This post discusses sexual encounters, emotional coercion, bereavement, religious guilt, and experiences of obligation around sex. It may be difficult for some readers.

Reflecting on yesterday’s encounter, I became aware that it was almost an exact replay of my first ever sexual encounter – although the outcome was very different this time.

I came out in my final year of university. It was 1994 and I was 20. There’s no standard coming-out story, but this is mine.

It began with a pressure inside me – growing and growing, demanding and demanding – until I had to do something about what I had always known. Was I gay? Of course I was.

I put an advert in the local paper:

Gay biker looking for fun and friendship, maybe more.

(You were charged by the word, a bit like a telegram.)

I had three replies: one from a chap called Geoff, one from a fellow called Mark, and a third I can’t remember. I was rather taken with Mark, who was a policeman. We spoke on the phone a few times, but I think I must have unnerved him. I was clearly desperate and more than a little bonkers.

I spoke with Geoff a couple of times and eventually agreed to meet him in a café in Southmead, Bristol. I don’t remember what we talked about. What I do know is that I wasn’t attracted to him. I wanted him for one purpose only: sex.

When he asked if I’d like to go back to his place, I jumped at the chance.

I was buzzing. I was with a gay man and we were going to have sex. That was all I could think about – not whether I fancied him, just the overwhelming need to be fucked.

His flat was on the top floor of a once-grand Georgian terrace by the harbour. It would once have been a wealthy trader’s town house, but it had long since been carved up into characterless, run-down flats.

I don’t remember whether we went into the bedroom. What I do remember is that everything felt tired and neglected. There was damp in the bathroom and unwashed crockery in the kitchen sink. Even the supposedly clean mugs were tea-stained.

When I cast my mind back now, I have a hazy sense of being on the floor, naked.

He was excited – a virgin. I was young, inexperienced, and painfully available.

The thing is, he couldn’t get hard. I came. He didn’t.

I experienced the famous post-nut clarity and thought: what the fuck am I doing?

But I had already offered myself. In my confused mixture of shame, embarrassment, and longing, that offer felt binding. I still wonder whether, if I’d managed to make him come, I would have felt any differently.

It didn’t help that he kept talking about being a spiritualist and about how we were “destined to be together”.

He leaned hard on that language over the following months. I felt trapped. How do you escape without trashing someone’’ beliefs or hurting their feelings? My own religious upbringing had already scrambled my head – particularly around being gay – and Geoff knew it. He used both my fear of my sexuality and my residual religious guilt to turn obligation into something moral.

I felt manipulated. And I felt stupid.

In the end, I told him it was over. There was no attempt to stay friends. I saw him only twice more, from a distance, and never spoke to him again.

That was the worst situation I ever got myself into where I offered sex and then felt an obligation to stay longer than was healthy. Smaller versions of the same pattern cropped up throughout my single life.

I don’t want this new phase of my life to be blighted in the same way – by feeling committed to situations I no longer want.

My early sexual experiences taught me that offering sex created obligation. That belief wasn’t challenged; it was reinforced by Geoff and several subsequent partners.

Yesterday shook it loose. This time, I did leave.