When you’re young, it’s easy to imagine losing your virginity as a monumental event complete with candles, rose petals, soft music and professions of eternal love. There will be no question of whether or not the time is right, because you will have found your soul mate, and it will be clear that destiny intertwined your lives with this very purpose in mind.

You will look deep into your partner’s eyes and realize that tonight is the night you will physically demonstrate the deep affection you feel for one another, and at the end, birds will sing and doves will cry.

Right. Although this fantasy may still exist in tattered copies of Judy Blume’s “Forever,” in the real world, losing your virginity is often a case of lowered expectations. It’s a cold, hard fact that nothing as debated, discussed and over-planned as your first time will go off without a hitch. While romance novels may have you believe that nothing feels as good as the first time, facts show quite the opposite.

According to Dennis M. Dailey, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare, in his article, “Losing It: The Virginity Myth,” one in four guys have so many problems the first time that they cannot complete the act. The high levels of anxiety and anticipation result in an inability to maintain or even achieve an erection, and if guys are lucky enough to get it up, they usually ejaculate before penetration actually occurs.

What’s more, less than 5 percent of women have an orgasm the first time they have sex. Why? “Young men do not understand very much about female sexuality (or their own for that matter) and neither do a lot of women,” writes Dailey. “Thus, women cannot tell men what they want, and most men do not have a clue.”

These disheartening statistics do not allude to the even sadder fact that most people lose their virginity in less-than-ideal situations. Many UW students emailed me with their own tales of “the first time,” and I noticed a common thread of disappointment.

One girl wrote, “I lost my virginity on a living room floor at, like, 11 a.m. I was visiting this guy for the weekend, but all we’d done was make out and fight — oh yeah, and clean out his pantry. Mad at him, I went to sleep on the couch. The next morning, he came out of his bedroom and jumped on me without a word, and I thought, ‘Why not?’

“I can imagine much weirder scenarios than this one, but it was quite weird for me, because I’d always imagined my first time being on a bed, at night, with someone I really liked.”

Another student, this one male, encountered the all-too-common problem of over-planning when he first had sex. He wrote, “I was a senior in high school. My girlfriend wanted the whole experience to be really special, so she set a date and had everything planned. The thing that really sucked is the date she picked was two months away.

I waited and didn’t really care that much, but there was already way too much pressure on the whole session. I remember reading books about controlling your orgasm. Anyways, I don’t think that helped. While we were having sex, I had to listen to ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louie Armstrong. All I can say is, good song, bad timing.

“I took one for the team and just kept on going about my business. I felt kind of outside myself the whole time. I always expected sex to make people feel closer, but the first time seemed just the opposite.”

This letdown as a result of high expectations is something that I have noticed in my friends’ stories as well. When I was a sophomore in high school, my best friend at the time decided to have sex with her boyfriend whom she believed to be her one true love. They planned the entire evening for the following week when her parents would be out of town, and even made a mixtape of all the songs they thought should accompany this phenomenal event.

She called me the next day sounding like someone who missed winning the lotto by one number. “Sex is not half as cool as I thought it would be,” she moaned, “It didn’t even feel that good.” Innocent virgin that I was at the time, I was shocked by this announcement. But looking back, I think my friend’s forewarning helped me later on in my own first experience.

With the knowledge that the first time was not going to be all that great, I went into it with extremely low expectations, and was actually pleasantly surprised. Without the aid of my friend’s disappointment, I would never have been as relaxed as I was on that fateful night.

This seems to be the case with other students who saw their first time as something to get through on the road to a great sex life, rather than the crescendo of their sexual experience.

One of my guy friends, a junior on campus, recalled his first time with minimal drama. He said, “My first time wasn’t very special; I was just making out with this girl I was dating and suddenly we were having sex. Afterwards I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not a virgin anymore!’ But that was about it.”

Similarly, my girl friend went into the summer before her freshman year of school with the mindset that “I was going to lose my virginity before I go to college. I was determined to leave home experienced, so when a guy I had been dating for a few days took me out on a lake in his boat, I told him I wanted to have sex. He made sure I was serious, and then we did it under the stars in the middle of the lake.”

It seems like no matter what the situation, whether you over-plan it or decide spur-of-the-moment, losing your virginity is most definitely not a good indicator of what you’ll enjoy later on in your sex life and, therefore, should no longer be revered as the culmination of every story you heard on the back of the bus during junior high school.

Professionals and students alike agree, you may never forget your first, but you can sure as hell try.

Is oral sex “sex?” Do you think guys or girls expect oral action more? Email me at [email protected] and let me know what you think!