Confessions of a virgin marriage

I loved and was attracted to my husband, but I didn't want to have sex with him.

By Beth Heaton

Nov 20, 2003 | I was a virgin when I married my husband last May. I was also 26, older than my friends when they married, but the average age for women of my generation. My husband and I met online when he read an essay I'd written for Microsoft. We fell in love within days without any idea what the other person looked like or who they really were. We were 500 miles and 25 years apart, eager to build a life together. We got engaged eight months later.

At our wedding ceremony, the pastor talked about physical love, the joy between husband and wife. I prayed that he would finish before my grandmother realized what he was talking about; if I'd been less embarrassed I'd have had the presence of mind to blush or giggle. There I was, standing in a gown I'd chosen, unconsciously, for its resemblance to my mother's, with a veil bobby-pinned into my hair, holding a bouquet of flowers equal to the weight of a very large newborn, and I couldn't let go of my husband's arm for the sheer transcendent joy of it. This was my initiation into married life. A sex talk from a minister, a handsome groom with tears in his eyes, and 50 of our dearest friends. The past, the future, and the heady present.

While many little girls spend years planning the details of their weddings -- their gown, their cake, their flowers -- I spent my childhood planning my marriage: where we'd live, what jobs we'd have, how we'd treat each other. Becoming a wife meant a lot of things to me, but it didn't surprise me. My husband was my parents' age and twice married, but he was happier, healthier, and stronger than most men his age. By the time we married, we were both Christian Scientists, believing man to be spiritual and unable to age and die. Despite others' worries of what our union might hold, I settled into my marriage immediately. It was natural, and I was ready. Things weren't different between us after the wedding, except that we now lived together. And we shared a bed.

We waited more than a month to make love. Regardless of his previous experience, John had never made love to a virgin, and he was genuinely concerned with the logistics of it all. We were both a little shy, not to mention apprehensive about putting our natural birth-control method into effect and risking pregnancy. Walking down the hallway to the bedroom on our first night was the longest three seconds of my life. We made love three times that weekend.

And then we didn't make love for a year.

In this year I learned two things. First, I had some issues. Second, my husband is a very patient man.

I seemed to have lost all desire to have sex with John. A thousand explanations came to me throughout the year. Maybe my subconscious was testing him to make sure he wouldn't cheat or leave. Maybe the age difference we'd spent so long working out and defending to others really wasn't resolved and it was, as a friend posited, "mythological incest" that stood in my way. Maybe I was so fearful of getting pregnant, I had shut down. Maybe I just wasn't attracted to John.

I began to realize that much the same way many people come to worship sex and its role in their relationships, in my unmarried years I'd come to worship my own purity. It had become so much a part of my identity that even after the wedding, experiencing anything contrary felt foreign -- even wrong.

During our engagement, I'd seldom had sexual feelings toward John, but I shrugged it off as guilt. After all, what use were these feelings if I knew I wasn't going to act on them anyway? Long ago I'd made the decision to save sex for marriage, and since John had made the same decision, there was no struggle. But after the wedding, I began to wonder if I'd been a virgin so long I didn't know how to give it up. More to the point, maybe sexual feelings weren't as natural as people made them out to be -- maybe they were a learned behavior.

People joke that the start of a couple's marriage means the end of their sex life. To a virgin wife, this means a sex life that never starts. It never occurred to me that I would get married and not want to have sex with my spouse. I kept imagining Mr. Rogers coming in from outdoors and taking off his jacket and putting on his cardigan. Sex should be like that, I thought. I'm safely inside a marriage -- time to hang up the virginity and put on the married sex. I never thought it would be a problem. I figured we'd make dinner, clean the bathroom, balance the checkbook, make love. It would just be part of our lives.

I floundered for months trying to explain my absent sex drive. And we floundered together trying new things to encourage it. John bookmarked an Internet site with erotic stories. He also suggested porn, but the idea of being turned on by someone else's engorged penis made me sick to my stomach.

We were given a book before the wedding called "The Guide to Getting It On!" and we started reading it together at night. Although witty, much of it seemed based on the "men want sex all the time and have to coax it from women" principle. Our marriage fit this category, and I resented it. I finally persuaded my husband to let it go. And the book made its way under the bed.

Our religion teaches that there is no material identity; men and women are the spiritual ideas of God, his reflections. We have no bodies, and we are wholly good because God is wholly good. Therefore, there are no problems with health, relationships, sex; we only think there are. We heal our minds of these situations with prayer rather than medicine. We were both convinced that nothing was physically wrong with me -- no hormonal imbalance, vitamin deficiency, or psychological scar keeping me from desiring sex. I simply had some things to deal with.

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