I see a lot of "Losing your virginity won't change your life" but in many ways it can. I don't think I was alone in being an immature straight male whose goal through most of senior school and university etc was to lose his virginity, but for me it became this all consuming goal hanging over everything with all the stresses and strains that carries with it. Part of that was peer pressure I suspect.
When I lost my virginity at the age of 19 it was, rightly or wrongly, like a great weight was lifted, my mind was reset; I had 'achieved' what had been consuming many of my waking (and subconscious sleeping) hours for a number of years, I had performed well enough for someone with zero first hand experience of what they were doing (ie terribly, but I didn't kill anyone, bonus), I felt my horizons had expanded in a sense of I knew more now than I did previously, and I felt a weird sense of leaving the 'boy' behind, as cliché and daft as that might sound. I also felt a sense of realisation, of de-mystification. A sense of 'aha, so that's what it's like'. The pursuit of sex wasn't such a detrimental presence anymore, the pressure was off. I could slot it into my life as just another aspect, but not the main aspect.
Generally when I was growing up you weren't a virgin by choice if you were a straight male. We didn't have standards especially, we weren't waiting for 'The One', it was a pure drive to carry out the base act.
