13.
“I was raised in a Catholic culture, but my family stopped attending church after I made my First Communion at age 7. In public school, my principal was a specialized health teacher, so I received comprehensive sex education. Still, I decided not to have sex until marriage because I didn’t want to risk contracting an STD that can’t be cured, getting pregnant, or even becoming that ‘we had sex once, so now she’s the one’. All birth control methods have a higher than zero failure rate for STIs and pregnancy, and I’m not one to take chances. On top of that, I couldn’t use tampons at all, and I would never pass a Pap smear, so I suspected I had vaginismus. If I couldn’t have penetrative sex, I wanted to make sure it was with a partner I knew loved me, not some strange man who thought I was attractive.”
“When I said I wanted to wait until I was married, my mom laughed and said, ‘Well, come see me when you’re in college.’ I ended up not getting married until I was 35 (and my first mouth-to-mouth kiss with my first boyfriend was 29). I was a virgin on my wedding night. Sure, I had some pretty steamy kisses with my second boyfriend, who would later become my husband, but we were basically clothed the whole time. My husband wasn’t a virgin, so he taught me how to have sex.
To my surprise, even though I thought I would never do it, we had sex on our wedding night and it was one of the best nights of my life. I was unable to have penetrative sex on our wedding night due to vaginismus, but 6 months of pelvic floor therapy fixed that. I don’t regret my decision to remain a virgin until marriage, but I’ll be honest and say it wasn’t without its consequences. Also, I don’t know what would have happened if my husband had been a virgin, or if we hadn’t had a passionate kiss before marriage. BTW, I don’t think I’m any better because I was a virgin on my wedding night. It just happened to make sense to me, and I didn’t have any long-term negative effects from the decision I made as a teenager.
-Anonymous
