I started Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex last night, and, in addition to hitting the nails on several heads, she’s bringing to mind a conversation I had with some girls on my hall my freshman year of college.

I was a virgin until I was 20—in my corner of the universe, and in that time period (the early 2000s), that was, like, ancient. Like, there must be something wrong with you if you hadn’t “lost it” by 15 or 16 at the latest. My friends in high school had accustomed themselves to this quirk of mine, and it had rarely come up until college, when it became clear that I was seriously, seriously weird. And then, one night, I got into a conversation with some girls. I can’t remember who any of them were now, but I don’t think they were particularly good friends; we were all just in the lounge or something, and the topic of sex came up, and then they all did that head-swivel thing when it came out that I was a virgin.

One of them brought up the argument that “You don’t buy a car without test driving it first!” (If you read any kind of teen magazine in the late 90s or early 00s, this argument was all over the place.) Another one made the point that, if you don’t sleep around before getting serious with someone, you might not be any good at sex when you are with that someone, and then that person won’t have any good sex as long as they’re with you.

I told them that those arguments had been in my mind, too, but that my mother—who was young and single in New York, Boston, and San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s and knew a thing or two about the sexual revolution—had always said, “Sex, at its best, is an expression of love between two people. Not an opportunity to show off or assess a person’s skill level.”

I don’t particularly think that’s an earth-shattering statement, but it was sort of a mic drop moment (though I didn’t mean for it to be—honestly, I was super uncomfortable being the odd one out and wanted to just go back to my room).

“I never thought about that,” one girl said. Another said it sounded so romantic. Another said she wished she’d heard that before she’d ever had sex. One by one by one, their brains exploded.

I realized something: my entire adolescence, I’d assumed that we all knew the same things about sex but that I was just making a different choice with that information. But these girls (women, in a sense) had, apparently, never had anyone tell them that sex had anything to do with love. I couldn’t believe it. It was one of the first times I was ever grateful to my mom for saying something so old-fashioned and embarrassing.