I chose “female, after 20” but more honestly I’d say 24ish. Ish because maybe if he was in a coma for a few years and relearning to walk/talk, I’d give him a pass. But IMO, if you’re a normal 25 year old man and haven’t been able or willing to get laid yet, I don’t want to deal with your issues.
That said, I’m 39 and married so I’m not ever going to be dealing with that problem. If I end up divorced and meet a man my age who is still a virgin, I will run far, far away.
See, I’m not sure I believe this, nor most of the other responses like it. Sure, if you’re dispassionately talking about some anonymous guy you might be in a position to have sex with, I can understand this response. But it really seems strange that being a virgin in and of itself would cause you to run away if you already like the person enough to be thinking about sex with them. I can definitely see it opening up a conversation to explore just what weirdness the person actually has, but I can’t see it being a straight-up dealbreaker in and of itself.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just exposing my own hang-ups. I mean, while I recognize I’m late to the party in many respects (it took me until this year to start drinking alcohol), I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-adjusted, stable, and mature person who just…hasn’t had sex yet. I just tend not to experiment without encouragement. If that’s a serious hang-up people want to run far far away from, well…consider me baffled, I suppose.
(Not that I mean to turn this thread into a discussion about me. But I find the general responses offputting, to say the least.)
That may well be your experience. For me, though, I’ve never had a problem letting my sex partners know, in bed, what I’d like them to do and what pleases me. I also prefer sex partners who say what they want.
I’ve had numerous lovers who responded very well to being told what I like. Actually, if he doesn’t respond to knowing what turns me on, that’s a big problem.
I guess i have to go with After 30, because my husband was 21 and a virgin when we met…
But maybe what they’re saying is that finding out the person is sexually inexperienced will diminish that initial sexual attraction, because part of that initial attraction involves a series of mental assumptions about what you expect of that potential mate, and inexperience means it ain’t there.
OTOH, people have been known to throw out the window every previously self-declared “standards” upon meeting the right person… or even the* wrong *person 
In the end, people and societies are mostly, for lack of a better word, “Normonormative”. They consider what they’ve experienced as normal in their lives to be, well, what’s normal, and while they may have no problem with the unusual or different existing and carrying on, they are under no obligation to go out of their way to accommodate them. (sometimes we forget, “normal” means that which is the norm; it does not necessarily mean that which is “right”)
I said anyone after 20. I’m a rather sexual being, and anyone who hadn’t at least done it once before me would be so different than me personality-wise there’s no way we could be in a relationship.
Bad past experience is to blame for me. My ex was a 22 year old virgin when we met and that threw me for a loop even then. I didn’t expect to be dating a virgin at that age.
I blame a lot of “issues” that came up during the course of our relationship on his lack of prior experience. Specifically (and in no particular order):
So yeah, never again. That might be unfair to all 25+ virgins out there who are teachable, instinctively know how to behave in a relationship and who will never get itchy… erm, feet… but I will not risk putting myself through that again.
(plus, I’m off the market now anyway!)
See, it sounds to me like he basically sucked at (1) sex (2) relationships and (3) life. Moral of the story being “don’t stay in a relationship with an obvious loser”.
Yeah. I don’t doubt that late virginity has a high correlation with serious relationship or mental/emotional issues, but there isn’t necessarily a direct causal link.
Isn’t virginity in an adult male kind of a giant flag that the guy might be a loser, though?
You may not realize, but Tom is my husband, mentioned above. Suffice it to say that I don’t think he’s a loser, but he is certainly capable of speaking for himself.
Might be, and I’ll grant you that. Not is. And if he is a loser, it will probably show in ways beyond his experience in bed.
And none of us are saying that each and every late in life male virgin is a loser, what we’re saying is that it might stand as a red flag that the guy MIGHT be a loser.
Well, perhaps. But personally, I’d be less likely to use that as a red flag than, say, a guy who’d had sex with 100 different women and made a point of telling me all about it. I’m mostly concerned with how the guy is going to treat me and value the relationship, and IME a guy who tosses out girlfriends like old laundry isn’t someone I want to have a relationship with, sexual or otherwise. Bedroom skills can be learned; basic humanity is much harder to teach.
(And some people ARE flat-out saying they wouldn’t even consider someone who was a virgin past a certain age. Their choice, and potentially their loss.)
Some people learn fast. And some people retain bad habits.
So it’s not a deal-breaker, although after, say, 30 it would give me pause for thought.
I think the whole point is that these are not the options. Both are outliers, and there’s a whole world of normal(ish) in between to choose from.
I’d say it’s equally as much of a red flag as a guy admitting he’s Wilt Chamberlain or something. But that’s just me.
Try to remember he’s an actual person with far more complexity that could ever possibly be relayed in a post on a message board, particularly one that by its very nature is focusing on his flaws. I’ve shared a painful piece of my history here in order to illustrate why I now hold a “prejudice” against mature-age virgins; don’t trivialise it. While I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about my ex these days, it’s certainly unfair to characterise him as “an obvious loser”. He was charismatic and outgoing, and also - as I discovered far too late - shallow and deceitful. The charisma and the deceit combined to convince me that he was worth being with despite his more obvious shortcomings, that he was worthy of my love and that he was greater than the sum of his parts. It was only once he was honest with me at the very end of our relationship that I realised that he was far, far less than I had ever realised.
Besides, I don’t see all these traits as isolated to him. While he might have embodied the worst of them, I still think that inexperience in a relationship is utterly undesirable. It’s a set of skills most people have picked up by their late teens/early twenties. I did not enjoy teaching them as an adult, or being practised on.
Dealbreaker? If anything at my age it would probably be a turn-on. I might be suspicious at first, but I wouldn’t sweat it too much if not obviously combined with other issues.
I said after 20.
I slept with a virgin in college. He had been very overweight in high school and then went the ROTC route and got super hot. He also got an eating disorder but that’s not the issue at hand.
After about 4 seconds of dark comedy I was left with a sulky man-child and a sneering remark about how maybe the problem was that I was too experienced. I was just like OH HELL NO. He was going to have to be some other woman’s problem.
Getting good at sex takes a while and along the way there is a lot of ego-damaging humiliation potential along the way. I am simply not patient or understanding enough to deal with anyone’s ish.