The age old question: prude or whore?

and why it's better with a frontal lobe

For about six years of my life I believed I’d only ever have sex with one person.

I lost my virginity to him freshman year of college and we broke up the spring before I turned 25—this is famously the age at which our frontal lobes are supposed to be done developing.

When I remember this detail it makes sense to me why the younger version of me thought she was ready to call the party off early and marry the first boy she loved. I wasn’t in my right mind. My brain was still green. I couldn’t understand that life could be so much bigger, love could mean so much more than this one person.

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Years later, I was telling a friend about a different relationship when she asked me, Well, was the sex good?

I remembered the last time I’d slept with this person. An hour or so before we broke up, I buried my face in a pillow after he’d finished, pretending I was catching my breath when really I was wiping tears from my eyes. I knew something wasn’t right, I knew I couldn’t be with this person much longer. I took “faking it” to whole new level.

Sometimes I enjoyed sex with this person. Other times I felt this great divide between us. He was unreachable even when he was inside of me. At one point, when I brought up the topic of our sex life, he told me in passing that I was more vanilla. After that I couldn’t have sex with him without getting trapped in my thoughts and feeling like a failure because I wasn’t creating a fulfilling enough experience for him out of my body.

I was too busy concentrating on being all open minded and sex positive during the vanilla conversation that I glazed over how disrespectful and condescending his comment was. Sometimes I’m so eager to be loved I forget I have a right to anger.

Months later, after we had broken up, I remembered how in another past relationship I’d felt embarrassed when it seemed like my partner skirted me any time I tried to initiate intimacy. I remember feeling like something was wrong with me.

My friend Iz recently reminded me of this quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: Everything is about sex, except for sex.

It wasn’t that I was too horny or too sexual—it was more humiliating than that. I was too clingy, too needy, too demanding, too desperate. That’s what our relationship made me think and our sex life was just the mirror.

I considered these two relationships. How in one I was vanilla. And in the other I was some hyper sexual nympho freak. So which one was it? Was I a prude or a whore?

I realized that for the duration of my sexual history I’d always defined myself in the context of the person I was dating. Eve is made from Adam’s rib, etc.

How many times had I meditated on the idea that I needed to define myself on my own terms and stop letting a man and his needs define me? In reality I’d let him right into my bed.

I am perpetually confused by how we manage to talk about sex.

On one hand, our society is addicted to casual. We have situationships, sneaky links, friends with benefits. We are not looking for anything serious. We are interested in Short term open to long. We treat intimacy like kids in a candy store. We are told it is ok to run around chasing a high while ignoring the possibility of a crash.

And on other hand, we treat sex so preciously: it’s best when it’s with someone you are in love with or married to. But we forget it is intertwined with desire, power, love, agency, advocacy, communication and pleasure. I can’t help but think, shouldn't we understand all of that for ourselves?

We don’t ask how harmful it is for us to build that sexual sense of self in relation to someone else. And again, as Iz and Oscare Wilde said, everything is about sex except for sex. If ever there were a case for having a slut phase, surely it would be to understand our desires and agency as a form of self discovery rather than as affection for someone else.

I sometimes wonder what the consequences of having had long relationships as a young person are. I was 18, with so much of my frontal lobe missing, when I loved that first boyfriend.

18 is an eerie age because you have the awareness that you’re becoming an adult, becoming more you. But you don’t have the sense or life experience yet to filter out the noise. The boys, their affection—and the way they could withdraw it at any moment—they were all noise.

But the noise, it wasn’t just screaming prude or whore???? at me. In one relationship I was told I was controlling and manipulative. In another I was docile and desperate. I could be the big sparkling personality with a sullen dismissive boyfriend. Or I could be the reasonable one, the one who quietly kept everything in our lives running. I could be whoever you wanted, I swear!

I have been single for about two years now. I’ve dated men exclusively and I’ve dated around, and I’ve even slept around an amount that I can consider both modest and still thrilling enough that my friends in relationships throw martinis down my throat while they live vicariously through my stories.

Each time I dish the details of my single life to my friends someone says the following to me:

When I was in college I was going crazy and sleeping around and I got my heart broken by all these dumb frat guys.

I’d hook up with a guy twice in his dorm room and then think maybe I’m going to date him

You’re so confident with these guys. I wasn’t like that when I was single.

I was so emotionally rocked by some idiot when I was 22.

When it comes to your sense of self, I’m not sure which is worse without a prefrontal cortex: being in a serious relationship or being single and hungry for love.

But I am grateful that I can say this: When I go on a really good date, I take it at face value. When a man doesn’t text me every day, I understand that this is normal and healthy. When I am about to sleep with someone I ask myself if I feel safe, if I feel comfortable. When I wake up in the morning, I call my own Uber. I don’t wait around for him to ask me to coffee—I don’t want to get the coffee. When I find out that one man doesn’t vote, I don’t laugh it off. I berate him while he’s still mostly naked, prove he knows nothing about how mayoral elections work and I tell him Your values, they’re so selfish…Have a nice shabbat! as I slam his front door shut.

No one is keeping me up at night. I’m not wondering if anyone is my future husband. I’m looking up their ex girlfriends on Instagram for fun, not out of insecurity.

After so many years of being in relationships I started to really love my single, empowered, maybe promiscuous, dating phase. And then one day, I decided to call it off altogether.

Nothing dramatic happened, it was simple. I woke up one day, thought I’d had enough of all the casual romance and lust. I deleted two of the three dating apps I had, canceled five first dates, stopped sleeping with My Friend I Sometimes Sleep With, and stopped Facetiming Adam Driver Cowboy every day.

I still go on dates and stay up too late with boys I haven’t known for very long but it happens less frequently now. I never knew how to stop relationships with men who felt so comfortable putting me into buckets. But I know how to recognize when something isn’t right for me anymore. I know how to identify the noise and when to call it.

That’s the great thing about having a grown up brain: knowing when the party’s over.