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  I felt comfortable, but also tense. I kept wondering if he felt for me like I did for him. I put on my Minnie Mouse ears. He loved them. I loved that he loved them.

  We lay on my bed together (!!) and pet Fifi for a while. Every few minutes there would be a moment of silence and, as far as I could tell, sexual tension. I savored those moments. Sometimes our hands would touch when we were petting Fifi, and he complimented my haircut.

  You are welcome, Penthouse Forum.

  As it turned out, amazingly, I was not living completely in a fantasy. Fernando, unaware of all the pentagrams I had drawn to summon his lust, was attracted to me, which I learned one spring night a few years later when he kissed me in his parents’ bedroom. The kiss lasted for about five seconds—just long enough for me to think, Holy shit, we are kissing, and then awkwardly dart my tongue into his mouth as though I were stamping a time card. Then Fernando drew back, looked into my eyes, and said: “This doesn’t mean anything. And you can never tell anyone.” Obviously it meant everything and I told everyone. But more on that later.

  Second Base: ?

  I think Fernando maybe touched my right boob during our life-changing five-second make-out. But it’s also possible I skipped second base entirely and went straight to . . .

  Home Base: Age Twenty

  Yup, you read that right. I stole two bases just so I could lose my virginity before I graduated from college. In fact, my next book could be a helpful intimacy guide for nuns and people who’ve spent roughly ages twelve to thirty-five in solitary confinement or a coma. I think I’ll call it Just Do It: From Kissing to Intercourse in Four Short Years. I don’t think Nike will mind.

  Third Base: Age Twenty-One

  Because you should only put your mouth on the genitalia of people you actually like. If there’s one quote from this book I want meaningfully tattooed on people’s forearms, that’s it.

  But backing up for a moment . . . After Fernando’s painful rejection, I didn’t touch another boy for the rest of high school—not that I had many opportunities. I still didn’t get invited to parties and spent my senior year infatuated with a classmate who would later turn out to be gay. Anna, meanwhile, began an intense phone relationship with an older guy based on his belief that she was someone else. It was pretty much par for our course.

  I didn’t fare much better when I got to college. In fact, it got worse. Because instead of owning up to my inexperience, I decided to lie about it.

  Before you judge me, two things you should know:

  1.My freshman year roommate, Carolyn, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in real life. A genetically blessed mix of French, English, and Vietnamese, she looked like a young Christy Turlington with a Euro-chic wardrobe and edgy asymmetrical bob. Instantly she was the most sought-after person on campus, and I became known far and wide as “Carolyn’s Roommate.”

  2.I don’t know if it’s still like this, or if I just happened to be placed into a dorm of oversharing nymphomaniacs, but at Wesleyan University in 1998, asking a person how many blow jobs she’d given was considered an acceptable social icebreaker. By the second day of college, we were pretty much sitting around dictating our sexual histories to each other while chain-smoking—an experience that at the time went for about thirty-two thousand dollars a year.

  I could have just told them I was a virgin. It wasn’t like it would have been shocking, based on my acne and tendency to wear bulbous-toed platform sneakers that looked to have been cobbled by cartoon elves. But I saw the opportunity to reinvent myself—to rewrite history according to the unrealized fantasies of my youth—and I jumped at it. I told everyone that I had an on-again, off-again boyfriend back home, who had taken my innocence over the summer, in between acting jobs. He was sexy and a little bit mean, keeping me on the hook while he gallivanted around with C-list movie stars—even though I was the one he truly loved, a confession he would whisper in my ear after one of our vigorous yet tender lovemaking sessions. His name, of course, was Fernando.

  Sex Six Good Reasons Not to Lie About Losing Your Virginity, from Someone Who Knows

  1. It is wrong.

  I’m not going to tell you you should never lie, because I lie a lot. Some lies, like pretending to be sick so you don’t have to put pants on and go see a friend’s improv show, are fairly harmless. Others, like inventing major life experiences, sexual escapades, or professional credentials, are not. In some cases, you may actually be breaking a law.

