Get fighting fit...
You are a creative bunch out there in the digital ether. ‘Regner’ from Denmark sent me this charming if highly poignant collection of thoughts and stories about virginity. Namely his own. It got me to thinking in another Carrie Bradshaw moment of contemplation that virginity loss is the conduit. The tunnel through which we drive so much of our anxiety, our sadness and our frustration with the way that life just doesn’t pan out the way we want it sometimes.
In many ways this story isn’t really about virginity loss. It’s part of it - the tangible part of a life that its owner doesn’t feel is quite up to scratch, but it’s not the whole story. This is the story of someone who has not yet grasped a sense of his own power. Put differently, he lacks confidence.
Confidence. Ten letters that pack a punch. If you want to define something indefinable, confidence makes a great example. What does it look like? Where do you get it? And how do you keep it? Big questions that require big answers and I’m not sure I am qualified to help but I will say this: we don’t have to be helpless.
The most powerful thing that a human being can do is to take action. We can’t make people fancy us more or grow taller or better looking, at least not on the outside. And therein lies the clue. Forget about the things that you can’t do much about and start working on the things that you can. Forget about labels like virgin or non-virgin and start defining life on your own terms.
Think of it like this. When a captain takes hold of the wheel and begins the long slow turn to take his ship in another direction, a tiny shift of ten degrees might not look like much but here’s the thing. His boat will end up in a totally different port. It’s the small things that make the difference.
Have a haircut, go on a diet, learn to dance or all of the above. Question your thoughts. Even one a day. Are the rest of the world really ‘so happy and in love’? Or is that just the way you chose to see them? Or what they tell you?
‘You can’t count other people’s money’ as somebody once said to me. Making assumptions about other people’s lives is just that – making assumptions.
Confidence comes from steering your own ship. A crisis of my own saw me take myself to my local gym a few years back. And I don’t mean Holmes Place. I mean the All Stars Gym on Harrow Road. It’s a starkly lit brick building with a boxing ring, a bell and a lot of large muscly black men knocking seven bells out of each other’s shadows. It was just what the doctor ordered. I didn’t go more than four times but it signified an important moment in my life – the moment I took control and decided to fight, quite literally, for what I wanted. And I found out this: the right energy will attract more of the same.
I shall step away from the pulpit now but hear this Regner. I always change people’s names to protect their anonymity. Consequently I find myself looking on web sites like this for new names to give to people. How would I know what a popular men’s name in Denmark is? Today I chose Regner because aptly, it means ‘wise warrier’.
Regner, if you are brave enough to tell the world your story then you have the strength to change it. Go forth and conquer (yourself) young man. I know you can do it.
'Hi Kate
You’ve written that you receive a lot of stories from late virgins. I am myself a 24-year old Danish ‘super-virgin’: I have never had sex, never been kissed, never held hands and it goes without saying that I’ve never had a girlfriend. This is my story and some of my thoughts on being a virgin for way too long time.
The Origins of Sex-lessness
I was brought up as a only child by my parents in a rural area. We were living outside of the village so there were few other kids that I could play with. When I was six years old and went to school I realised that my parents were different. It was a typical rural area where people were craftsmen or farmers. My parents on the other hand can be described as intellectual hippies – my childhood home was filled with books on philosophy, classical music and Buddha-statues.
They had little in common with the locals and little interaction with them. I am happy for all the things that I’ve learned from my parents and for the amount of cultural capital I’ve received but I wish that I could have avoided the negative consequences of being the strange nerdy kid who liked to read and hated football.
My company was good enough for my classmates when they were copying my homework but they would never invite me over or do anything else to include me. Needless to say there were a lot of social skills that I didn’t learn.
Things were bad but they got worse once I got old enough to realise that girls were very interesting. As any normal kid would do, I fell in love with Trine, a girl from my class. I think she also had a crush on me. In the afternoons, she used to walk a dog and it often happened by ‘accident’ that I met her on my way home from school.
I was completely obsessed with Trine. When I today read some of the diaries and poems I wrote during that period I am shocked at how creepy I was. But I never said a single word about my crush. Being the strange kid with no confidence, the task of expressing interest in a girl was a monumental challenge. Eventually her interest in me died out and she found other guys to be with.
But people are not stupid. Everybody was able to see that I was madly in love with her and as everybody who has ever been in a schoolyard would know, ‘strange fat kid being in love with someone’ is the best material a bully could ever wish for. I was ridiculed for being in love with Trine and I soon learned to associate love with humiliation and ridicule.
