When I was young I thought sex was probably quite a rare occurrence. From what I’d seen on TV and in films, it looked like sex within a straight, long-term relationship involved a fair amount of rigmarole. You have to shave your legs, wash your hair, put on makeup and look seductive. If you’re a dude you’ll probably have to do a different kind of groundwork: snuggling in front of a film, and inching your arm along the back of the couch painstakingly slowly until it finally comes to rest on one of your partner’s breasts.

I’ve never seen a TV couple start fucking the way we usually do.

“Do you want to shag? We haven’t done it for a while.”

Or seduce each other with the kind of lines you can only get away with if you know the answer will be ‘why not?’

“Do you want to touch my freshly-shaven cunt?”

(more…)

I often walk down the street and imagine a hot guy (who probably looks a bit like David Tennant but with piercings and maybe a bicep tattoo) stepping out of a nearby shop and saying “hey there, you look incredibly attractive and exactly my type – do you fancy coming into my dungeon so that we can have all the sex?” Sadly my life is not a porn film, and the closest it’s ever come to one is that one time a plumber came over and I’d forgotten to put trousers on before I answered the door. That’s where the similarity ended, though, as he blushed a bit and I had to pretend that my boxer-brief/jumper combo was how I greeted all my house guests.

This week’s guest blogger has had far more interesting experiences, though, and he’s here to tell you a couple of deliciously exciting stories about unexpected sex. Take it away Simon…

Guest blog: the joy of unexpected sex

Sex is fun, exhilarating, a relief, all sorts of things. When it is unexpected it is even better – and I don’t mean when your partner suddenly decides that “Tonight’s the night, dear” when you’re settling down in front of Match of the Day. I mean when someone you know, but haven’t paid a great deal of attention to, surprises you with an out-of-the-blue session that leaves you completely sated. It’s happened to me twice and both times were mind-blowing.

I used to work at a hospital. A bunch of us would get together once a year to put on a show – all very silly and amateur but we took it fairly seriously and I had massive, full-on lustful cravings for one of the nurses who was part of this group. Very sexy, black wavy hair and a cracking smile and laugh. A real shame, as my amorous advances were never returned and she ended up with someone who I considered far behind her in evolutionary terms. What I didn’t realise was that another nurse in the group (I’ll call her Evie) had her eyes and ideas set on me and I was totally unaware of it.

We gathered one evening in my flat – I lived quite close to the hospital – was the usual messy, friendly  hilarious rehearsal for the show, spurred on with more than a few drinks and everyone (I thought) left quite late. I ushered them all out of the front door, dumped the empties by the bin, washed, brushed my teeth and jumped into bed to find Evie there wearing nothing but a chunky necklace. Genuine blonde, booby and a seriously gorgeous figure. This was well before the acronym “WTF” was invented but that’s probably what I thought at the time. (I should have written it down and patented it). However, being unmarried, unattached and certainly not one to look a gift nurse in the mouth, we had a rompingly good time involving massage oil, hands tied together, feet tied together, clothes pegs – use your imagination – and a pair of airline eye-shades. I am fairly certain I had four decent orgasms over the following hours and I am not sure I have managed that in one session at any time since. I know I was very late for work the next morning and several more in the following few weeks.

Wind the clock forward quite a number of years and I am on the way to deliver some training in the north of England. This is to an outfit whose manager I have known for some time on a purely professional basis – friendly, but definitely professional. I am due to be at her office between 8 and 8.30 a.m. but I get a call to ask if I can swing by her house to pick her up and drive us both in, then (she says) we can use her parking permit at work. So I drive up at about half past seven, ring the doorbell and she answers the door wearing a dressing gown.

That stopped me in my tracks for a start – I was expecting business attire and a “Let’s get the day started” attitude – but she had the gown open quite low, her hair was down and she did look absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and more than just a little sexy. Even more so when she reached past me to shut the door, then walked a few steps into the house, turned round and let the dressing gown fall away. It had the sort of effect that she obviously wanted. My jaw was probably following the dressing gown on its way down to floor level and my cock inside my trousers responded with a speed it hadn’t displayed for a while. I can’t remember if I actually said anything but, if I did, it was probably gibberish and pointless. She looked pleased at the effect she was having, climbed a few of her stairs and sat down, waiting.

