Did you regret having/not having premarital sex?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Well, after reading the purity balls snicker thing, I decided to start this thread. The question is simple. Did you regret having or not having premarital sex? Also, please feel free to add experiences of others you know, as I imagine most dopers would never say they regretted premarital sex (being the lewd bunch we are).

And no, it doesn’t count if you regretted having sex with one particular person. I imagine everyone’s done that.

I’ve had premarital sex. I am not married, engaged, or have a girlfriend. I have to say that I have not regretted it to this point. I lost my virginity in a kind of non-special way. I was 18 and most of my friends had already done it, so I figured, well, I better get this over with, so I won’t be so scared of it. It seriously could have been a problem in college, because for the first two years I didn’t get much action at all. In fact, the second girl I had sex with was my first real girlfriend at 20 years of age!

I have to say though, that I’ve had a lot of relationships that have been really special to me, and I think that if I were saving myself for marriage or whatever, that would have made these relationships much less special. The bond you have from making love to someone that you’re really in love with is something truly special. A relationship without sex is, to me, kind of immature. You have all of these lovely feelings, but it is hard to connect without all of this sexual tension. You end up feeling like a monk. I can’t imagine marrying a woman I’ve never had sex with. Obviously there needs to be a time to get to know someone, and I definitely do like that brief period of twenty minutes so I can memorize her name and a few basic bio details. Just kidding! When it’s a girl that I think is really special, I’ll gladly wait until its unbearable.

But then there’s nothing better than that period when you start to fall for a girl and you realize that you want to see her damn near every day for a week or so where you have loads of sex and then spend the rest of the day being together. And the moment you realize that she wants to see you just as much, well… it’s great…

2

No regrets here for pre-marital sex.

I think the regrets come in when people “save themselves” with the expectation of something unrealistic, such as a string quartet springing out of the closet, triggering an earth-shaking orgasm. Or when obvious sexual incompatibility wrecks an otherwise good relationship. Or when they consider it dirty or slutty to have sexual feelings for another person.

There are folks around here who waited until marriage because getting pregnant before marriage was not an option. Reducing the chance of unplanned pregnancy to zero was the only responsible choice to make for them, and I see nothing wrong with that. It’s a concrete issue with concrete solutions.

3

Like John Betjeman, I regret not having more premarital sex.

4

Have had plenty of premarital sex and will continue to do so. No regrets.

5

I’m now about 50 and the best sex of my life was premarital, in high school. Our first time was on the concrete floor of the Pottery classroom. We wound up living together for some months later, and, wow, was she hot. We’d have hot monkey sex in the way I think only teenagers can. Looking back I see the relationship probably could not have been sustanable for many years, though I still think very fondly of this lady, as I have of almost all the women I’ve been intimate with.

Getting married to be able to have sex sounds to me like a really bad idea. There are so many other things, some of them so subtle, and it seems to take so long to understand them well enough to manage them well. Having kids around, for example, deserves a kind of steadiness and knowing oneself that I think teenagers eager for sex are just not going to be able to deliver.

So, I’m glad I had premarital sex, and I wouldn’t discourage my kids from it. It’s like learning to drive, to handle money, to work, to travel, and many other things - dangerous but an important part of life that we should start doing somewhere in the teen years. Help from wiser older people can be very valuable, but abstinence programs are wisely ignored by their intended targets.

6

I wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it. :smiley:

7

Ha! I wouldn’t be half the man I am today without premarital sex, believe you me. I’m not married, but I’d bet quite a bit that my answer won’t change. Humans are naturally inclined to start having sex between the ages of 10 and 13. Every minute after the onset of puberty that we delay losing our virginity, I believe we tax our bodies and minds in ways many societies and species would find repulsive. If anything, the tragedy is that I couldn’t find a willing partner before the age of 17. (When it rains, it pours, though…it seemed like once I’d taken a crack at it, I had the enviable problem of having to choose which consenting woman to have sex with on a given weekend. How I miss being 17.)

