Dating is tough now but it wasn't much easier when I was a teenager

I didn't lose my virginity until I was. It was a dismal event and all entirely about him

It was almost as difficult to meet boys when I was a teenager as it is now, more than 30 years later. I went to a girls' school and had no brothers, so ordinarily the boys I met were somebody else's brother, or were bantered with at bus stops at 4 o'clock on the way home, or were encountered at city discos.

The brothers of friends fell into two categories: either they were astoundingly good looking, five years older, completely unattainable, a quickened heartbeat as we crossed in the kitchen, or they were goblins with acne. There didn't seem to be anything in between. Peter Gabriel was on the wall, David Bowie was on the turntable, Bryan Ferry made elegant love to me via Top of the Pops, and there was a boy I fancied at the bus stop who had wavy dark hair, but (aside from the occasional snog) that had to suffice, for years and years.

At 16, my best friend and I went to a disco most Saturday nights, because of the dancefloor and for the love of it, not because of the men. We were generally oblivious to those watching at the sidelines as we spun about in shirtdresses and footless tights and heels. The occasional inept bloke would sidle up and shuffle about alongside, and go off again at the end, too nervous to follow through.

We also frequented a retro disco that, musically, was still the early 70s, and where lanky college boys shook their hair in time to All Right Now by Free, but none of them were interested in a non-hippy chick. Occasional attempts to take matters into my own hands proved doomed. A note passed at the bus stop turned to humiliation when the wavy-haired boy had it ripped out of his hands and read aloud to everybody on the top deck.

For the whole of the sixth form, I was pursed by a fey, pale boy of my own age, who used to hang about in the bookshop where I had a Saturday job and slip me postcards with love poems on them. It turned out he had a girlfriend and that I knew her, and the mystery of her chilliness with me was solved. There was also an academic in his 30s, Heathcliffishly handsome, who used to walk me home from work, and spoke rapturously of my well-turned ankle. He persistently suggested lunch, and I consistently refused.

If it was to come down to a count-up of actual snogs snogged in the secondary school years, I'm struggling to need more than two hands. There was a boy at a party that the girl who loved across the street took me to, where we paired off by protracted negotiation and lay together in the dark, kissing, with Pink Floyd playing - a very English, innocent sort of teen orgy. There was a one-off never-to-be-forgotten kiss with the son of friends of my parents in a dining room while clearing the table (he never looked me in the eye again). There were far more missed kissed than fulfilled ones. There was the quirky-looking, very tall boy at the youth group who played guitar, sang his own songs and had a clingy girlfriend; there was the quirky-looking, very tall boy who was a poet (a pattern may be discernible) and the boyfriend of a friend, and thus strictly off limits, but who had a mouth I couldn't help thinking about, and the kind of eyes hard to look into for long.

Then, when I was 18, the summer before I went to university, there was Gary, who was a girlfriend's boyfriend's single pal. and who agreed to make up a four. Gary was blond, sharp-featured and 22, and had an air of impatience. He took me out alone a couple of times in his sports car. The first time, invited to decide where we went for the afternoon, we had my idea of a first date (meadow, picnic, kisses). The second time, we went back to his "for coffee" after lunch and he made it clear what his idea of a second date was. His ardour had to be dampened pretty fiercely. I wasn't ready. He realized that's what it was and didn't call again.

I didn't lose my virginity until I was 21. It was a dismal event, and it was all entirely about him, a boy I hardly knew. He thought his sawing joylessly away should be enough to bring about ecstasy in a woman. It's not an uncommon philosophy.