My first experience with sex was at 14. My parents were away, I had a friend over and... well, you know.

My first thought after he'd finished poking at me while I lay there half-clueless was, "That's it?" No pain, but certainly nothing else either. The event was nothing like the flowery (and temptingly smutty) romance novel I'd found. That novel had alluded to near ecstasy. My first time was just confusing and boring.

My second sexual experience was at 16. Acting out from a home life gone crazy while my father died slowly of Alzheimer's, I screwed a lot of guys.

I was a belt-notcher. I didn't care about myself or my reputation. I made it a personal challenge to get the hottest guys to sleep with me — the ones that were out of my league. Rich kids, popular jocks, the son of important parents...

I drank a lot, I smoked a lot of dope, and I had a lot of sex in cars.

I've never associated sex with love. Ever. And with good reason. How can you throw something away and treat it so negligently if you care about it? Sex was sex. No one cared about me — why should I care about anything at all? Damned if I ever felt a thing in bed, too.

Sex was something the wrong kind of girls did. The girls who didn't care about anything. The tough girls. The scrappers. That was me. I didn't even bother to try to enjoy sex.

It's taken me years to work through my issues. They have nothing to do with men or gender confusion or anything like that. My problems have to do with finding a way to resolve that behavioral cry for attention at a time when my world was falling apart.

I wonder sometimes how different I would have been had I had normal teenage years. Would I have been more chaste? Would I have avoided booze and not even dared to smoke up? Probably. I wouldn't have needed any of that.

When I was 15 years old my mother sat me down for a heart-to-heart chat. "Sweetheart," she said, "Before you get married you should sleep with as many men as possible. That way you will know what you like in bed and won't marry someone who you aren't compatible with."

You may have guessed that my mom was not the most traditional woman, but at that age I figured she was telling me something that every mom told their daughters. Little did I know then that she was setting me up for some real heartache as an adult.

Needless to say, I entered into my marriage with far more sexual experience than my husband. He had a couple of sexual encounters before we met, but he was a bit of an introvert and didn't date much. As for me, let's just say that I can count the number of men I have slept with on my fingers and toes, but if I were to get into an accident and lose a few digits, I wouldn't be able to anymore.

It's not something that I'm proud of, and I will absolutely not be giving the same advice to my daughter at that tender age.

I wonder if this big difference in experience has anything to do with our sexual issues. It isn't as though I consciously lament about how my husband is as good as so-and-so or doesn't do the same freaky things what's-his-name did, but I can't help but think that these comparisons might be going on somewhere inside my mind.

I will admit, though, that although my husband puts in a good effort in bed sometimes, he's not the best I ever had. I can't help but wonder if it would be better to not know the difference to begin with.

I mean (some of) you just got divorced. Are you really ready to jump in the sack with someone else? I know I wasn't, so I didn't. I feel compelled to ask, What is it that makes women prematurely seek out relationships and casual encounters? Do they really need a man that badly?

Or is it the fear of being alone that compels someone to look for Mr. Right-Now?

Some of you who are reading this post probably think this has nothing to do with you. You may be right. For others, this may have struck a chord. Either way, I hope everyone stops for a minute and thinks this one through.

To all of you, I ask this question: How well do you really know yourself? You know that you hate peas, love Journey and all that, but what about the difficult questions? Why are you afraid of being alone? How satisfied are you with the last five years of your life? What would you have done differently, had you had the chance? What's that thing you have always wanted to do, given the opportunity?

Here's your chance to find all that out.

I recently stumbled across a poll that reported that 80% of the women regretted having casual sex - sometimes, if not always. That's an awful lot of disappointment to voluntarily add to one's life. Given all the other uncontrollable misfortunes in one's life, why add more problems?

My cat doesn't want me to have sex.

Larry doesn't really understand that he's a cat. He can't jump, he runs into walls, he eats thumbtacks. He's about as sharp as a marble, but he adores me.

Larry is a cat-whore. He'll snuggle with anyone and is particularly prone to the man-crush: Kingsley stayed with me for a few weeks when he was between apartments and Larry refused to leave his side. He would sit on the back of the couch and hug Kingsley's head, purring so loudly we couldn't hear the TV.

