Hi folks,

I've been feeling some insecurities getting into ENM, which I'd felt for a while before I actually became properly "practicing", so to speak.

Which is to say, objectively speaking as far as what data there is goes, I'm not sexually (and as of this last year, romantically) inexperienced. Like, supposedly, the lifetime average number of sex partners is around 3-5 and I easily beat that, but in my late teens and early twenties I seeked out sex wherever I could find it for the sake of validation (unhealthy, I know, but I've grown past that now) and the types of people I usually ended up sleeping with then we're people I wasn't super into, people who were probably too old for me and a couple were some pretty awful people. In that time I never found any love either, until I got with my partner last year at 26. This contrasts with what I saw in other queer people my age, who were able to find fulfilling romantic and sexual experiences with people they found attractive and good-hearted. No such luck for me back then.

Which is to say, my formative experiences of sex and romance taught me that I wasn't worthy of the kind of actually fulfilling intimacy with people who were my actual peers that I genuinely found attractive. That I had a "low sexual value" (ik thats close to incel speak and it icks me out too, but for lack of better language there it is).

Overcoming this has been a process and in the past year I've found myself in a relationship with someone who was previously a long-time friend who is also dating someone else, and we have great romantic and sexual chemistry. It's amazing, a dream come true.

But as part of this, we've been getting into other ENM activities like going to a sex club and potentially organising hookups together or separately. It's slow going since we live in different cities and so only see each other a handful of times a year atm, but we're both eager.

And, in reading up on other people's experiences, following poly/ENM people on social media and so on, I've suddenly started feeling very insecure about my level of experience and what it says about my desirability again. It seems like the typical young poly queer slut experience is multiple partners, slept with some, most, or even all of your friends, and to have been a regular orgy-goer since you were like 19 (looking at you Polyphilia et al). I know it isn't really true, but looking at what's visible online, I feel like the only horny bisexual who hasn't had uncountable experiences with many people and had every possible fantasy fulfilled before you turn 25.

To be clear, working through my feelings, some of this is just jealousy and FOMO and that's just how it goes, but the thing that gets me is feeling like as I step deeper into this world, the people who have had that sort of lifestyle might look down on my for my, at least relative, inexperience. That because I'm a late bloomer I might have "missed the boat" on some possibilities that I really crave, that I might not belong, that it makes me undesirable. Just like I felt when I was younger, and what I felt my experiences back then confirmed.

So, I guess what I'm asking is, to the more experienced - would I be welcome I the spaces you mingle in? Assuming I'm polite and respectful of consent and well-groomed and so on, would my noobishness be off-putting? And to the less experienced - how did your entry into this lifestyle go?