Actually, that’s another thing. Getting laid regularly did wonders for my confidence. Which, in turn, made it just that much easier to get laid, and that much more inconsequential when I didn’t. (Plus it got me invited to parties, made it easy to make friends with anyone, and allowed me to get away with all kinds of stuff.) I mean, at my apex I remember chatting on AIM with two girls at once who were vocally admiring my pictures and competing to see who could stroke my ego enough to win my affection for the night, and me deciding not to bother with either one because it was too entertaining to watch from afar and I didn’t feel like driving to their neighborhood. I turned down threesomes on whims and hung up on drunk girls making booty calls. Looking back on it, I can’t believe how much more confident I was then than now. I’m not saying all of the things I did were right, but I only wish I could be as carefree.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

8

Well, all of my sex has been premarital, and I definitely don’t regret it. I can’t imagine waiting for marriage in a world where marriage is certainly not a foregone conclusion, nor can I imagine marrying someone I hadn’t had sex with.

Seriously. You get married so that you can spend the rest of your life with someone, NOT so that you can finally fuck them. Isn’t it better to find out that it was a bad idea to have sex with someone, than that it was a bad idea to MARRY him?

9

I’m Catholic, so sometimes I feel guilty, but I have no regrets. I’m not married yet, but sex feels “damn” good :wink:

10

40 married, had premarital sex…don’t regret it. Regret some of the complications of it (and I didn’t have severe complications like pregnancies or STDs - just the “drama”) that came with being young. But in my 20s that had gone away as well.

11

I’m in my 30s and happily married for years. I have no regrets about having sex before marrying, and even wish I’d had more premarital sex. I grew up in a strict church and had really screwed-up ideas about sex (that I managed to educate and talk myself out of, while rebelling against that church and switching to a far more liberal one), to the point where my teenage years were a stressed-out mess of me feeling that sex was dirty and awful and it was sinful to have those feelings, swinging way over to me desperately wanting it.

12

Me, too. 40, married, had premarital sex…don’t regret the sex but regret some of the consequences.

And from the parental side, I explained sex to my kids when they were young, expected them to have sex before marriage, encouraged them to wait until they were older, gave them condoms for Giftmas.

I’ve never told them that having sex was bad, though I did have to tell my older daughter at 16 that I would have preferred not knowing that she was having sex, that she should do a better job of cleaning up after herself–and next time use her own room instead of her brother’s. Thank Og he wasn’t here to discover the nasty sheets. Ew!

I was disappointed that my younger daughter got pregnant at 20, but not because she was having sex. It was because she wasn’t careful enough–always two forms of birth control, dammit! She knows better now.

Sex is natural and wonderful. I wouldn’t want my kids to have major hangups about sex, or to feel uncomfortable having their SOs come with them to stay with us, or anything else. Yep, my kids have sex in my house even though they are unmarried. Horrors! We would see less of them if they couldn’t bring their current partners, and we want to have a good adult relationship with our kids.

I guess I’m just not uptight enough for some folks.

13

Oh my Buddha! Why on earth would I regret my years of premarital sex???

14

Haven’t regretted it for a second. What if they are bad at it? I mean, do you really want to get married and not know all the kinks of your prospective partner? If I am a big fan of roping someone down and wearing all kinds of fun leather, and she freaks at the idea, I’d much rather find this out sooner than later.

15

Never regretted it. I’m 44, married 4-evv-r. Had sex with my first major love g.f. at 16, she was 15. ( Now I’d be in jail, forever a sex offender, life wrecked, etc. etc. Back then, we were just lovers. Not felons. But I digress… ).

I learned about respect, balance, urges, cravings, pleasuring a partner, listening, and fun. I learned a lot about what I wanted in a spouse.