Larry does not like Mike.

It's mostly about the sex: If I'm having sex, Larry can't be on top of me, and this displeases him. He tolerated the boys that I brought home periodically over the past year, put out, but knowing they wouldn't be there that long.

Mike, on the other hand, is here for a week at a time. And there's a lot of sex happening when he is here. Larry refuses to sit near him, throwing scathing looks at him from across the room. This from a cat who was once called "the sluttiest cat I've ever seen." He's figured out that there is more to this than anything with the previous boys — which is impressive for such a dumb cat.

When Mike goes home, Larry reclaims my lap, letting me know that my body belongs to him and I better not forget it again.

Poor Mike is determined to win Larry over. It's uphill work. I suspect though, that, as long as he's sleeping with me, Larry will remain un-won.

So, I'm pregnant again... For the fourth time.

There are so many things which this means, and I'm sure I should be concerned about most of them. I mean, I'm going to have to give yet another kid glasses. Dental care. Likely braces, when it comes to that. We'll have to move to a bigger place, start another education fund, buy another car seat. These are all really important things, but at the moment I just can't bring myself to care.

The thing I care about is sex. It seems like only a few months ago that life became calm enough again that I could start having sex with my partner on a semi-regular basis. Now I am pregnant, and sex will, once again, go to shit.

I know you can have sex when you're pregnant. It just doesn't happen a whole lot in this house.

I am not a nice pregnant woman. I am bitchy and bloated. I retain water everywhere from my ankles to my neck. I frequently threaten to stab myself with pins, just to let the water out. I complain 23 hours of the day. In the early months I'm too sick to shave my legs, and it the later ones I couldn't reach them if I wanted to. I spend a disproportionate amount of time vomiting. It's not exactly sexy.

Then, in around five or six months, there will be another person to look after, another person to breastfeed. There will be diapers and doctors' visits and somehow even less sleep than we're getting now. And the whole thing is going to go down the tubes, yet again.

When I am up, this is hilariously tragic. When I am down, I wonder when sex and pregnancy will stop running and subsequently ruining my life.

Falling in love with a woman is not a signal that you're a closet gay just discovering your sexuality. Generally, the situation is far more likely to be one where you fall in love with the emotions and romance. You can't just suddenly switch on the light and become a lesbian.

Trust me. I tried it.

When you separate from a partner, you're raw and hurting. You may be a little excited, too. You suddenly have all this newfound freedom. It's pretty damned easy to swivel around and think you've fallen in love with someone else - and the person just happens to be the wrong sex.

The problem is that you aren't falling in love with that person. You're falling in love with the feelings that you've been missing all those years. You crave affection, and hey, they just happen to be giving it to you.

My female friend and I were crazy in love. We had the love notes, the surprise presents, the long phone calls, everything. She was also across the country, which make falling in love that much easier.

So we arranged a visit to decide whether the attraction was real — or just two people being really lonely and confused.

For three days, we had a great time. We slept together, too, and the fact that it really wasn't very good and felt really strange was chalked up to inexperience. What did we know about gay sex? We cried a lot when she went home, and settled back into our routine.

Your body knows what you are way more than your brain does, though. Your brain goes and scrambles up everything you want and love and need and feel to create a very wrong answer about your self-definition.

The next trip she made ended up with both of us saying, "Yuck. What the hell are we doing?"

I had two bad relationships with men that broke my heart, and so what? That doesn't make me gay. It doesn't mean I'm built to be with a woman.

I have a question that I can't ask anyone face-to-face without blushing, so I'll present it here. My husband has always given me the impression that sex is an utter physiological need for all men.

Without regular sex, men have physical pain that is tough to endure. According to what he has told me, men can't control the urge to want to have sex and if they don't get the sex they need they need to masturbate in order to relieve the pressure brought on by lack of sex. One time shortly after my baby was born I accidently walked in on my husband as he was "getting busy" by himself in the shower, and his immediate response was, "I gotta get it somewhere!"

For the record, I'm blushing while I'm typing this.

