As a woman in her late 30s and looking to be married I am extremely nervous about having intercouse for the first time.

What should I do to be more relaxed about the situation? Do you think this should take place on the wedding night or the next day to be more comfortable. Please help because as each year passes, I get more anxious about not knowing what to do.

I can understand your nervousness, but since it’s only going to make it more difficult, you must find ways to overcome it. First of all, I’m going to assume the man you’re marrying isn’t a virgin, so you can count on his experience, to some extent. I would also suggest that you get some books on sex and read them thoroughly. The more information you have, the easier it will be to relax because while the details will still be new, at least you’ll have a better idea of the broad strokes of what could occur.

If you do run into trouble, you can then go back to those books to see what you can do about it. I don’t want to start giving you a laundry list of what might go wrong, because then you’ll be thinking of the dangers and that will make it more likely to cause you psychological pressure. But nervousness can cause problems and since you say you are anxious already, it’s something to look out for. You ask about waiting for the day after your wedding to have sex, and that’s not a bad idea, but it’s not a necessity. You could try having sex the first night, and the odds are that you’ll be successful, but the thought that you have to keep in the back of your mind is that at that point you’ll be married, so no one time is all that important because you have a lifetime left of opportunities to have sex. So if it takes you one additional day, or an additional week or even a month, in the context of a lifetime, that’s really not a big deal.