Our first kiss was awkward enough that she noticed. She put it down to first-date nerves, which was generous, accurate, and nowhere near the whole explanation. I was thirty, and it was my first kiss. Ever.
She was twenty-nine. We had met on a dating app, gone out for dinner, and kissed on that first date. We came from different backgrounds, but I liked her, and things had moved far enough that she was now my girlfriend. She had also made it clear early on that she wanted sex. That was exciting news with a rather significant administrative problem attached.
I had already told her I had experience. Some hookups, some one-night stands, nothing especially adventurous. A modest little history, except that none of it had happened. Apparently I had decided the best way to begin my sex life was to give it a backstory.
I hadn't just left out a detail. I had supplied several false ones. There is a difference between not announcing that you're a virgin over dinner and telling someone about encounters you never had. Now she was getting to know a man whose romantic résumé contained jobs he had never held.
The kissing, at least, had improved. After that first attempt, I read and watched guides, and the second kiss went better. That gave me something real to feel encouraged about: I could be awkward at something, learn a little, and do better. It did not, unfortunately, turn the rest of my claimed experience into a documentary.
From what I understood of her preferences, she was more sexually adventurous than the fairly tame version of myself I had described. Even my imaginary experience was conservative. I had managed to make myself sound more practiced than I was without actually sounding like a match for everything she might enjoy.
I kept thinking that when we had sex, she would know. That was my fear, rather than something she had said would happen. Her explanation for the first kiss had been nerves. I couldn't treat that as proof she had already worked out the truth, or as a guarantee that she wouldn't.
What made this harder was that I really liked her. I wanted to do well with her, and there was a new relationship here that I didn't want to lose. I was worrying about whether I would disappoint her sexually while also having created an entirely separate reason she might feel disappointed in me.
Telling her would mean correcting a story I had volunteered, not simply revealing something private. Staying quiet would mean carrying that story into an encounter I had never actually experienced. No amount of reading could make that particular choice for me.
We hadn't had sex yet. The second kiss had gone better. She still didn't know that it was only my second kiss.
