As the semester spirals to an end and I prepare to relinquish my throne as your trusted sex and health columnist, I’m struggling to decide what to say with my last few columns.

One thing I’m circling back to, though, is a question my editors posed to me at the very beginning of the semester: “What does having sex mean to you?”

This was difficult for me to answer at the time. But they say when you write a weekly column about something, you grow. So I think I might finally be ready to tackle this question.

Before I begin, I have a disclaimer: Just because this is how I feel doesn’t mean that if your opinion differs I think you are wrong. One of my greatest beliefs about sex is that it is a personal experience.

When I have sex with someone, it is someone I care about. For me, sex is personal and intimate and it would be hard for me to sleep with someone I do not know.

I lost my virginity the fall of my senior year of high school. I was 17 and it was with a boy I had been dating since I was 15. As hard as I flinch at the cliché, it was as beautiful as a first time could be. Sure, we were awkward and had no idea what we were doing but I felt safe and relaxed. When I teared up because of the inevitable first time pain, I didn’t feel embarrassed.

Since then, I have only slept with — drumroll please — two other people. While I didn’t date them both, they were both boys I consider friends and who I consistently hooked up with. While I respect people who enjoy casual, one-night stands, as an anxious person, I prefer to be with someone I can relax around.

Sex is a connection between two people, which requires mutual respect. I feel the best way to achieve this is to be with someone you know. You figure out what they like and vise versa and thus each time the sex becomes a little bit better.

Even if you are in a friends-with-benefits type of situation, you still probably care about that person more than you may about a one-night stand, so you will strive to maximize their pleasure so they will want to keep the relationship going. To me, being with someone who cares about you enough to try to make you feel as good as possible, also makes having sex more fun.

And sex should be fun. Nobody ever goes into sex saying to themselves, “Wow, I hope this is very mediocre.”

As soon as sex loses its luster, it’s time to move on or at least try to figure out why it has become a burden. I am not saying that all relationships revolve around mind-blowing sex, but I do think that a healthy sex life is an important part of a relationship so it is something that should be discussed.

Many people say sleeping with someone you care about gets messy because feelings complicate things, especially in college, and this is true. But for me — call me a romantic all you want — I think you should care about the person you are sharing the most intimate of experiences with. I have found that the more I sleep with someone, the more I start to care about them and I have never regretted it.

And that, that is how I feel about sex, at least for now. I am sure these ideas will shift and vary over time, but that just adds to the mysterious allure that is sex.

Alex Archambault is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email her at ararcham@syr.edu or follow her @Alex_And_Raa on Twitter.

Published on December 2, 2015 at 8:59 pm