And, oddly, ignored what I had learned when I chose a spouse. Stupid, huh? :rolleyes:

It wasn’t THE best sex I had, but some of it was the best lovemaking I’ll ever experience.

Cartooniverse

16

I guess I’ll be the first poster who waited–not until I was married, but until I was engaged. I kind of regret waiting so long. I started dating my husband when I was 18, and we had the “talk,” and I said that I didn’t think I was ready. I grew up in a very conservative household, and he was very respectful of that. We got into a rhythm of doing “everything but” having actual sexual intercourse.

This went on for a couple of years, and whenever we talked about going further, I wavered a bit, and he would back down and say that he wanted me to be absolutely sure. I was afraid of something, that intangible thing that all of the adults talked to me about–the way I would be “changed forever” once I had sex, the way I’d “lose” something. I was a pretty rational person, but I couldn’t shake that. It was mostly subconscious, but my boyfriend was always accommodating in letting me wait to make the critical decision.

When I was about 21, I finally just wanted to get it over with. I knew I’d probably marry the guy, and I was ready to push on despite those little niggling fears. But by now we’d built it up in our minds. He had never had sex either, and we started to fear that we had spent too long together to just casually start having sex one night. It was a Big Deal now, and it had to be done right. We couldn’t face the thought that it might be bad, because we’d committed the last few years to each other. And there was still the pregnancy issue…there was really no option of getting pregnant. It just couldn’t happen. To top it off, we were happy with the sexual stuff we were already doing, and we slept in the same bed every night, and it was just so comfortable, and shaking things up seemed like a bad idea. We had become the proverbial old married couple.

We got engaged when I was almost 23. I felt really silly now, not having “done it.” I started to feel like something was wrong with me. To the outside world, I had no sexual hangups. I went to sex toy stores with my friends, I never judged anyone on their sexual choices or preferences, I talked about bondage with friends who were into that sort of thing…I was your average liberal, sexually comfortable, post-college woman. Then why couldn’t I have sex? I had started to suspect that maybe my fiance found me unattractive. I wished I’d had sex before I met him so I hadn’t “screwed things up” like this with our relationship. Why couldn’t we be “normal?” I confided in a few friends–I would be so upset about this that I would cry. There was also, on the other hand, the problem of facing a life with only one sexual partner forever–could I really do that, and never experience anyone but my husband?

I blame this weird schizophrenia on the moralization of my sexual education. I’m very well-educated (I’m actually studying now to be an NP focusing on women’s health), but everything was so thick with morals and fear and guilt that I feel like I was very under-prepared. My husband is a wonderful man for putting up with me for all those years and for dealing with the weird fallout that’s still happening now. And for getting over the biggest obstacle and finally having sex with me during our engagement, when I said I was sure, I wanted to do it, and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I didn’t want to be faced with a wedding night fraught with worry and insecurity and fear. And I came out of my “first time” feeling like I’d finally taken a huge weight off of myself. It was my business, it was my decision, nobody made me “change,” and I didn’t “lose” anything. I never refer to that night as “losing my virginity.” I’m still whole, and I’m pure of heart, and I’m me. I have no idea what the hell anyone was talking about when I was younger.

On the plus side, things are good now. I do wish I’d been more adventurous when I was younger (like maybe making out with a few guys in high school, which I never did), but I’m happy that I’ve only had sex with my husband, even if we did wait way too long. It’s the way things worked out for me, and I love him, so I can’t be too upset. :slight_smile:

17

Beautiful post, Millit. Thank you.

18

I don’t regret having premarital sex, as I’d probably be a more frustrated and angry person otherwise. Now, I could have chosen a less “crazy story” worthy method to lose my virginity, but things went up from there.

Plus, I try on shoes before I buy them. Why wouldn’t I want to do the same with sex? There’s the potential for severe incompatibility is pretty high.

19

I second that.

20

I had all the premarital sex I could manage to get. What’s to feel guilty about? Guilt is an induced emotion, not a natural one IMHO.