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What if everything you’ve been told about your first time is a lie? What if the stumbles, the silence, the “Oh, sorry—was that okay?”—are not failures, but the whole point?
We live in a culture obsessed with curating firsts. First kiss. First love. First time. These are sold to us in movies, in TikToks, in the breathless group chat recaps, as either perfectly cinematic or perfectly catastrophic. Either way, the story has a shape. A beginning, a middle, an end. A verdict.
But real life rarely behaves like a script. And the pressure to make it do so might be robbing you of the thing you actually want: to be genuine, connected, and real.
In Unscripted, Hannah Davis has a plan. She calls it ‘Operation V-Loss.’ It has bullet points. A color-coded revision timetable. A target—Eddie Penrose—chosen not just for his looks, but for his potential to upgrade her social status before university. The plan is meticulous, strategic, and almost completely disconnected from what Hannah actually wants or feels.
It’s a masterclass in using planning to avoid feeling.
But when the first time isn’t about feelings, there is a high risk of sacrificing the joy and pleasure of sex in favor of excessive control and safety.
1. The Script (Where Does the Pressure Come From?)
Before we can escape the script, we need to know who wrote it.
Part of it is internal, written by ourselves. In the novel, Hannah rehearses conversations she might have with Eddie. She calculates best-case and worst-case scenarios. She practices kissing her own hand. This isn’t romantic anticipation—it’s the anxiety management of someone who believes that if she controls every variable, she can guarantee a specific outcome. That if she prepares hard enough, she won’t have to feel anything unprepared for.
But the internal pressure doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It feeds on everything outside.
There’s the media script: the rom-com first time that’s always slightly awkward in a cute, endearing way, before becoming effortlessly sensual. The filmmakers know what angle to cut to. Real life doesn’t.
There’s the peer script: the social currency of experience, the way certain names carry weight in group chats—Eddie Penrose being proof of that. Sleeping with someone like him doesn’t just feel personal; it feels like a statement about who you are in the social hierarchy.
And then there’s the cultural script: the narrative that transforms a human experience into a transaction. Virginity as a “V-card.” As something you “lose” rather than share. As a box to tick, a milestone to clear, a status to update.
Hannah understands this, somewhere beneath the checklist: What I want is to arrive at university with my V-card already stamped. Period.
That sentence tells you everything about what the script does to desire. It turns something intimate into a logistics problem. It turns a person into a tool. And it turns the question “Do I actually want this?” into a question that can’t even be heard above the noise of “Am I doing this right?”
Reality check. Honest answers only:
Have you ever made a decision about your body—who to be with, when, or how—primarily because it felt like something you were supposed to do by now? Not because you genuinely wanted it. But because the checklist said it was time.
2. The Performance Trap (When Intimacy Becomes a Transaction)
Hannah isn’t the only one questioning the scripts that night.
Eddie Penrose walks into his own story with a playbook inherited from his father and refined by his brother Hugo. Women, according to the men in his family, are transactions: “Complete them. File them. Forget them.” His Virgin Hat-Trick—three V-cards in one year—isn’t about desire. It’s about proof. Proof of masculinity, of dominance, of worth measured in conquests.
So here’s what actually happens when Hannah and Eddie enter the same room with their respective scripts: two performances collide. She’s auditioning for the role of girl sophisticated enough to have done this. He’s executing the role of guy who has always been doing this.
Neither is engaging with the other as a person. They’re interacting with roles—the Virgin, the Golden Dick—two cardboard cutouts arranged around a transaction neither of them has actually chosen.
Performance requires an audience. Even when you’re alone, even when no one is watching, the critical internal observer never leaves the room. And that observer—how do I look, am I good at this, am I doing it right?—is the opposite of presence.
Eddie catches a glimpse of this in a rare, unguarded moment in front of the mirror: I catch my reflection… For a second, I don’t see Eddie Penrose, Glassworth College’s most wanted Chad. I see a naked guy. Just a guy. The person behind the performance. And it unsettles him, because somewhere underneath all the calculation, he has a need that the spreadsheet can’t satisfy: The problem is… I want her to see me.
Not the legend. Not the role. Me.
This is what performance costs us: the very thing we’re performing to receive.
Reality check.
The last time you were in an intimate situation—or imagined being in one—how much mental energy went toward feeling it, and how much went toward managing how you appeared?
If the answer feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth sitting with. The internal audience never bought a ticket. But we keep performing for it anyway.
3. Redefining “Perfect” (Presence Over Polish)
Think about the intimate moments in your life that meant something—not the ones that looked good, but the ones that felt true. The ones you still carry.
Were they flawless? Or were they full of exactly the kind of raw, unpolished, slightly-terrifying presence that no script could have produced?
This is the real definition of an intimate experience: not flawless execution, but mutual presence. It’s perfect in its authenticity, not its smoothness.
And the awkward moments—the fumbles, the nervous laughter, the uncertain touch, the “is this okay?” asked with real vulnerability—aren’t bugs in the system. They’re proof that something real is happening.
They mean that two people are experiencing something together, rather than reciting lines they memorized separately.
