A photo from a Halloween party turned up in our work group chat. The guy I have a crush on was in it with his friends, dressed up for the night. His comment was a joke about how they looked: “haha we look like a bunch of virgins.”
He was talking about a costume photo. I was reading it as a woman in her late twenties who has never had sex. Nobody I know knows that about me, including him. Suddenly, a throwaway line in a team chat felt uncomfortably close to something I keep private.
I already liked him before this. That is what gave the joke its weight. If someone I had no interest in had written it, the comment might still have bothered me, but I would not be wondering whether it said something about my own chances with him. I am trying to understand a man I am attracted to through a sentence he did not write about me.
The word was clearly doing the work of an insult, however mild he intended it to be. Looking like a virgin was the funny part. I cannot tell what he thought was embarrassing: the costumes, the idea of being sexually inexperienced, or the combination that made his friends worth teasing.
What I fear is more personal than being the subject of a joke. If he found out I had never had sex, would he stop wanting to know me? Would he see a loser where I had hoped he might see someone he liked? There has been no rejection. I am imagining one before he even knows the thing I am afraid he would reject.
There is an awkward difference between hearing somebody joke about a group he assumes is imaginary and belonging to that group without his knowledge. He could have meant nothing beyond making his friends laugh. The remark can still sting. I do not need to believe he deliberately hurt me to wish he had chosen a different joke.
Because we work together, this is also sitting in a chat shared with other people on our team. It is not a private conversation about dating or what either of us wants from a partner. I have a public scrap of his humor and a private question it cannot answer. Nothing in the exchange tells me how he would respond to a real woman telling him she had no sexual experience.
I have not told him. I have not told anyone I know. For now, he is still the guy at work I have a crush on, and I am still wondering whether a joke he made to everyone says anything about how he would see me.
