Let Me Guide You

This entry begins with something I wrote on a long bus ride on Ukraine, back in 2012. It has been hanging out in notes app through three different iPhones. It's time it has a home.

Essays for my Future Kids

"Losing It"

Growing up, I didn't get the impression that boys were very interested in me. As I'm writing this at 24, I still don't see myself as any kind of "guy magnet" or "siren." I have plenty of male friends, but I don't date a lot. I'm starting off this way because this perspective has had a big influence on the way I approached sex as a young person.
Let me tell you something I wish I'd taken more seriously as a teenager: no matter how ugly or annoying you think you are, statistically speaking, you are almost certain to find someone to spend the rest of your life with. If you buy into the Christian faith I've been raising you with, God has picked out the perfect person or mix of people for you. He says so in Jerimiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you, plans to benefit you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future." If your idea of "hope and a future" is similar to mine, it includes a life partner and children.
All these beautiful truths established, let me add a rather cynical one-- for every person that is willing to love you, there are probably at least two more people willing to have sex with you. Why? Because sex feels awesome. I hope you aren't totally appalled to hear that I love sex. It's a physical and emotional experience unlike anything else, so I lack the appropriate words to describe it to you. Sex isn't a bad or dirty thing, either. At least, not in itself. God wants you to have sex, and so do I. Read Song of Soloman. Then take a cold shower. But sex is like medicine-- there's a right way and a wrong way to use it, a right place and a right time. Abusing sex, like abusing drugs can make you more sick rather than healthier.
I'm not really proud of my first time. Like every choice, it has had good and bad consequences, the worst of which is that I couldn't be a virgin for your father. That was something really important to me.
But then I met S. I was 19 and a senior at Seattle Pacific University. I had never had a boyfriend in real life (but plenty of fantasies and a few dalliances I deluded myself could be compared with relationships). S contacted me through my MySpace page and we chatted for a few weeks before we arranged to meet for a dinner date. At this point, we weren't even clear what each others' first names were. I don't blame that on the online thing. S was and probably still is a good guy and we had a pleasant first date. He did come on pretty strong, though. I wanted to date casually and take things slow, but he had other ideas. I was just so thrilled that a guy seemed to be into me that I let him stroke my arm when we had coffee and kiss me at the end of the night, even though I wasn't really comfortable with the situation.
We texted and met again two days later. I even brought my roommate with me as a buffer so he wouldn't get too physical. That didn't really work. He still wanted to hug and kiss and generally behave on a level that two people who have only known each other in the real world for a few days don't generally behave. Let me add that I wasn't even all that attracted to this guy at the time. I guess that's part of how guys and girls operate differently. At some point, however, I just decided to let go of my discomfort and let myself like this guy. I let him hold me at Alki beach, then we took my roommate home and we made out a little at the ship canal. Then S took me to his place.
I was genuinely shocked when he expected sex. In my earlier "dalliances" with teenaged guys, you could mess around together and it wouldn't even get close to intercourse. Not that quick, anyway. However, S was 24 and a great deal more experienced than me. When I figured out where he was headed, I stopped him. Dear sons and daughters, you ALWAYS have a choice to say "no," no matter how far you've already gone. Blue balls is in no sense lethal. I held out for about two more hours, during which S whined and begged and I explained why it wasn't going to happen.
It did happen, though, or else I'd be telling a different story. In the end, my two thoughts were "my best friend did it with her boyfriend a long time ago" and "if I make this guy take me home, I'll probably never hear from him again." Those are the wrong thoughts to be listening to, by the way. Just because sex is the right decision for someone else doesn't make it the right decision for you. Also, anyone who is pressuring you to have sex is not someone you need to have in your life.
I knew these things though and I still had sex with S. For your information, it hurt like hell and I bled like a stuck pig. I didn't think my hymen was still intact after sports and tampons, but it was. Here was the physical evidence that I'd never be the same again.
The emotional change is real, too. Once you've had sex, you'll want it more than you ever did before. To quote a popular snack food slogan of my day "once you pop, the fun don't stop." That's crude, but it sums up the feeling nicely.
I wish I could tell you that S dropped me back home the next morning and never called me again, because that would be a more dramatic ending and I could tell you I regretted the decision I made. The truth is we dated for two years filled with laughter, tears, and sex. We had good times, but I knew in the back of my mind he wasn't a guy I'd marry, and he even said he wasn't considering marrying me. Breaking up was inevitable and I did it the best way I knew how-- by fleeing the country. Ok, so that's a dramatic way of saying I joined the Peace Corps. In Ukraine, I thought I'd be too busy to be tempted, which was mostly true, but I managed to add a few more notches to my bedpost.

***
There is nothing wrong with sex, in the right context. I am not even saying that legal or religious marriage is the only acceptable context for sex. What I do say is that I have hands-down the best sex with my spouse, and I wish that he had been my only partner. With all other partner's (not that there have been that many), I came away feeling "less than" or downright used in the end.

The man I am married to (and whom I assume will be the father of the yet-to-be-conceived children I write for), has only had me for a partner, and I envy that. On the other side of the coin, however, I do not know if we would have the sex life that we do if I did not have a basis from which to ask for the things I like and stop the things I do not. Is it possible there's no best case scenario?

The bottom line is sex is serious. Fun, and pleasurable, but in so many ways unnecessary, especially for a teenager. Children, this is why I am asking you to put off making a relationship sexual for as long as possible.