  2. It is nuts.

  It may come from a place of insecurity, but it is still insane in a noncharming way to pretend that someone—especially someone who actually exists and whose name you don’t even bother to change (see next list)—has ravished your body and made you a wo/man.

  3. You have to pretend to know things you don’t know.

  Picture that scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin when Steve Carell is describing touching a woman’s breasts and how they feel like bags of sand and you get the idea.

  4. You might develop an undeserved reputation.

  With my newfound freedom to bend the truth, I became a sexual legend in my own mind and, apparently, in the minds of others. In fact, at the start of my junior year, I—still a virgin!—was listed on the men’s bathroom wall as Best Fuck on Campus. As it turns out, you can get around without actually getting around, and become a slut before you have ever even seen a penis in person.

  5. When you lose your virginity for real, there is no one to tell.

  The absolute best and most important reason not to lie about losing your virginity is so that you can tell the person you actually lose it to that he or she is your first. I was lucky enough to lose mine, at age twenty and three-quarters, to a very nice boy who liked me a lot, and it didn’t hurt or make me bleed or any of the other things I worried about that might “give me away,” but it still makes me profoundly sad to know that I kept up a stupid, pointless lie instead of making myself vulnerable at a moment when it really would have been worth it to let my guard down. Perhaps because of the resulting self-loathing, I broke things off with that boy shortly after the deed was done. And I wish I could say I never lied about it again, but . . .

  6. You have to keep the lie going forever.

  You can’t just turn around and say to your friends, “Hey, guys, remember that extensive backstory I told you about Fernando and all the sexy sex positions we did? None of that actually happened. Ha-ha.” They will back away slowly and never speak to you again. You can start telling the real story to any new friends you make, but you have to keep a detailed list of who believes the lie so that you don’t inadvertently reveal your deep mental issues to the people who know you best.

  And One Very Good Reason Not to Make the Fake Virginity-Taker a Real Person, If You Insist on Lying

  1.If you are dumb enough to name a real, live person in your elaborate lie, chances are one hundred percent that at some point later in life, that real person will end up in the same room with someone you lied to about all the sex you had with him, and you will have to run interference as your trusting friend makes confusing small talk with your oblivious pretend penetrator. (The only situation slightly more awkward is if you lie about someone dying and then that person appears at a cocktail party, so please make sure to fake only the deaths of the already deceased. Pro tip from me to you.)

  The upside to all of this is that I did finally lose my virginity and have continued to have non-lie-based sex for the past decade and a half, primarily with my husband, who might be the only person on earth who has always known both the real and the fake stories of my deflowerment. However, in return for his nonjudgmental devotion, he did make me promise not to write about our sex life in this book. I said I wouldn’t, and, as you all know, I would never lie.

  Just this one thing:

  Seven Things No One Tells You About Postbaby Sex

  1. Babies are the world’s biggest cockbloc
k.

  Ironic, I know, considering how they got here. But the first few times Jeff and I attempted to rekindle the romance, our son—perhaps sensing the potential biological threat of additional offspring—refused to cooperate. Time after time, we attempted to put him down in his bassinet, only to hear him squeal moments later as we prepared to doff our spit-up-stained sweatpants. Once we finally succeeded, it was a hurried affair, and not as enjoyable for me as I would have liked—not because of any failure on the part of my husband, but because it was impossible for me not to worry that my equipment had been . . . well, compromised.

  2. You will have an identity crisis between your thighs.

  Once you’ve pushed a baby through an orifice you once reserved for recreational purposes, it’s hard to go back, psychologically speaking. That’s not always a bad thing—I recently needed encouragement to finish a stressful project on deadline, and a friend put her hand on mine and told me, with some very meaningful eye contact, “You gave birth. You can do anything”—but when you’re in the throes of passion and suddenly you find yourself thinking, A head came out of there!, it kind of puts a damper on the proceedings. I remember my tenth-grade health teacher, Ms. Drvostep, gravely informing the class during a discussion of human sexuality that, at least biologically, the anus was designed as an “out hole.” Maybe that’s the problem. My vagina was an in hole, then it was (briefly, but memorably) an out hole, and now it’s supposed to be an in hole again. It’s having an identity crisis, and it doesn’t help that sometimes, when I’m drying off after a shower, Jeff will point at my crotch and exclaim gleefully to Sam, “There’s your old house!”

