Sex Lives chronicles the evolution of one person’s sexual history. This week: Palmer, 45, in Whittier, CA.
I guess I was kind of a little bit of a late bloomer. I didn’t even really masturbate or anything until my sophomore year of high school. Freshman year of high school, everybody was giving me shit about it, but it took me a while to get into it. I knew what it was; I had just never done it. I kind of just got tired of everybody giving me shit about it, so I was like, Ok, let’s try this. And I went to the bathroom and tried it until it worked, and then I was like, Oh, I get what everybody’s saying now.
That same year, I hooked up with one of my classmates that I really liked. Over the course of that summer, we did everything except have sex. I ended up having sex for the first time in my junior year with someone who would go on to be an adult film star. We were Facebook friends for a long time after that, and through Facebook, I found out that she was an adult film star; she became one pretty much right out of high school.
The first time was relatively smooth. We went to our homecoming dance, and I took her, and then I dropped her off, and her parents weren’t home, and she invited me in, and we had sex. I could tell that I was the new one to this. It was fairly unremarkable except for the fact that, like, three years later, she was in the porn industry. I watched something of hers just for the novelty of it. She did a lot of Miley Cyrus stuff because she was also a redhead then. But yeah, I did watch it.
After that, I entered into a long relationship in college and ended up getting married at 24. We were married for quite a few years and then got divorced in 2017, and during that time, I was monogamous that whole time. Sexually, there was quality over quantity. She was raised religiously—Catholic. And she still had a lot of trauma and hangups about it. So it was good when we had sex, but it was like once a month. Not very often. It was few and far between, but when we did it, it was great. It wasn’t part of the reason for the divorce, though.
A lot changed for me around the time of the divorce. I lost 130 pounds and got in shape. It wasn’t as a result of wanting to date post-divorce. But I was getting back out there for the first time in a long time, and it was nerve-wracking. Since then, there have been a lot of eye-opening and different experiences that I’ve had that have been positive. But it wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking about at the time of the divorce. Honestly, dating gave me a lot of anxiety, I suppose because it had been so long.
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