Wow, I should have thought better of it when I posted the sarky second (and third) replies to the OP. This thread has, um, multiplied like rabbits.
I wasn’t a virgin when I got married. My (now ex-) was. I regretted my past “indiscretion” dearly when I met her, and we neared our wedding day. You see, after a few years of agnosticism, I had moved slowly back into the sort of evangelical Christianity my wife believed in. (Theologically, I was still liberal, but morally I was dead serious.) During our engagement we “fooled around”–petting as I guess you would call it–but never in any kind of intercourse.
It was all right, I thought, until just before our marriage. I knew that she was a recovering anorexic, and that she had serious body image issues. Now she said that she felt that sex was evil and disgusting, and that she didn’t think she could “go through with it” even after our wedding day. Her concerns were largely correct. We went to sex counselling for months, but she never “enjoyed” “having to have” sex (her words). I knew because of her past there was little I could do to change how she felt. Within about ten months, other issues started damaging our marriage beyond repair. As I now understand, she started seeing someone else, our marriage officially ended last year, and she is now married to the “someone else.”
The point of this confessional is that I can understand her confusion in a way. All throughout her teenage years, she’d been “bombarded” (her word again) with “sex is bad” warnings by her evangelical church leaders, peers, etc. I know that they were really supposed to be saying “premarital sex is bad,” but somehow that got lost along the way. Then, after her wedding day, that thing that was evil, bad, never to be talked about, suddenly became something you absolutely had to do (“the will of God!” as our rector said during the marriage service). How can you change your views on anything, let alone an act so fraught with psychological reprecussions, so totally? It would be, I guess, like a society where, say, theft was punishable by death (and since many evangelicals regard fornication as punishable by spiritual death, it’s not far off), except on Tuesdays, when you had to steal, or otherwise face reproach.
I know we were not alone in how we felt about this subject. Our counsellor told us that a number of her patients were also evangelical Christians who could simply not bring themselves to commit an act that they were told was “wrong” and which they did not feel they could discuss between them. I know the answer is not “so, they should just have sex before marriage.” But it does demonstrate that, to use a poor turn of phrase, “the cult of virginity” can have some bad effects.
I’m sure for many couples who waited, sex after marriage is a straightforward act, and they can enjoy it. But for some of us, it wasn’t, and we didn’t, and it affected our marriages badly.
[sub]I’m not taking back what I said in the second post. My dick is so big its UN rep is running for President of the Security Council. But being able to joke about that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily want to put it in every woman I see.[/sub]