I really didn’t need too much encouragement after that. Would any man? My jacket and tie came off remarkably quickly and I positioned myself at her feet and opened her knees wide, kissing and licking up the inside of her thighs as she lay back on the stairs and closed her eyes. I found she was extremely wet already – and extremely tasty, too – and the next few minutes were spent teasing her, opening those beautiful cunt lips to admire a swollen clitoris and to help it to swell even more. I slipped two fingers into her and she arched and shuddered and came hard and it was all I could do not to join her, though I was still mainly clothed. I stood up and started to undo my trousers and let my aching cock into the light; she turned her back on me, climbed another couple of stairs and stuck her arse out towards me, presenting me with a picture that most red-blooded men would like to frame and keep. Still with my trousers around my ankles, I slipped straight into her and she braced herself against the stairs with one hand and pulled me harder into her with the other. We fucked in that position harder than I had known for ages – the excitement of the situation, a new experience with someone who was almost a stranger made me rock hard with pleasure and I came like a train inside her, flooding her with my come for what seemed an age. For some inexplicable reason – guilt, pleasure, surprise? – we both collapsed and started laughing helplessly on the stairs and slithered to the bottom step in a sticky, tangled heap.

The trickiest bit was walking into her offices, washed and cleaned, over an hour later and keeping myself from smiling inanely while trying to train her staff with her present in the room.

People ask me for advice sometimes, and I find this a bit terrifying because ultimately I am just a bumbling nobhead, who stumbles through life trying to work out how to look like a grown up without anyone noticing that actually I am a ball of bluster and panic. I expect some of you feel like this too, but because I am human I think that I have it much worse: that I am surrounded by functioning adults who have brains and wisdom and the ability to fill out mortgage paperwork, while I still struggle with the concept of having to throw milk away when it starts to get smelly.

So when you ask me for advice, know that I am doing one of two things:

1. Making it up, based on ‘what I reckon’, and given that I often come home half-drunk and ‘reckon’ I should lie face-down on the carpet until my partner covers me with a blanket, my reckonings are unlikely to be particularly insightful.

2. I give advice that other people have given me before, which struck me as wise and thoughtful and far better than anything I could say.

Today I am doing the latter, and I present to you the 3 best dating tips I’ve ever been given.

Dating tip 1: say yes

A long time ago I had a horrible break up. I did that thing where you hide in your flat in your pants, crying to old episodes of Scrubs and eating cheese until you almost stop liking cheese. It was pretty serious. My life was never going to be good again and everything was awful and I couldn’t see myself doing anything at all because he wasn’t by my side.

Then my Mum called.

She told me to pull myself together and stop moping and all those comforting things that Mums are supposed to say. She told me I was beautiful and that I’d find someone else in no time if I wanted to, but that I didn’t need a man to complete me and yada yada etc. I cried some more, because all of this stuff was just clichéd and obvious bullshit which was instantly swallowed by the pit of my misery. I wanted something practical. Something useful. Something I could go out and do rather than just repeat to myself as a wishy-washy happiness mantra.

“Say yes,” she explained.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Say yes to every single thing you’re invited to from now on. Evenings in the pub, trips to the theatre, weekends away – everything.”

“Why? To meet someone else?”

“Don’t be a tosser,” she replied. “You do it because it will make you that ‘fun’ person: the one who always says yes. The one who gets excited about life and wants to join in with things. The one who’s always got something exciting on the go.”

“Will it win him back?” I asked, like a pathetic loser.

“Who gives a shit? You’ll be too busy rock-climbing or something.”

So I did: I said yes to everything. And so followed one of the most enjoyable three months of my life. I was skint, of course – all this socialising gave my wallet a thorough hammering – but by God I was having fun. A few weeks after she gave me this advice I was having dirty tent sex with a hot guy, and drinking vodka with strangers on a beach. Thanks, Mum.

