13.
“I had a culturally Catholic upbringing, but my family stopped attending after I had my First Communion at age 7. I had comprehensive sex education in my public school because the principal had been a health teacher who had specialized in it. I still chose to wait until marriage to have sexual intercourse because I didn’t want to risk getting an incurable STI, getting pregnant, or even just turning into that girlfriend who goes, ‘We had sex once, so now we’re soulmates.’ Every form of contraception has a failure rate greater than 0 for STIs and/or conception, and I’m not a betting gal. In addition to that, I suspected I had vaginismus due to being completely unable to use tampons or get through a pap smear, so if I was unable to have penetrative sex, I wanted to find that out with a partner that I knew loved me for me rather than some random guy who thought I was hot.”
“My own mother laughed when I told her that I wanted to wait until marriage, saying, ‘Yeah, come see me when you get to college.’ In the end, I didn’t get married until I was 35 (and didn’t have my first mouth-to-mouth kiss until I was 29 years old with my first boyfriend). I was a virgin on my wedding night. Obviously, I had some pretty hot make-out sessions with my second boyfriend, who eventually became my husband, but essentially, our clothes were always on. My husband was not a virgin, so he coached me through sexual intercourse.
Surprisingly, we got it on during our wedding night, despite my expectations that we wouldn’t, and it was one of the best nights of my life. I wasn’t able to do penetrative sex on my wedding night because of vaginismus, but six months of pelvic floor therapy resolved that. I have no regrets about my decision to remain a virgin until I was married, but I’m the first to say that it’s not without its own consequences. Also, I don’t know how it would have been if my husband had also been a virgin or if we had never had our hot make-out sessions before getting married. By the way, I don’t think I’m this awesome person because I was a virgin on my wedding night. It happened to sit well with me, and I had no negative long-term consequences due to a decision I made in my teens.”
—Anonymous
