What if I hated it?

Hardly anybody writes about this, which leaves people who tried it and did not enjoy it feeling like they failed a test. There is no test. A perfectly reasonable outcome of trying something is deciding it is not for you.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Then you hated it, and you are allowed to stop. Nothing about having wanted something for years obliges you to enjoy it when it turns up, and finding out is the entire reason for trying.

This page is for people who did the thing, felt bad, and are now wondering what is wrong with them. Usually nothing is.

First, wait a week

The 72 hours after a session are the worst possible time to reach a verdict. Chemistry is still clearing, drop arrives somewhere in that window and drags everything down with it, and shame has a way of rewriting an evening into something considerably worse than it was.

Plenty of people who were certain on the Sunday that they hated it find on the following Saturday that they mostly did not. The reverse happens too. Either way, the assessment made a week later is the one worth trusting.

Bad night or bad match

These feel identical from the inside and lead in opposite directions. Some things that produce a horrible evening without saying anything about whether you like this:

• A rushed or skipped warm-up. Cold skin makes everything feel like a sharp, mean sting with none of the depth people describe. This is the single most common reason a first session is unpleasant.
• Too much, too fast. Someone who went straight to an implement, or delivered forty when twenty was plenty. The activity is not to blame for somebody else's pacing.
• The wrong person. Not unsafe, just wrong. No rapport, no attention, a script that had nothing to do with you. This is far more common than anything sinister and it wrecks an evening entirely.
• Self-consciousness. You spent the whole time watching yourself, wondering how you looked, and monitoring your own reactions. Nothing works from there, and it eases with familiarity more than anything else.
• A scenario that embarrassed you. Roleplay is optional and quite a lot of people find it excruciating. Try it with no scenario at all before writing off the whole thing.
• No aftercare. Being sent home twenty minutes after a session with a stranger will sour almost any experience.

And some things that suggest the activity itself is not for you: the pain was simply pain, all the way through, with no shift in it. You felt no anticipation beforehand, only dread. You felt nothing much at all and were mainly bored. The whole thing struck you as absurd rather than embarrassing, which is a different feeling and a more final one.

What a fair second attempt looks like

If you want to test it properly rather than close the file, change one thing at a time. A different person is the biggest variable and worth changing first. Then: much longer warm-up, hand only, half the duration, no scenario, and somewhere you feel comfortable rather than somewhere unfamiliar.

Most people need three or four attempts before they can tell what they think, for the same reason nobody can evaluate anything while they are still concentrating on not looking foolish. The first attempt tells you almost nothing.

But you do not have to do this. Retesting a thing you disliked is a choice, not a duty.

Permission to stop

You can decide it is not for you and never think about it again. You can decide the fantasy was better as a fantasy and keep it there, which is a completely functional arrangement that a great many people have. You can conclude that you wanted a specific kind of attention and this was not the route to it.

None of that is a waste. Knowing is better than fifteen more years of wondering, and an afternoon that answered a long-held question is a good afternoon even if the answer was no.

The version that is not a bad night

There is a difference between disliking something you agreed to and being taken past what you agreed to. If a limit was ignored, if you said stop and were not listened to, if you were pressured into something you had refused, then what you are feeling is not disappointment about a hobby.

That is not your fault, it is not a consequence of being into this, and it is not something to file away as a bad first attempt. See when it goes wrong.