Because of this apparent physical need, I have always had sex with my husband whenever he expressed a desire to get intimate. During those times when I didn't feel like having sex I still did, because I didn't want to be the person standing between my husband and physical comfort. He needed it and I could give it to him, so it seemed like a logical solution. Nevermind that there have been times when I felt like I was absolutely betraying myself for getting intimate with him...at least I was still performing my wifely duty.

What I have been wondering about lately is this: Have I been duped? Is sex truly an absolute physical need for men? I think about the celibate men in the world, and I wonder if they spend their days in sheer agony from pent-up sexual frustration.

The other day, I was describing this Erase-All-Fear-of-Commitment Superpower of mine to The Boy. He finds the whole thing enormously amusing.

"Don't make fun," I said, "look what it did to you."

If there was anyone more skittish about relationships than me in this world, it was The Boy. My superpower has, as usual, sucked all the fear right out of him. This is more startling than usual since he was more skittish than average. Sometimes it makes me worry. But, interestingly enough, it doesn't make me want to run screaming away. A lot of the time, it's kind of nice.

Yeah," he said, "but I got you back."

This is true. I have yet to cut and run. I've lost interest in randomly making out with pretty people. Those thoughtful little things he does are not irritating, they're fabulous. Panic levels, with occasional backslides, continue to fall.

You know," my friend Nick said to me the other day, "this skidding-into-commitment thing you're doing is kind of adorable from the outside." Luckily for Nick, you can't punch someone through an instant message.

How did this happen? Out of everyone we know, The Boy and I are the two people least likely to be in a real relationship. And yet, here we are.

He just laughs at me when I wonder out loud to him. "Think of it as commitment détente," he says. This seems about right.

As I mentioned previously, my ex was not good in bed. He could swing a mean hammer and was truly great in a crisis, but sex was really not his forte.

The funny thing was, even though I'd slept with other men before him, I used him as my basis for comparison for everyone I slept with after he left the scene. For a while I even avoided getting naked at all because I didn't want to have shitty sex. You'd think I would realize that one 18-year-old who was a virgin when we got together would not be an indication of the sexual abilities of an entire gender, but no.

By the time I got together with my current partner, I was absolutely desperate to get laid. He, on the other hand, was a waiter. (Not like a food server. Like one who waits. Specifically, one who waits for sex.) I had never encountered this before — I was thin and had good hair! I drank beer out of the bottle! I wore leather pants! Who wouldn't want to sleep with me?

Everyone from the girl in the cubicle next to me to my own mother was convinced he was gay. I later found out his mother believed the same thing, so I guess they were in good company.

Eventually I got him drunk enough that his inhibitions were lowered but not so drunk that he couldn't perform, which appeared to do the trick. I wonder, though... how many people does this happen to? It goes so far against what we believe to be true about men. Then I think, if we have all of these stereotypes about them which turn out to be wrong, can we really blame them for having stereotypes about us?

"Hurry up, would you? The movie's starting!"

"I'm comin', I'm comin'," my sister-in-law said, jamming a lit cigarette in her mouth so she could grab her cup of coffee and a bag of chips. "Keep your pants on."

Indeed.

She walked into the living room of her home and I trailed behind. I took a seat on the sofa — at the complete other end from where my partner sat — and curled up into myself. Outwardly, I looked like everyone else. Just watching a movie with the family.

Inwardly, I wondered what sort of family watches porn together every night.

But this was normal for them. All four of us would sit, eating popcorn, while watching guys go down on girls, girls do other girls or girls take on a couple of men. Sometimes the movie was one of the "better" ones, and there'd be massive orgies or group scenes.

We'd sit there and listen to the tacky scripts, punctuated by faked groans and grunts or the occasional cheer from my brother-in-law. "Oh yeah! Give it to her," he'd shout with glee.

A couple of hours later, when movie night was over, my partner and I would go home like it was any other night. I always hated the sex that followed. I felt dirty and disgusted. My ex felt turned on and inspired.

The irony is that I thought I was the one who wasn't normal. Here were three people who were perfectly upstanding members of society watching porn as a family unit. They had regular jobs. They paid bills. Their home was tidy and they were average people. There was nothing wrong with them. It confused me.

It took me many, many years to realize that there wasn't anything wrong with me at all. It took many more years before I understood that sex wasn't dirty. But I still have trouble enjoying it fully.