It was long before I ever started getting interested in girls that I realized I would be no good at sex.

I had a pretty solid understanding of the mechanics of the process at a very young age, and it always just kind of made sense that sex – or the physical act that we associate with sex – would someday be a big problem. As a kid, I wasn't that athletic and I was especially bad at both swimming and basketball, two sports with which I was able to draw oblique sexual parallels.

People that were having sex (or, at least, people whom I was able to observe having sex), were nothing like me. More often than not, the guys were muscular, sweaty beings who, after some punctuation of a dinner or car trip that culminated in a knowing sideways glance later he’d be  seen in profile, animalistically ravishing a girl against a wall. She'd have her milky neck exposed, lips quivering as her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. “Oh!” she'd be saying.

I'd be with it until this point, I think. He'd be making noise too, as he pawed at her clavicles, head butting her trachea from below. “Mwom...” he'd go, “...Naghm, mughflum, nyum...” like he was eating a big juicy peach that he just couldn't quite pass through his gaping maw.

“I don't get it,” I would be thinking as I half-listened for footsteps approaching the closed door to our den, where I was alone, watching the Red Shoe Diaries on HBO. I was able to infer some things: you kiss a girl's neck because it feels good; you tear the elaborate costume buttons off a girl's blouse because you're impassioned.

But tossing your partner onto the bed in a way that doesn't feel staged? Impossible. The sheer physical prowess is a stretch for a wimp like me. Comically exaggerated moans of lust? Unnecessary, and I'm a quiet guy anyway. It seemed like sex for me would be better off as peaceful, quiet. Relaxed.

And most fearfully: the expectation that I would have to essentially get into a “push-up” position, someday, and wildly buck my hips into another human being? Terrifying at best, and a woeful commentary on the state of my physical endurance at worst.

Indeed, the key element to providing an impressive sexual performance is to simply overlook all of one's own inadequacies, focus on yourself, and let your inhibitions be forgotten – something I've simply never been good at. Sex is the only instance in life when, in order to do right by another person, you have to first learn not to concern yourself with what they're thinking.

Of course, I'm not saying to ignore their desires but, if you're anywhere near as pathologically concerned with being an unacceptable partner as I expected myself to be, you will most certainly create a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

It would be years later that I ever found myself in a situation where these fears could even be relevant and, unsurprisingly, in the heat of the moment, they were nowhere to be found. There was no tearing of blouses, and yet we managed passion. There was kissing, and there was saliva, but there was no “ravishing.” Strange enough, while we weren't acting like animals, I felt like we were in love.

A while back, I was commenting to a friend that I had never felt the need to scream or pound the head board when I had a girl over.

She was laying almost upside down on the couch, with a beer in hand. “Really?” she asked, “Then maybe you aren't doing it right.”

“Maybe...” I thought, “But at least it's fucking quiet.”