- I've always experienced a certain degree of pain during sex, regardless of who it was with or what the circumstances were.
- I felt insecure, self-conscious and uncomfortable talking to other people about it, but once I confided in close friends, I learned I wasn't alone.
- The stigma around sex changed for me, as I made a conscious decision to stop having sex because I felt like I had to.
- My standard of living, going out, and socializing has changed dramatically now that I never engage in intercourse.
Although I lost my virginity four years ago, I've never been somebody who has typically enjoyed sex.
During the last years of my adolescence, I found the boy I wanted to finally lose my virginity to. I was the last of my friends to have sex and I was ready to take that step in my relationship. We decided to plan it so our expectations would match — and to make sure his roommates would be out of the room for a long period of time.
As previously scheduled, my boyfriend and I left the party we were both attending early and met outside of his dorm. It took us about an hour to get past our nerves and make moves to follow through with our initial plan. About two hours (and plenty of foreplay) later, we had successfully taken our relationship to the next level.
I was told by numerous people that the first few times I had sex it would probably be painful until I got into the rhythm of things.
This isn't always the case for everybody of course, but for me, there was no doubt it would take some getting used to.
Although at times it was bearable, the pain typically had two dimensions. The first was a burning sensation as if there wasn't enough movement, or like our choice of lubricant was causing an allergic reaction. This pain wasn't consistent; it didn't happen every time we had sex, only sometimes.
However, the second dimension was always there. As a small girl, 4 foot 11 inches to be exact, my proportions are small as well. The second type of pain I felt may never go away, but it was the constant feeling that something didn't fit right, but in a painful way, the type of discomfort a woman gets when she inserts a tampon in incorrectly, or when you fall hard on something in between your legs and you feel the recoil.
The more my boyfriend and I had sex, the more I noticed things weren't getting any better for me, even though they were great for him.
I was vocal about my discomfort and frustration that the pain wasn't absolving. We tried an abundance of things to try and make it feel better. I even went to a pain management doctor who specializes in vaginal discomfort, but in the end, nothing worked.
After we broke up, I was really unsure how to handle this problem by myself.
Instead of trying to find answers and seek guidance, I slept with a few other guys thinking maybe it was just related to my ex-boyfriend. With each new guy, I found myself in the same kind of discomfort as I had previously experienced. This only led to awkwardness when I tried to explain myself to men who didn't really care about my pain. They were still able to finish, and to them, that was the most important part. I quickly became self-conscious and insecure about my sexual experiences, which in turn made me feel alienated and depressed. Regardless of who I was having sex with, I felt as though I was having an out of body experience every time and counted the minutes until the encounter was over. This was certainly not how I wanted to be expressing myself sexually in my 20s.
Communication and self-expression became the key to handling this insecurity.
I began confiding in my closest friends about this issue. I had spent so much time suffering internally, I never thought to involve other people in my struggle and see what they would have to offer. I even extended the information to my mom, who also gave me some advice to think about as I continued to look for solutions.
The more I heard from other people, the more I realized I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Some of my most trusted peers actually turned out to have similar circumstances to me, which we ended up bonding over and commiserating over some of our worse experiences. We laughed and joked about our endless research and outrageous self-experiments to see if anything would improve. Even though I didn't feel alone anymore, it was still extremely upsetting to me that so many of us had this problem and couldn't find anything to help.
It never dawned on me that I could abstain from having sex until I was ready to commit to finding a proper, longer-term solution.
I always considered sex to be something that had to be relatively mandatory and consistent in my life, especially being in my early 20s. However, the more I spoke to other people who were having trouble with their sex lives, the more I learned about their mechanisms of avoiding or just flat out not engaging in intercourse to improve the quality of their lives. I didn't quite want to go to that extreme and force it out of my life, but I decided that I was going to stop having sex because I felt like I 'had' to and start having sex in a situation where I wanted to.
In the beginning, this choice felt intimidating. The idea of being closed off to sex was difficult, especially when going out with friends who were specifically going to the bars or clubs to find men to leave with. I felt insecure and lost when my group would disperse to find guys to flirt with or leave at the end of the night with other people, and I was left to walk myself home — or even worse, when someone would offer to walk me home and linger around waiting for an invitation to my house or apartment.
I also felt insecure about myself while I was dancing with or flirting with guys. I felt desirable, in that I knew they wanted me, but their interest wavered when I wasn't willing to go home with them to have sex. Fortunately, the more I made this conscious decision, the more comfortable I became with the idea of saying no, or waiting for the right person who I actually wanted to have sex with, which was a relatively new concept to me.
Shortly, the social expectations of sex faded away from my mindset and my anxiety over the concept dissolved. There was no longer a reason to fear the act if I wasn't doing it in the first place. I found myself more excited about going to bars or clubs, and less bothered when I watched people pair off at the end of the night. I basked in the lack of expectations that I once was so weighed down by, and smiled to myself when I remembered I wouldn't have to share a bed with anybody tonight, or any other night until I decided I wanted to.
It's now been about a year since I last had sex, and instead of calling it a "dry spell," I think positively about the idea of resuming regular intercourse one day, but keeping my bed, my body, and my mindset to myself until then.
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