  3. It’s hard not to picture your vagina as one of those wind socks you see at the airport, for the rest of time.

  There is also the uncomfortable (double entendre intended) truth that it’s hard to go back, physiologically speaking, even if your doctor gives you the go-ahead after six weeks, which is the standard abstinence period gratefully celebrated by the new mom and ascetically endured by the new dad (the wait time is even longer following a cesarean section). No matter how many Kegels you do, the fact remains that a fully formed human being weighing around eight pounds came out of an opening previously accustomed to visitors of a smaller girth. An old Lenny Bruce routine once compared a large penis to a baby’s arm, but add a second arm, two legs, a torso, and a head that feels, from the inside, like a bowling ball set on fire, and you have something not at all like a penis. So naturally there is going to be some fallout (no pun intended! none!) from the stretching. No one wants to talk about it, of course. I mean, I’m always seeing tabloid covers crowing about some celebrity or other’s fabulous postbaby body, which she presumably has achieved through a combination of colonic therapy, macrobiotic diet, and virgin sacrifice. But I never see an article about, say, Jessica Alba’s postbaby vagina. And if hers isn’t ready for the pages of Us Weekly, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

  4. Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet is just taunting you now.

  Postbaby sex is a slippery slope even under the best of circumstances, and I’m not speaking literally, as anyone who’s experienced the drying effects of plummeting postpartum estrogen can attest.

  5. Better get used to the term “MILF,” because that is all you are allowed to be now (if anyone wants to have sex with you at all).

  Even if you do get over the libido-robbing hormone fiesta and the colicky coitus interruptus and manage to retain enviable nether-regional muscle tone and semiregular bedpost notching, there’s one thing that no amount of personal grooming or mood music can change, and that’s the realization that you’re now somebody’s mother. As such, society now gives you two exciting choices, a special procreative variation on the traditional Madonna/whore: either succumb to the high-waisted jeans, sensible earlobe-length haircut, and soccer-friendly SUV of the asexual martyr who lives in a Tide commercial, or get a gym membership, hop on the treadmill, and run like hell for MILF Island.

  The term “MILF” itself might be the problem. I’ve always disliked it, and not just because it’s icky and sophomoric, but because it suggests that a mother who’s considered sexually desirable is an endangered species on a par with the Tasmanian devil or the giant panda. I like to think I am at least as sexy as a regular-size panda on days I’ve managed to shower.

  6. Sex toys become literal.

  Get ready to roll over in the heat of passion and find Mr. Potato Head’s nose trying to force its way into your butt. Not as kinky as it sounds.

  7. Just kidding. It’s actually pretty awesome.

  Despite all the awkwardness and body dysmorphia I’ve mentioned, I’m happy to report that I still very much enjoy sex when conditions are ideal (baby, asleep; me, awake) and that, despite what my sense memory occasionally tells me, no part of my anatomy resembles the Holland Tunnel, even in passing. Postbaby sex can even feel sometimes like the carefree sex of my youth, except that it’s faster and more exhausted—not to be confused with exhaustive—and we can’t make any noise. And we never even consider not using protection in the heat of the moment, because, I mean, seriously, look where that got us.

  To be extra cautious, we should probably just stick to the stuff real fantasies are made of: getting drunk, stuffing our faces with bar snacks, and talking about all the other people we wish we could have sex with.

  ANSWERS I WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE IN RETROSPECT

  Year: 1983

  Context: Naked, examining the posterior of my best friend, Salvador

  Question: What are you playing, Una?

  What I Wish I’d Said: Doctor

  What I Actually Said: Look in butt!

