I think that virginity is something that is best gotten out of the way. You shouldn’t necessarily be in a hurry to have sex, but you shouldn’t cherish your celibacy either. Virginity is a gift that is worthless until it is shared.
No matter who you are, the first few times are awkward, and you feel weird and silly and elated and giddy. And then things get really complicated. Welcome to life.
No matter how old you think you are, you’re a child when it comes to those new experiences. A forty year old virgin is prone to the same excesses of emotion and stupidity as a fourteen year old when it comes to having sex for the first time. You learn from doing. If you never do it, you never learn anything from it. Secondhand experience is practically the same as no experience because nothing can prepare you for the reality of it.
I’ve met a few people who held on to their virginity and after a while it just seemed sad, like being around someone who never makes any close friends, only has acquaintances. Sex and intimacy are part of real, adult relationships. Guarding your virginity is putting up a barrier. You’re holding part of yourself inside social walls. Yes, it’s nice and safe in there, but from a different perspective it’s a prison. In protecting yourself from the world outside, you’re keeping yourself from experiencing anything of that world too.
One of the great and powerful and terrifying things about sex is that you are vulnerable; that’s part of the exhilaration. You’re trusting the other person. You’re trusting that they won’t laugh, that they won’t hurt you, that they won’t degrade you, that they’ll return some of the same emotions you have vested in them. Even casual sex is really not that casual. Being rejected feels terrible even when it’s a relative stranger. How much more terrible when you’re that open, that unprotected? How much more rewarding when you take that emotional step into space and find that they’re there to catch you?