Tori

I probably should save this post for Valentines Day, but heck, I can’t wait.

On the surface of things, this might appear to be a story about religion and how it affects the choices that people make. But I disagree. This is a story about love and how it affects the choices that people make.

Tori may be a Christian - or a vegetarian - or possibly even a two headed, purple-spotted alien, but it makes no difference. This is a woman who knows that she wants something - she isn’t sure what that something is but she is prepared to wait until she finds it.

I may not be religious in the traditional sense but even I had to say, ‘Tori, I believe that God would think you were a nutcase if you had passed up this chance’.

Love doesn’t come along every day. Grab it while you can.

The background…

‘You, my love, are no longer a virgin’, he says to me, his eyes wavering from my face to the bloody finger he has pulled out of me. I must look worried, because he smiles. In the medieval sense, that is.

For some reason I feel bereft. I can't understand it. The hymen has no inherent value. I didn't even know where it was, or if I still had one. But now it's gone and I can't get it back. I feel exposed. I curl onto my side and hide in sleep. His arms are still around me when I wake.

Last month I had sex for the first time. We had sex for the first time together. And the second and the third and then I lost count. I can be a little single-minded when I discover a New Thing. Fortunately, G seems to find this both adorable and flattering, so everyone is happy.

The terminology surrounding virginity is flawed. We talk about losing virginity, or giving it away. G prefers sharing, which I have to say is a much better term, but it still doesn't quite express what I am feeling. I have not lost anything, or given anything away. I am in no way less. If I lost anything, it was at that point, weeks ago, when my hymen broke courtesy of ‘outercourse’. I was overwhelmed, and inexplicably shaken up and I came home and wrote the little word sketch above. Something I had never been aware of was gone. But that loss did not mean I was no longer a virgin. It was merely a step, a stage in the journey.

G and I fell head over heels for each other. I met him four months ago and in a stroke of rather embarrassing irony, I noticed him at first only because he was with his very striking girlfriend. For some time, I remembered him only as the-guy-who's-dating-Striking-Girl. He came along to an extra-curricular group I'm in, and he and Striking Girlfriend started hanging out. G and I must have had a few conversations, nothing memorable, but during which we found out two facts which have since become a very interesting factor in our relationship: he is a vocal, steadfast and often angry atheist, and I a committed, though respectably left-wing Christian.

At some point I found out that Striking Girlfriend had gone away for a few weeks and G was feeling deprived of social interaction. I decided, out of the goodness of my heart, that we should take him under our wing and provide him with social interaction while she was away.

Weeks went past in a blur of late-night conversations. I found that I could talk to G candidly about my faith, which is very unusual. I don't talk about faith - theology, yes, but not the more personal side of it. Have you ever met someone and almost instantly known them? Fallen into them? The kind of instant connection that powers the chick flick industry? He walked into my life and I instantly trusted him.

The point when I realised that I couldn't think of anything that I would not be able to talk about with G was the point I realised that I could have sex with him. I found myself on the telephone to him at some weird hour of the night, telling him the story I had wanted to tell you when I last wrote. I mentioned then that abstinence education did nothing to prepare me for that confusing state of being, when your body and mind both want someone desperately, and yet both are overloaded with new sensations and desperately want out.

That was where I had ended up with my last partner - a state of total confusion. I thought that writing to you might help, but I was unable to put in words what was bothering me. Anyway, here I was talking to G, and it all came spilling out. This is the kind of person I want to sleep with announced my brain. Which was a little scary, given that he was still technically taken at the time and I was doing a great job of convincing myself I wasn't interested in him anyway.

Things kind of cart wheeled out of control; I realised I was interested in him about five minutes before a bunch of friends ambushed me and pointed out that I was glowing in his presence. For reasons that aren't any of my business, and which I take on trust were not directly related to me, G and Striking Girlfriend broke up.

Much angst ensued as he sorted out various things in his life. Somewhere in there, a friend of mine, prone to thinking she knows everything about everyone - and sadly she often does - announced that if I dated G, I would end up sleeping with him. I remember laughing, because at that point it didn't look like we'd get the chance to get that far. But the idea itself didn't bother me; I simply accepted it as true.

My partner before G was the first time I had experienced real desire and it had scared me. I didn't know what I was feeling, or how to deal with it. That particular relationship tailed off, which was all for the better, but I remained confused. I had caught a sideways glimpse of the vast unexplored territory within, and I didn't know what to do about it. The door didn't fit back quite as well as it had.

It was at this point that I first wrote to you. It helped, a great deal, because I was able to pin down a few basic principles. But what I really wanted to say, to someone – anyone - was that I was scared. The idea that I might have sex, the feeling of having to make sexual choices, was suddenly in my life, and no one, not my family nor my friends nor my church, was giving any classes on making those decisions, at least not to nineteen year olds who are, for all intents and purposes, adults. It wasn't until I met G, and found myself able to be completely open with him, that I found someone to say that to.

‘You get to make the decisions’, he maintains. This could be just typical male abrogation of responsibility, but I prefer to think he's being Gentlemanly. We took things as I was ready for them. There was that first kiss, which slid into making out, which slid into sleeping - actually sleeping - together. One of the nicest things you can do with another person is simply to curl up in one another's arms without any question of sex. People look at me funny (or used to), when I'd say that I wasn't having sex, and meanwhile I had my boyfriends stay over without batting an eyelid. But for my part, I've always known I couldn't have sex with someone without knowing that I trusted them enough to sleep by their side.

Next I learnt to recognise the expression on G's face that goes with a particularly delicious thought. At first, he was reluctant to tell me about them, assuming - reasonably enough - that it would squick me out to hear that he'd started daydreaming about how I might taste or some such. I expected me to be squicked out by these things. Instead, I found myself amused by his embarrassment and neutral about the mental images produced.

Then they would sneak up on me a few days later and part of my brain would go ‘hmmm... that could be fun.’ Once I'd noticed that this was a recurring pattern, I explained to G. that it was his duty to contribute to my store of mental images, since I lacked the experience or the sexual imagination to come up with many for myself. This duty he took upon himself without complaint, with the result that everything we've done so far, I've had plenty of time to think and talk about in advance. And we still have a store of these mental images to explore when we get the chance.

....to be continued – tomorrow....