  Year: 1991

  Context: The PS 282 Fifth Grade Sudden-Death Geography Bee, in front of my entire class

  Question: On which island is Hawaii’s capital located: Maui or Oahu?

  What I Wish I’d Said: Oahu

  What I Actually Said: Maui

  Year: 1998

  Context: My mom treating me to a pricey haircut during fall break from my first semester of college

  Question: What if we went short short, like Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby?

  What I Wish I’d Said: No, thanks, I’m pretty sure I’d look more like 1980s-era Billy Crystal with adult acne.

  What I Actually Said: Okay.

  Year: 2006

  Context: Upon returning home after a drunken dinner party, my boyfriend, Jeff, dropping to his knees in our apartment vestibule

  Question: Marry me?

  What I Wish I’d Said: Yes, yes, a hundred times yes!

  What I Actually Said: Fuck you.

  Year: 2012

  Context: Cocktail hour following a friend’s nuptials

  Question: Would you like to try a mini Reuben?

  What I Wish I’d Said: Yes, yes, a million times yes!

  What I Actually Said: No.

  Rules for Sitcom Living

  Most people do not know this, but from late 2003 through mid-2005 I was part of the cast of Friends.

  Some of you may be thinking, But Friends ended in May 2004, Una. To which I say, touché. You have a keen eye. I was not actually on the show Friends. But I was one of three twentysomething women living in close proximity to three twentysomething men, and it was the mid-aughts, and so for those eighteen months you could not attempt to microwave a frozen burrito without someone trying to claim that they were the Chandler of the group.

  To be sure, there were some details separating the six of us from NBC’s all-star ensemble. For example, my roommates, Betsy and Ellaree, and I did not live in a sprawling, eclectically chic Manhattan apartment but rather on the third floor of a charmless row house in Brooklyn with thin walls and carpeting the color of eggnog someone had ashed in at the office Christmas party. Our male counterparts, Kabir, Bajir, and Alex, lived in a similarly unimpressive (and much filthier) pad fifteen m
inutes away, but we treated their apartment like it was right across the hall, often showing up still in our pajama pants. Kabir, Bajir, and Alex sounds more like its own spin-off show about two Muslim grad students forced to room with a pretty, neurotic tomboy—or maybe a feisty Labrador—but actually they were three tall, strapping white guys, two of whom happened to grow up together in a Sufi fellowship in Pennsylvania and one of whom wore Al Franken glasses and collected superhero figurines.

  Everyone knows that there are rules that come with living in a sitcom, and we tried our best to adhere to the clichés. We had the “guy’s girl” in Ellaree, a stunningly gorgeous but socially awkward comic geek; and the “girl’s guy” in Kabir, a lush-lipped sensitive singer-songwriter and elementary school teacher who set Rumi poems to acoustic guitar music in his free time. Bajir was the kooky artist, Betsy the mother hen, Alex the nebbishy brain. I was the one who accidentally bleach-stained all the towels with her benzoyl-peroxide-laden acne masks and who kept everyone up to date on The Bachelorette. (So, basically the Chandler.)

  Group friendships can be tricky. I spent my senior year of college living with four other women, and while I still love them dearly, our house was a minefield of perceived slights, long-held grudges, and carefully plotted emotional manipulations. We spent that year playing an off-screen game of Survivor—forging and breaking alliances, voting people out of the house during tense family meetings, and sustaining ourselves with strange, desperate food choices, like pad thai made with reduced-fat Skippy peanut butter and baby carrots.

  But somehow, living with Bergen-Butler (as we came to call ourselves, based on the names of our streets) was easy. Our personalities meshed in a magical way that almost never happens outside of romantic comedies. Sure, we had moments of conflict—there was that time when Ellaree went on vacation and sublet her room via craigslist to someone who turned out to be a wanted criminal and the incident in which Bajir secretly rubbed one of Alex’s tea bags on his balls and then replaced it in the jar—but for the most part we were a cast of characters with enviably natural chemistry.