I dated a woman who was a born-again virgin, shall we say. 13 years celibate. I’m not sure exactly why - we were members of a social group where, in general, sex was available if wanted.
Anyway, I was between wives, in the post-divorce screwed up period and had determined that I was going to have fun, date, screw-around but not get serious with anyone. This woman was one of the woman I was dating. (There was another woman in another city - they each knew I wasn’t seeing only them but they didn’t have details. I wasn’t cheating, in my mind, since everybody knew about everybody else.)
This woman and I had many “friends only” discussions. It was never hours of conversation on this topic but things said and things implied done five minutes at a time. I used to jokingly refer to her as my “girlfriend du jour” and she would preen in response.
Good clean fun - with benefits - not getting too serious.
However, enter girlfriend number three six months later. This one knocked my socks off and in very little time I had decided to have an exclusive relationship with her. Girlfriends number one and two were dumped as gently as I could. My reformed born-again virgin didn’t take it well at all. There’s numerous examples but I’ll sum it up by saying it culminated in a police report.
She had apparently building castles in the sky, knitting booties, etc. despite our numerous conversations that we were not getting serious, right?, and I was too screwed up from my divorce to be serious, right?, and all our other “keeping it light” kind of conversations.
My worries of a thirty-some year old virgin, especially the ones that were waiting for the somebody special, is that she might choose me as the special one when I’m not in the same mode. Since it’s more common for men to desire casual sex, taking an older woman’s virginity moves it out of the “casual” column and puts it in the “serious relationship” column. Something that men are usually slow to do.
There’s a reverse to this, too. I’ve known too many young men who have grandiose expectations built around sex. Not the, whoo-hoo-this’ll-be-great kind of expectation but rather the it’s-going-to-be-magical-and-emotional-and-such expectation.
I think many of us have all rolled our eyes at men like this and said, “Yep, he’s going to marry the first girl that sleeps with him.”