Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Will sex on third date spoil chances of long-term love?

I am 29, single, and have recently met someone who I really like after a year of unsuccessful dating. We’ve known each other for a few months, but have only been on two dates. In the past, I have slept with men on the first or second date but it has come to nothing. This time I want it to turn into something more. I really fancy him, and I’m dying to sleep with him, but do you think that jumping into bed so soon would harm the chances of something longer-term?

The notion that smart girls should make a man wait before they have sex with him derives from a host of socially-constructed methodologies designed to prevent young people having sex with each other at a time when contraception was either unavailable or unreliable.

Since the advent of the Pill, parents, religious groups and educators have resorted to guilt narratives to try to rein in youthful sexuality. For example, your mother and my mother would both have absorbed the notion that boys would tell you that they love you in order to persuade you to have sex with them and then once they’d had their wicked way, they would not even consider marrying you because you were too ‘easy’.