Anonymous asked: Ok so yesterday I had sex for the first time. It was with a friend of mine and it was, well I'm not sure how I should describe it but it was nice. We talked about it up front and after and it's probably a one time thing since I'm moving to another country for half a year.
The thing is I'm not sure if I want to tell my friends. They're a little more conservative than me and I know they will judge me for sleeping with a guy who is not my boyfriend and probably never will be and I don't know I want to hear that. On the other hand, they're my friends and hiding it would probably feel like lying.
What do you think I should do? Ever been in a similar situation? I know it's a weird question to ask you, but well, I can't really ask my friends so..
You know, normally, I would say, don’t worry about what your friends think as long as you’re making choices that are right for you, but in this case, I’m not even sure you should feel any sort of obligation to reveal all the details of your love/sex life. These experiences are yours and your partner’s. Would your friends expect you to spill family secrets? Probably not. So perhaps being guarded about a one-night stand shouldn’t be equated to “lying”.
I’ve had a couple similar experiences so I can relate. When I first started writing Sex and the Ivy, there were a lot of things about me that people felt entitled to know. And that entitlement made me feel really uncomfortable, as if I didn’t have any privacy or secrets of my own. Compounding the problem was that I lived at the time in a suite of six women, where you couldn’t sneak in overnight visitors if you tried. Some of these women are my closest friends to this day, but nonetheless, it was really hard to live with zero secrets. They may have been my biggest cheerleaders when it came to critics of my blogs, but there were plenty of things I did back then that they didn’t approve of (perhaps rightfully so) and plenty of things I did that they didn’t necessarily understand. I didn’t want to share every single anecdote of my sophomore year with my roommates, but it happened anyway because of our living situation.
There was definitely a point at which I realized that our rooming arrangement was bad for my mental health and probably bad for everyone else’s too. It was just too much estrogen in too small a place, and it didn’t help that we were all rather entrenched in each other’s lives. For a variety of factors, all of us split up for junior year; two transferred Houses, two moved into an off-campus apartment together, and two stayed.
And you know what? I think this saved a lot of friendships. I don’t think that being close friends with someone requires sharing everything and anything and trying to force that model of friendship can actually be really detrimental. If you can deal with whatever backlash you may get from your friends, perhaps you should be open with your experience and try to change their minds about non-relationship sex. But if it’s a lost cause or if you simply don’t feel like spilling the beans, then by all means, keep your secrets. You’re entitled to them.
More burning questions? Ask them here.
Related posts on blogging and privacy:
Sex and the Ivy: Then & Now
Musings From A Reformed Attention Whore
Control
When I Was 20
