I was staring at my apartment ceiling in pure horror while my best friend mechanically rubbed my collarbone like he was defusing a bomb. We made a drunken pact to lose our virginity to each other to skip the brutal city dating scene, but the second clothes came off, the cringe was suffocating. We both ended up crying from sheer mortification—and that’s when he confessed he’d been paying a Discord 'intimacy coach' by the hour to script his moves so he wouldn't fail. Now our whole friendship feels radioactive and weirdly outsourced. How do we ever look each other in the eye again?

Deep breath: your friendship isn’t dead, it’s just suffering from acute, third-degree cringe. A pragmatic virginity pact sounds brilliant on paper, until reality hits and you realize that sleeping with your best friend strips away all the polite mystery of a stranger. Add in an anonymous Discord guru treating your foreplay like a competitive gaming speedrun, and it’s a miracle nobody spontaneously combusted. Your friend didn't outsource this to be creepy—he did it out of sheer, sweating panic that he’d let you down. The absolute worst part is already behind you. The bubble burst, the tears happened, the secret is out. Now you just have to puncture the weirdness before it hardens into permanent silence. Next time you hang out, order cheap pizza, put on a terrible movie, and tell him straight: "The pact is officially dead, your Discord guru is fired, and we are never taking our pants off in the same room again." Mutual laughter is the only antidote to terminal mortification. Give it a couple of weeks—this disaster will eventually be the funniest story of your twenties.