Embrace awkwardness. Not as a thing to overcome. As a sign that something real is happening.
In Unscripted, the most unexpectedly tender intimate moment arrives completely unplanned—stained with Bloody Mary, lit by a flickering basement light, with a washing machine humming in the background. It isn’t beautiful like an Instagram-worthy moment. It’s beautiful in the way truth is beautiful: raw, slightly awkward, and completely unscripted.
That’s more real than any romantic fantasy. Because real intimacy was never about being good at something. It was always about being real with someone.
Not perfect. Not polished. Not on script. Just two people, finally intimate with each other. And this can only occur when the script has been set aside.
The fumbles are not the failure. The fumbles are the signal that you’ve arrived somewhere real.
One question worth sitting with before you read on:
What’s one thing you’ve been told you “should” feel during your first time—or any intimate moment? What would it look like to simply let that expectation go?
4. The Unscripted Alternative (Connection Over Perfection)
So if the “perfect” first time is a myth, what’s the alternative?
Not a better script. Not a smarter checklist. Not a more carefully chosen partner with more social capital attached to their name.
The alternative is a completely different set of questions.
Instead of “Was it perfect?” ask yourself: “Did I feel safe? Did I feel seen and heard? Did I feel like myself?”
Three questions. That’s it. No rating system. No performance review. No comparing your experience to someone else’s story in a group chat.
Hannah arrives at something close to this when she finally admits, quietly and without fanfare: “I’ve been pretending to be real my whole life.” It hits her not as a failure, but as a door opening. Because if she’s been performing authenticity rather than living it, the goal was never the wrong destination—just the wrong vehicle.
The checklist wasn’t helping her become ready.
It was helping her avoid feeling what ready actually means.
Here’s the thing about checklists: they’re not inherently bad. They’re actually a very human response to fear. When something matters enormously and feels completely out of our control, we reach for structure. We itemize. We plan. We prepare.
Hannah’s color-coded timetable, her rehearsed conversations, her strategic targeting of Eddie—none of it came from nowhere. It came from anxiety dressed up as agency.
But real intimacy isn’t a problem you can solve in advance. It doesn’t reward preparation the way an exam does. It rewards something harder and stranger: the willingness to not know exactly what’s coming next, and to stay present anyway.
Drop the checklist. Not because planning is wrong, but because no checklist can answer the only question that actually matters before an intimate experience:
What do I actually want? (Not what you think you’re supposed to want. Not what your friends have already done. What you, in your own body, actually want.)
If you’re reading this and thinking: “But I don’t even know what I want!” that’s exactly the point.
Neither did Hannah, Ben or Eddie. Neither does anyone, until they stop performing long enough to listen.
Those questions can’t be answered in a Notes app. They can only be answered in the moment, with your body and your instincts and your honest inner voice—the one that gets drowned out by the script.
5. Your Unscripting Practice
(Not rules. Just challenges.)
a. Audit your invisible checklist.
Before your next date or intimate moment, pause and ask: “What expectations am I carrying into this?
Then ask: “Where did they come from? Maybe from a film, a friend’s story, something you read online, or something someone told you about who you’re supposed to be.
You don’t have to throw them out instantly. Just notice them. Name them. If appropriate, redefine them and make them actually yours.
b. Embrace one micro-awkwardness.
Examples:
- Say something true and uncertain out loud: “I’m actually nervous.”
- Ask a question you’d normally skip: “What does feeling good mean to you?”
- Let a silence sit for a beat longer without rushing to fill it.
Awkward doesn’t mean wrong. Sometimes it means you’ve stepped off the script and into something real.
c. Shift from doing to feeling.
In any intimate moment, try redirecting your attention from how you’re performing to what you’re experiencing. The warmth of a hand. The rhythm of someone’s breathing. Your own heartbeat.
The question isn’t “Am I good at this?” It’s “Am I here for this?”
Presence, instead of performance.
d. Redefine the goal.
Change the objective from having sex or being good at sex to connecting with this person or exploring what feels good together.
This removes the pass/fail dynamic entirely. You can’t fail at being present. You can only be more or less honest about where you are.
6. Your Unscripted Story Starts Now
The most transformative moments in the novel don’t happen because anyone executed a plan. They happen despite the plan. In the spaces between steps, in the unexpected silences, in the accidental kisses and the conversations that begin with “I’m actually terrified.”
Here’s what no one tells you about the first time—or any time that matters:
The awkward parts are not the obstacle to connection. They are the connection.
The uncertain voice. The nervous laugh. The moment you both realize you have no idea what comes next, and you have to figure it out together.
That’s not failure. That’s the closest two people can get to being real with each other.
The script promises you safety. It promises that if you prepare enough, perform well enough, choose the right person with the right status at the right moment, you’ll feel what you’re supposed to feel.
The script can’t deliver presence. But in intimacy, presence is the only thing that actually matters.
Because that version of you—the nervous, curious, unsure, hopeful one—is the only one capable of real connection.
The goal isn’t a “perfect” first time. The goal is a first time that feels true to you.
And that’s more than enough, don’t you think?