24, zero sexual experience, and vaginismus is making me terrified to date
Hi! I’m 24 and I have literally zero sexual experience. Like truly zero. I’ve never had sex, never made out with anyone, never really done anything sexual with another person.
When I was younger, that was mostly because I was really uncomfortable with intimacy and avoided it because I was continuously touched by a trusted male adult… But now I actually want to date, have sexual experiences, lose my virginity, etc., and I feel like I’ve gotten myself into a
catch-22 where the longer I go without experience, the more embarrassed and insecure I am about having no experience, which makes me avoid getting any experience 💀
I’m trying to use Hinge and I’ll talk to guys, but as soon as it gets to the point where they ask me out, I get terrified and usually end up ghosting. It’s not really an appearance/confidence thing, I don’t think I’m ugly and I know men can be interested in me. I’m just SO scared of actually going on the date and eventually having to navigate anything physical.
There’s a guy I’m talking to right now, who I would love to go out with, he is like my perfect type to a T on paper, but I’m already feeling like it’s pointless. I don’t think he’s on Hinge looking for the love of his life, which is completely fine with me. I’m not opposed to something casual and part of me really wants to do those things in a casual way. But then I think what guy looking for something fun/casual wants to deal with a 24-year-old who has absolutely no idea what she’s doing AND has vaginismus? 😭
I’m in pelvic floor physio and working on it, but progress is slow. Penetration is still extremely difficult for me. I also know that even if/when I can have penetrative sex, I’ll probably need someone to be rllyyy patient, go slowly, spend a lot of time on foreplay, stop if something hurts, etc. I get so insecure imagining a guy finding that annoying or thinking I’m way too much work.
The other problem is that I don’t think I could comfortably start doing sexual things with someone without telling them beforehand that I’m completely inexperienced. I know technically I don’t “owe” someone my sexual history, but I would need them to know because otherwise I’d be panicking thinking I was doing things wrong and pretending I knew what I was doing and I’d be uncomfortable the whole time. But the thought of actually looking at a guy I like and saying that is so deeply terrifying to me for some reason.
I think I’m especially scared that someone will be initially interested, and then once they realize sex with me might require patience and communication and might not even include penetration, they’ll decide I’m not worth the trouble. I’ve had one (ex) boyfriend when I was 20, and he cheated on me a bunch because I wasn’t ready to go further, despite having been very up front about my issues. So I guess I feel a bit hurt about that still.
For anyone who started dating/being sexually active later and had vaginismus: how did you actually get over this? When did you tell someone? How much did you tell them? Did people actually care about your lack of experience as much as you thought they would?
And especially if you dated casually/had hookups while dealing with vaginismus, is that even realistic? How did you navigate telling someone what you could/couldn’t do without making the whole interaction feel like a whole trauma dump thing.
I really want to stop letting this control my dating life. I just have no idea how to get from wanting to do it to actually feeling brave enough to act on it.