"I was really nervous to write this article because by writing it, I’m revealing one of the biggest secrets I have about myself to an audience of x amount of people. A secret that society has taught me is not okay for a girl my age to have. But I am me and I like that girl. She’s ambitious and hard-working and has her eyes on the prize. She likes to be honest and open when she writes and tries her very best to be a strong role model to her siblings, friends and even just people she’s only known in passing. She loves and hurts and bruises and giggles just as much as anyone else, despite her sometimes unapproachable veneer.
She’s me and I am a virgin. As in, never had sex virgin.
Up until this moment, only my very best friends were aware of this fact. And whether I was in high school or college, they were always flabbergasted. Whaaaaaat? You are?! How?? Yep! That’s me. The surprise was always because they knew I had done stuff with guys – gotten pretty far, but just not to that point. It’s one of those I’ve done everything but scenarios. Out here, especially for La La Land, it was almost unheard of. I’m an endangered species or mythical, like a unicorn.
Sex was never something I saw myself waiting until marriage for or just not doing because of religious reasons. I wanted to wait until I had this little thing called love on my side. I wanted to be in love with the guy first. I wanted him to love me back, for all of my flaws and issues and silliness and I wouldn’t settle for anything else. The older I got and keep getting, it feels almost like it’s a joke to keep with such a heart-driven vow. But for every night where I’ve been intoxicated and almost let myself slip, my heart always rescued me in the nick of time. No! Don’t do it – he won’t call you and won’t remember. Your memories will be blurry if even at that. Keep waiting.
Somehow, no matter how close to gone I’ve been, my heart has always been the loudest voice I heard – and listened to.
I thought I had love in college once. That one was the one who broke my heart the hardest. The break was divided neatly into two parts: the first real sting of a really real relationship ending and the other part was that I could not have done anything to stop it. I could have comprised my beliefs for him. He wanted to have sex without a condom. His excuse was that he didn’t like wearing them. At the time, I wasn’t on birth control and terrified at what the consequences for me could have been. I could have gotten pregnant. Or worse, contracted a venereal disease (I didn’t know anything about his past partners except that he told me he had over 10 girlfriends in the past). I told him I wanted to wait but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear and the relationship ended before it had a chance to grow into something more. He broke up with me before we even had a chance to have sex. I’ll never know what might have happened between us if I had agreed to what he wanted, but I know deep down I would never have. My heart was too loud and this time, my mind was fighting furiously alongside it. I got out of that relationship with a big hurt weighing on me for the rest of my senior year but the overall trade-off of getting to keep my v-card made me victorious in the long run and beyond proud that I stuck to my convictions, despite their unpopularity with him. It would have hurt me more to know that my first time would have been with someone who actually told me that I better not fall in love with him.
For anyone reading this, I don’t want you to be fooled by what society or your best friend or classmates tell you. This is not The 40 Year Old Virgin. If you wait, you shouldn’t feel ashamed or left out or like you have a problem or that something is wrong with you. You are you and you should only decide to have sex when you know you are absolutely ready and even better, when you’re with the person you truly love and who loves you back just as much. If people make fun of you or pressure you into thinking otherwise or if you wind up lying about it just to fit in or to get everyone off your back, just don’t. And screw all of those people. They don’t know what’s really going on and don’t need to. Your truest friends will not do that to you. They won’t force you to tell them your personal business if you don’t want to. My best friends are incredibly understanding and even shared their own stories of how they lost their virginity. I know none of them would ever judge me or look down on me for waiting, no matter what, just as I will never judge them for anything in their romantic past. And while I’m at it telling you to wait for love, I get not wanting to wait too. It’s hard to wait. Hormones make it near to impossible sometimes. Just make sure that you stay safe and use a condom and take birth control. Being a Teen Mom when you are 16 is not cool, despite what MTV says.
I’m not so nervous now after writing this out. Feels good to get it all off of my chest. It is so different from what I usually write about because I’m really famous for keeping my personal life under wraps and not making it something that everybody within earshot knows (or cares to know) about. I wanted to write about sex and being a virgin for a long time. Never in a way that would be preachy or anti-sex either. Just a true life story from a very real girl who has been there and will continue to be there for awhile. I know I’ll have sex one day in the future and love will sweep me off of my feet, but in the meantime I’ll focus on what I want to get out of life for myself and keep working hard because those are currently my biggest priorities. I hope my next relationship takes me by complete surprise too- spontaneous love! But from here on out I’m not going to be worried about capping it off at a certain age when I should have lost my virginity. It’s different for everybody. Gisele Bundchen didn’t lose hers until she was 22 and Tina Fey lost hers at 24 and look at them now! Fabulous, fierce women, both of ‘em.
And then there are Emma Stone’s words of advice from the film Easy A. If you don’t feel like taking my advice, she’s got some words of wisdom when it comes to sex too. “I really like this guy. I might even lose my virginity to him. I don’t know. When it will happen you know maybe 5 minutes from now, tonight or six months from now or maybe on our wedding night, the really amazing thing is, it is nobody’s goddamn business.”
