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The topic of sex, and specifically the pressure to have sex when I’m not sure I want to, is a complicated one for me. Most of the people that I know started having sex in high school, and they’ve continued having regular sexual relationships ever since. They’ve now gotten past the awkwardness and uncertainty that accompanies early sexual experiences. Not only that, they got through that awkwardness by having these experiences with people who were just as inexperienced as they were.
I’ve had a much different experience. I was born into a Christian home, and raised in an extremely conservative household. There were more guns in the house than we knew what to do with, Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and regular church attendance was a requirement. I attended Sunday school and youth groups all the way into college. For the majority of my life, a conservative view of the world and a constant overload of Bible analysis was the most normal thing I could imagine.
A few months after my 21st birthday, I moved to Colorado to help start a church in Boulder, where I lead worship. I also began studying Theology at Colorado Christian University (CCU), a school that has become notorious in recent years for its conservative bias (Donald Trump spoke in 2016 at the Western Conservative Summit, an annual gathering organized by CCU). My parents could not have been more proud as they watched me becoming exactly the person that they’d raised me to be.
The church that I was planting eventually had to shut its doors due to a lack of attendance, at which point I began to question everything that I’d grown up accepting as fact. The god that I’d been raised believing in seemed unwilling or unable to answer my questions, which was, in itself, exactly the answer that I needed.
Several years later, I’m a proud atheist who voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election. That’s a very short summation of my life until this point, but it’s enough to give you the proper context for the remainder of this essay.
Whether leadership within the church would be willing to admit it or not, few (if any) sins are considered more egregious than that of having sex outside of marriage. When my parents had the talk with me, everything they said was read verbatim from a book published by Focus on the Family—which said that sex was an activity reserved for one man and one woman within the bonds of marriage. From the very moment I learned what sex was, I was told that there was no place for it outside of marriage.
So I did exactly what I was told to do: I didn’t have sex. As all of my friends were losing their virginities and going after every girl they saw in high school, I was intent on waiting until my wedding night. I attended multiple church events where I publicly reaffirmed my decision to remain abstinent, and I read countless books on the topic of sex and marriage. I also had a pornography addiction that far surpassed that of any of my non-abstinent friends, but I didn’t see the connection at the time.
I lost my virginity at the age of 24. It had been several months since I’d stopped going to church, and I knew that I needed to lose it as quickly as possible to ensure that I’d made the right decision. I knew that if everything I grew up believing in were true, I would feel guilt beyond comprehension after having sex outside of marriage. It wasn’t just a coming of age experience for me, it was the final test of my religious indoctrination.
I didn’t feel guilty at all. On the contrary, I felt fantastic! The only thought going through my head after my first time was: “When is it going to happen again?” It happened with my girlfriend at the time, and from that point forward we had a perfectly normal sexual relationship. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing what everyone else had been doing for years. It was thrilling.
After she and I broke up, things changed. I knew that most single people went on dates and had sex as regularly as possible, but that was something I’d never done before. I’d barely dated anyone because the church saw every dating relationship as pointless unless its end goal was marriage, and the seriousness of that endeavor made casual dating impossible.
Since that break-up, I’ve had sex one time, and that was over a year ago. I know what my beliefs are on the topic, and I’m about as liberal as a person can be—but that doesn’t change the fact that my brain was wired from a young age to believe something entirely different.
Recently I started talking to a girl at a bar, and managed to get her number. We began a text conversation, and the night after that, she texted me saying that she wanted me to come over to watch TV with her. My sexual experience is limited, to say the least, but I understood her invitation. While the expectation for any guy is that they’d be in their car within minutes (more than one of my friends told me they’d have done exactly that), my reaction was to panic. I told her I was too tired to go anywhere, and nothing came of it. A few days later she made another similar attempt, and I reacted in the exact same manner. We haven’t spoken since.
There’s an expectation in society that men are ready to go every minute of every day. Recently I was watching a movie, and there’s a scene where a man asks a woman out. She says okay, but clarifies that she isn’t going to sleep with him. In an attempt to save his pride, the man answers that he isn’t going to sleep with her either. She walks off, and as soon as she’s out of earshot, he mutters “apparently”. That line bothered me. The implication was that since he’s a man, he must be trying to get into her pants—and the only reason that he won’t be having sex with her is that she said no. That portrayal doesn’t ring anything close to true for me.
I’d like to clarify that I want to have sex. Like anyone, it’s on my mind often and I hate that it happens so infrequently. The problem is that I started having sex at an age where all of my peers had gotten past the kind of anxiety and uncertainty that I feel, and there’s an expectation that I’m in the same place that everyone else is.
Friends have told me that I should just talk to these women and explain my feelings, but I’m concerned that responding to “want to come over and watch TV” with “I’m a formerly religious person who’s only had sex with two people and is terrified of the act when detached from the intimacy of a close relationship” might come off a bit crazy.
After a few years in the non-Christian dating world, I’m finding that there really isn’t a place for me in it. I’m expected to want to have sex as soon as I meet someone, and if that isn’t the case, she moves on to someone else. Everyone wants to have fun in their 20s, and I’m no different. I want to sleep around, I want to have a blast—but it’s not as simple for me as it is for most. The sense of isolation that that creates is next to unbearable.
This is an intensely emotional topic for me, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has been in the forefront of my mind on a daily basis for years. I would love to meet a woman who wants to go on a few dates, connect with me as a person, and then develop physical intimacy. I think that even after two or three dates, I’d be more than comfortable enough to spend the night with a woman. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find someone who’s looking for that.
So yes, I do feel pressure to have sex on a first date, even if I’m not ready. I also feel emasculated by the fact that I’m not spending my twenties trying to get in the pants of every attractive woman I see, and I feel like that’s exactly what’s expected of me. To complicate matters even further, I wish that I was that guy! Because from my perspective, that is what is normal, and I’m the odd one out. It’s hard to go through life feeling like an abnormality.
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