Virginity: Dismantling the Myth

Everyone can remember their first time; they recount it vividly. I can rather clearly envision my own, and it wasn’t something that was exceptionally romantic or otherworldly. It was odd, awkward, sweaty, and uncoordinated. How fortunate for me, right?

The prelude to the action itself was hasty, the hands of my boyfriend (at the time) exploring my inexperienced body as an effort to arouse me. And he tried, I’ll give him that. Desperately.

He kissed my neck, cupped my cheek, grabbed my breasts with an overpowering force fueled by nothing but lust (I would say that it was fueled by love but I knew he did not love me, sadly). And so, as a girl who’d grown up reading One Direction smut and fanfictions for the entirety of my pubescence, I was expecting to feel fireworks. Who wouldn’t, right? I yearned for the conventional “butterfly” moment; when I’d recognize that my cheeks were flushed and my thighs were warm.

But they weren’t. And I didn’t, not one bit. Not before, not during, and not afterwards. And I wondered why. Was something wrong with me? Was there something wrong with him? Was there something wrong with our relationship? Why did I feel that I quite literally lost a piece of myself after something so incredibly special? Why did losing my virginity feel so existential?

Growing up, I was told that losing my virginity was meant to be an experience that introduced me to pleasure, desire, what’s like to be loved (and to be in it); what it felt like to be wanted. Nearly everything I consumed capitalized on the concept of intimacy and how pure it was meant to be to you and to the person you choose to partake in it with.

However, it was quite the opposite for me, and I felt that I had lost something so precious to someone who I knew I wasn’t going to love, to someone that I couldn’t even picture myself with for longer than another 3 or so months. Everything felt disoriented.

I felt that I had wasted the potential of an encounter that could have been ethereal on a relationship and a boy that was rather average. To realize this was inevitably defeating and really, really displeasing.

The same evening of the day that I engaged in my first “big girl” act of sex, I came home and plopped onto my bed. I knew I was supposed to feel like I was floating on cloud-9 after what had just occurred but I only felt heaviness. My arms and legs sunk into my comforter, and my head was fogged with confusion. I took off my clothes and stared down harshly at what was no longer the body of someone ignorant to a touch sustained by fervor. But after more than a few minutes of laying in absolute solitude, I made the impulsive decision to tell my mother (to many of you reading, this decision may be portrayed as a mistake, but it felt necessary to my anxious mind and body to talk about it to someone, anyone).

So, I found her and I sat down and I talked. I vomited everything, and when I was done, my mother and I shared a dialogue only communicated through silent staring. I wondered if she could sense my worry. With my nervous eyes, I asked her if I’d be okay. With her comforting stare, she’d responded with an “of course you will be.”

Then we broke the quiet and kept conversing, back and forth. I asked her why in the hell virginity was so damn important, why it felt so damn important, why it was portrayed as important, advertised as important. My mom told me that it wasn’t.. but my feelings were.

That’s when I knew. Virginity wasn’t important. It’s simply cultivated to make people feel as if they had surpassed a threshold of immaturity, that they’d grown; that they’d seen some things and kissed enough flesh to be considered seasoned in the intimacy department. The loss of my v-card was not a sacred act etched into stone. Sure, it was something that I’d always remember, that I’d look back on, but it wasn’t life-defining.

I did not have to lose my “virginity” to the first body that touched me passionately beneath my clothes. That’s the beautiful part of beginning to delve into sex. You write your own narratives, you make your own choices, you decide who and what holds weight and who and what doesn’t.

Going forward, I decided that “virginity” was a myth. Whomever touched my body did not have to be exceedingly paramount because, at the end of the day, what I felt because of that experience is what mattered. It’s what will always matter.