Dating tip 2: approach people you fancy

We focus so much on how to ‘capture’ the man or woman of our dreams, and how to entice other people, that frequently we forget that the whole point is that we should like each other. I’ve heard a few variations on this piece of advice before, but none so brilliantly put as that posted by @ArchedEyebrowBR yesterday. In her post – online dating tips for the fat babe – she laid down some pretty significant wisdom that I think is relevant to everyone:

Don’t be at the mercy of everyone else: ask out the people you fancy, not the people you think will fancy you.

Hell yes. Something I have repeatedly and miserably failed at for most of my adult life, in part because I see so many things that give me pause for thought. He won’t like me – I’m too tall. He’ll probably think I’m too common. He goes for blondes.

Why is this stuff in my brain? It didn’t fall in there by accident – it’s there because I’ve had experience with similar guys that has led me to be wary of a particular reaction. It’s also partly down to the media constantly telling us what we need to be like, and down to my youth, during encounters at school which made me believe that like should stick to like. Goth kids with goth kids, fat kids with fat kids, clever kids with clever kids, and God forbid you should have a boyfriend who plays rugby when you’re a glasses-wearing sportphobe.

Anyway. Sometimes this stuff will be true – sometimes the person you fancy really will turn you down because you’re too tall, or whatever. But that is because they may well be a douchebag. And how much fucking better to know that you’re picking from a pool of people you have a genuine attraction to, than ‘settling’ for someone you think you might be able to get because you’ve always been told you can only have one thing?

Imagine if you were vegetarian and you’d been told that the buffet was 90% meat. You arrive at the venue expecting to be fobbed off with some crappy spinach and ricotta bullshit and a measly side-salad. Then you discover, to your delight, that the meat is actually cheese and you can have your pick of anything on the table.

ArchedEyebrow has literally just announced that, but for dating – tuck in.

Dating tip 3: you will never be happy ever after

Please don’t think ‘oh God what a depressing tip to end on’ – this is actually one of the most positive and uplifting pieces of advice I have ever been given, and it applies to LIFE as well as dating, because dating is basically part of life and is not some special expert subject on which only people who tell you to ‘play hard to get’ are qualified to comment.

This advice was given to me by the amazing Justin Hancock, who is wise. He was explaining mindfulness to me, and talking about being present in the moment. I’m not an expert on mindfulness, but this bit really struck home (I’m paraphrasing):

We often think of happiness as this big end goal – like we’ll get to a point in our lives and we’ll be happy. We’ll have a nice home, family, job, whatever, and by that point we’ll have reached peak happiness. Then we get sad about something and think OH NO I’VE RUINED IT and WHY CAN’T I JUST BE HAPPY. But it’s normal: happiness comes and goes, and we’ll never reach this ‘peak happiness forever’ – it’s a myth.

Actually, happiness is always a temporary thing. It’d be weird if it was just a climbing scale and, at a certain point, we reached a state of irreversible bliss. Even when we achieve our ‘dream jobs’ we’re not stagnant – we’re usually not content to just turn up from 9-5 and work to rule every day for the rest of our lives: we have ups and downs, fights with colleagues, deadlines that are unreasonable or realistic, new ambitions or needs or desires.

Likewise with dating: you can meet someone you love so much you want to lick their used socks and snuggle so hard into them that your face becomes melded to the crook of their neck, and still you won’t be happy forever. That person will eventually piss you off, and you’ll piss them off, or you’ll have to go for Christmas lunch with their parents or something and you’ll be miserable because their dad makes shit gravy and doesn’t do the sprouts properly.

The point is, no one will ever be happy ever after. Knowing that makes me much happier today.

I have a slightly different type of guest blog today – Edie Clark contacted me recently to tell me about the Clark Project, which is a website designed to gather information on dating, relationships and debut sexual experiences. I’m obviously a big fan of stories, and encouraging people to share their thoughts and feelings around sex – the good, bad, funny, difficult, and everything in between – so the idea of this project intrigued me, not to mention that the story she tells is a lovely one. I hope you like it, and that it reminds you of some of your own early explorations.

What did YOU feel like?

Janine carefully stroked the tip of the brush across the length of her thumbnail, applying one last layer of shiny polish. She had done her toenails earlier in the afternoon, and now all of her fingers and toes were perfectly sealed under a layer of bright orange nail polish. She held her hands out in front of her face and examined the results.

