I lost my virginity with a girl I loved, she was a great first love. I remember highfiving my friend walking home and telling my mates the next day, because of my excitement they definitely knew I had been lying about the French girl.

Claire

I was 17. It was his 17th birthday. It was on the top bed of a bunkbed, at his birthday sleepover with a bunch of his friends.

His friends walked in midway, then his little brother spotted the condom wrapper the next morning

It was awkward… very awkward. It didn’t last long.

I don’t think we ever saw each other again.

Liv

I did it with my boyfriend when I was 15 and he was 18. He was super nice but his mates had convinced him there would be loads of blood as I was a virgin so he’d got blackout drunk.

Was fine but extremely sloppy and I felt horrible after so I left alone with a bottle of vodka, went to a party and made out with a gross 24-year-old in a dragon shirt.

Catherine

I was 13, which is far too young, and it was with a boyfriend who was 19, which is far too old.

I regret having sex that early. I felt ready at the time, but looking back it wasn’t right.

Jess

We met at freshers week at uni – I was a late one by some standards (19), we were seeing each other from September, in December he told me he’d booked a trip to Paris for my birthday. First love and all that, tells you he’s taking you to Paris – we did it right then.

It was pretty damn good and not all that awkward considering it was the first time. That’s how I’m remembering it anyway, 11 years later, maybe I’ve blanked out bad bits.

It was the right time. We were serious about each other at the time, though very young and naive. It led to an awful breakup but I don’t regret it.

Tom

I was 19. I liked to imagine my first time would be a grand occasion with a marching band, confetti and singing Disney birds to wake me up into sexual maturity. Turns out, life doesn’t always go your way – I was given a single-bed fumble with my neighbour in university halls.

To be honest, there was an element of build-up to it. We had been on a couple of dates before, which perhaps ramped up my awkwardness surrounding it all. I remember it putting on a whole lot of pressure around it, which, looking back, is the worst thing you can possibly do ever.

We went onto have a three-year relationship, so it couldn’t have been too awful. But any attempts to make it ‘sexy’ are dashed when you’re clambering over one another and simply trying not to fall out a tiny bed.

I think I even left my socks on because it was so cold. Diabolical.

Looking back though, I don’t regret it. I’m of the mind of simply getting it out the way so you can move onwards and upwards as fast as possible. Everyone’s first time is an awkward mess, so just try to enjoy/forget about it.

Grace

The week before my birthday (so I was 18) I met this gorgeous breakdancer at the Student Union and he invited me to see him dance one evening.

I was pretty drunk and I couldn’t believe my luck when he came back with me to my crappy halls. Fairy lights on, the deed was done and I remember thinking maybe I should tell him it was my first time but it really didn’t seem like a big deal.

He had a pretty big dick but it wasn’t painful as such. I remember thinking why do people make such a big deal out of having or not having sex – it’s not world changing either way, but I really, really, really liked this guy so I was so chuffed with myself and also in awe of this dude.

Anyway, we’re finished and I was like, gosh, I’m so glad that happened, I’ve never done that before.

He was crushed. He was like: I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, I wish you had told me, I would have made it more special. I had no idea.

Part of me thought: look at me, I’m a natural. Part of me thought maybe I did a bad thing by not saying – maybe it was a big thing for him.

He’s literally one of the hottest and nicest people I’ve ever met.

The next time we had sex he covered himself in honey and I woke up stuck to him.

Names have been changed and stories have been edited for length and clarity.

When is the right time to have sex? The law says it’s legal for you to consent to sex from the age of 16. Beyond that, the choice of when to have sex is up to you. The NHS recommends asking yourself some questions: Does it feel right?

Do I love my partner?

Does he/she love me just as much?

Have we talked about using condoms to prevent STIs and HIV, and was the talk OK?

Have we got contraception organised to protect against pregnancy?

Do I feel able to say “no” at any point if I change my mind, and will we both be OK with that? If you answer ‘yes’ to all of these, sex is on the table. However, if you answer ‘yes’ to any of the following questions, now may not be the right time: Do I feel under pressure from anyone, such as my partner or friends?

Could I have any regrets afterwards?

Am I thinking about having sex just to impress my friends or keep up with them?

Am I thinking about having sex just to keep my partner?

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