The years passed and I got to high school. I still had no confidence but gradually I gained a little and I got a few friends. But I was still unable to get a girlfriend. During my high school years, I only developed a crush on one girl, Luca. I met her at a high school party and I really don’t know how it happened but we managed to arrange a date. The days from the party to the date were the best days of my life. I was ecstatic about the fact that Luca had chosen me over all the other guys and that my long period of loneliness and unsatisfied desire finally seemed to be drawing to an end.
But then came the date. I arrived at the cinema with a spirit of hopeful anxiety and left with the same feeling the Polish cavalry must have had after having attacked German tanks with lances during World War 11. It was a complete disaster. It showed up that we were incompatible and had nothing in common. Our conversation consisted almost entirely of embarrassing silence and she soon became more interested in her cell phone than me.
This did nothing but reinforcing me in the belief that getting a girlfriend and getting rid of my virginity was a hopeless endeavour.
Time passed on and I graduated from high school. Until then I had comforted myself by the fact that I was not the only virgin and it is perfectly normal for some people to loose their virginity a little later. But being nineteen and on my way to university I could no longer use that excuse.
I moved away from home to go to law school. It was wonderful to get all that new freedom and meeting all the nice and intelligent people at the university. I was filled with hope – nobody knew me and I would be able to redefine myself as an ordinary outgoing guy with a completely normal relationship to the opposite sex. The gender ratio at law school was also in my favour with 60% of the students being female.
I got more confidence and became happier but I failed to make any real progress with the ladies. During my university years I have only been on dates with two girls and it didn’t work out. The first one came and visited me at home and I cooked her some dinner. The date was a nice experience for me since it learned me that a date can be a relaxed, down to earth thing but unfortunately there was no real spark between us and there never was a second date.
A while after, I had a date with Rikke. She was interested in me and I enjoyed the experience of having a girl wanting to be with me but I simply didn’t have any attraction to her. I stopped the thing after three dates.
How Not To Lose Your Virginity
Getting a girlfriend is at the top of my list of priorities but whenever I am in the vicinity of an attractive girl I run into a mental barrier. I am afraid of the entire situation, afraid of having to relate to another person in this completely new and unfamiliar way. I really want to flirt with her but my mind freezes and I’m completely unable to come up with anything to say so I just sit there in quiet desperation and watch some other guy taking her.
I simply don’t believe that I’m able to get a girlfriend. The girls at the university intimidates me – they are so pretty, so confident and so much in control of their lives. I feel that I’ve got nothing to offer them, at least not something that other guys cannot give them.
My body image doesn’t help me achieving my goal of getting a girlfriend. I have never been into sports or exercise and I love good food so it is no wonder that I’m somewhat obese and out of shape. To me it seems I have found a very effective way to preserve virginity. All you need to stay a virgin is fear of your preferred sex, lack of belief in your own personal qualities and a poor body image.
Inside The Virgin’s Head
Being a virgin after your teens is not a preferable situation, especially if you’re a man. Virginity is something one has to hide as if it was some terrible crime. Most people view virgins as pathetic losers who should just make more of an effort.
Being a virgin makes me feel inadequate and less a man than my peers. It is if there is a hole inside me where all the wonderful feelings of love and sexual desire should have been and this empty hole hurts. The physical pressure can be alleviated but I have found nothing that can compensate for the lack of emotional connection.
My virginity has also leads me to having some very ugly emotions from time to time. Misogyny is dangerously close and I would be lying if I were saying that there have never been moments where I have blamed my situation on the female sex. Luckily that disgusting feeling disappears quickly. Envy and virginity often goes hand in hand for me. When I see a couple kissing or hear people talk about their relationships, I ask myself what I have done not to deserve that.
Why isn’t it me being so happy and so in love? When I see what I can’t have it feels like an ice pick is being driven through my chest. I know that I ought to be happy on the behalf of those who are actually experiencing love, but I just want it to be my turn to be sitting at a park bench kissing.
I have read all the self-help books I could get my hands on and flooded every relevant Internet board and advice column in an attempt to figuring out how to defeat virginity. But nobody seems to have a clue about
how to do it. Telling people to wait and let things happen by themselves offers no help at all.
My description can seem depressing, and being a virgin when everybody else are having normal sex lives is depressing - but luckily life consists of more than sexuality and romance and I don’t go around feeling bad about my virginity all day long. I have great friends with whom I have fun and a loving family. I can appreciate the beauty in art, literature and music and I like being at university. Actually I would have nothing to complain about if it wasn’t for my virginity.
Yours sincerely
Regner’