Joe didn’t like black nail polish. He preferred the traditional shades of red and orange. Janine had chosen “Orange Thunder” for this evening because she knew Joe would like it, and because she liked the name. She smiled as she thought about it. Orange Thunder was just the right name for tonight.

Janine, a freshman in college, was 18 years old and studying theatre. She had met Joe in her social sciences class and had been drawn to him immediately. They walked across campus and got ice cream cones after class on that first day; in the months to come there were movies, parties, study dates, and a canoe trip down the sleepy, tea-colored river that looped through the middle of their rolling, landscaped campus.

Since Joe and Janine both lived in dorms, they had few opportunities for privacy. Tonight, though, he was borrowing a car and they were going out to dinner at a romantic spot several miles from campus. Joe had rented a motel room, and they were going to have sex. It would be the first time for both of them. They planned everything together: Joe had purchased condoms and Janine had bought lubricant. They packed overnight bags with fresh clothing and snacks.

But now Janine had a case of the butterflies. She wondered if they had been wrong in planning everything ahead of time because now she was feeling nervous. Would it hurt? Would the condom break? And he had never seen her without makeup. What would he think of that? Would he notice that her thighs were too large? And there would be blood, right?

Janine shuddered, then shifted her thoughts.

Yeah, well, what about him? Maybe she wouldn’t like him. He had some measuring up to do, too, didn’t he?

Janine glanced at the clock on her nightstand. She had 45 minutes left before he would show up at the door, and she knew he wouldn’t be late.

Interestingly, almost everyone remembers exactly how they felt when they had sex for the first time. In fact, almost everyone I’ve interviewed as part of The Clark Project remembers their first sexual experience in great detail, right down to the color of the blanket, whether the door was locked, and how they felt afterwards. In Janine’s case, she still remembered the shade of nail polish she was wearing when she met with me, ten years after the fact, to discuss her experience. She remembered what she was wearing, what she had for dinner that evening, and even what kind of chips Joe had packed in his bag.

Why do the details of our first experience stay with us for so long – usually for a lifetime?

Sexuality is a powerful force, and the first time we have sex marks an important transition. The sex act, however you define it, is an explicit and intimate entry into the adult world. It can’t be undone. There’s no going back. When we have our virgin experience, we’ve turned a corner on a one way street.

Janine comes close to exactly fitting the profile for debut sex among college women. The average age for college bound girls is 17 years old, most of them have known their partner for six to twelve months, and very few of them expressed any regrets. When asked what they’d say to their partner if they could say anything at all, most of them told me they’d say “Thank you.” When asked what they’d change about their first experience, a few women said they wish there’d been a lock on the door, but most were happy with the way things unfolded. Though women seemed well-prepared in most other ways, about one-third didn’t use any kind of birth control other than withdrawal. About one-third of women reported reaching orgasm, and nearly all women reported feeling a greater sense of connection with the rest of the world. Only about 14 percent of the women I interviewed were still together with their first sex partner.

We’re in the beginning stages of collecting data as part of The Clark Project. If you’d like to participate in a confidential, 30 minute interview on the subject of your first sexual experience, we’d love to hear from you. Just send an email to [email protected] and let us know. We’ll get back to you and set up a telephone or a Skype appointment. We’re interviewing people of all ages, all genders, and all levels of experience, including no experience at all.

And, by the way, when I interviewed Janine and asked her to describe her feelings on that important evening, she blushed, then laughed. “You know, the waiter took pictures of us at dinner that night, and look at me.” She showed me an old snapshot of a smiling couple. “Look at that. With that white wrap on, I look just like a creamsicle. Seriously. There I was all dressed up, wearing orange, trying so hard to look special.To this day I can’t look at a creamsicle without laughing.”

Edith Clark is a retired public health professional with a B.A. in English and an M.S. in biostatistics and epidemiology. Her background is in survey research, and while most of her work has been with public health issues, she’s also worked with the education, criminal justice, and corporate communities. If  you’re interested in finding out more, or in participating in Edie’s project, please do visit the Clark Project website, or get in touch with her via the email address above.