The Virginity Project

The Vow

When I first read this story, I assumed that The Vow in question had been made in response to parental pressure. I was wrong:

‘Both of my parents knew about my vow and both of them, whom have not agreed on a single thing since their divorce in 1996, told me square in the face that I would not make it. Neither my mother, nor my father believed it was humanly possible to hold off till marriage. I think my parents are happy that I chose to abstain but I don't think it is because of the normal reasons. They just had one less worry in the world. I wouldn't be getting pregnant.’

No, I am actually talking about a more powerful vow than that. This is the vow made between children, children on the threshold of adult hood with idealism, adventures and a bright future laid out in front of them. The world is full of possibilities when we are teenagers. Making a pact to do – or not to do something can seem like a good idea when we are young.

These sorts of pacts can be enduring. I have a friend who decided to give up meat with her best friend at the age of fifteen. To this day, a full twenty-seven years after two teenage girls decided to forego the eating of animals, neither of them has eaten meat.

Of course giving up meat and foregoing sex are two different things and our needs change as we grow and develop. Although I did once hear a story about a vegetarian who had a very nasty bicycle accident. As she lay shocked and bruised in the road, the very real possibility of being crushed to death by a ten-ton lorry having just flashed before her face, a bizarre feeling overtook her. She felt an almost overwhelming urge to eat a big fat juicy piece of meat. Which she did and, by all accounts, she felt a lot better for it. Is there something in meat that helps humans to recover from shock? I don’t know. Was it a strange, almost primordial sense of self-preservation, i.e. I almost got killed therefore I must eat something that once lived? One can only guess.

I digress. At fifteen years old, we are taking a stance. We are laying down the law, our law, as we see fit. Making a vow is a way of asserting ourselves, of imprinting our authority upon ourselves, our parents, over anyone who will bother to listen and telling them, this is who I am. 

The trick, of course, is to recognize when the vow ceases to be useful to us because, let me tell you, at some point, that vow is going to become a millstone around your neck. Life changes, we change and situations change. Continuing to do something that you decided to do when you were fifteen is a bit like trying to squeeze into your childhood clothes when you are a teenager. They don’t fit. Don’t even get me started on True Love Waits and the concept of teenage girls promising their virginity to their fathers. People should be allowed to develop in the way that nature intended. If that involves sexual activity, so be it. In Sarah’s case, it didn’t and that is an equally valid choice.

Choice is the optimum word here. Not parents. Or churches. Sarah made her choice of her own free will. No parents were involved in the taking of this vow! Which is the way it should be. Sarah is also grown up enough to know when the choice she has made no longer serves any purpose. Is she planning on being a nun? No. Has she finished her schooling and not got pregnant? Yes. Excellent. Time to move on. The fact is that Sarah probably has saved herself a whole bunch of heartache by not having to deal with the intensity of a sexual relationship at a young age. But at 23 years old, she is more than ready to jump in at the deep end.

The best part of this story is that the opportunity to jump into metaphorical swimming pools comes a whole lot quicker than you think it would. ‘Do keep in touch’ I said. ‘When the time comes, I would love to know how this story develops’. Three weeks later, part two landed in my lap but I’ll save that for next time.

Part One – The Vow

'Growing up does many things. We love, we lose, we learn but most of all we gain a better understanding of our own choices. For me, I have learned that one choice was once right and that now it’s time to change my theory according to life, not past ideals, not personal histories but reality as it is now. The vow started as celibacy, moved to abstinence and is now something else…

My friends and I took the vow around 13. Like typical naive girls we actually believed it would work. I believe what kick started the conversation with my friends was gossip about a few girls our age that were pregnant and had dropped out of school. We were, and are, very educated and so, to us, leaving school was unthinkable. The idea for the vow spawned from there. We all made the pact that we would not become a teenage statistic and we wouldn't let anything stop us from graduation. By the time we graduated high school everyone but myself had broken it.

I saw how miserable sex was making most of my peers so I figured I made a great choice. There was pregnancy; disease, failed relationships and extra pressure that to me, were needless.

At 17, I really began to take my vow seriously and when I received a beautiful ring for graduation, I vowed to keep my promise even more. It worked out great because I was too busy with school to get involved with anyone to the point of intimacy. So no harm, no foul, no lesson. Most of my college days were spent not having a worry about sexual relationships because they never got that far.

At the age of 19, I met my first serious boyfriend. We got serious fast and desires to build a future seemed to only fuel my need to uphold my now, well-known vow. At that time in my life, I was so hung up on what other people expected of me, I continued to maintain my vow even though in my heart I saw my reasons had lost validity.

I always said I wanted to wait until my husband’s ring replaced my fathers, but I have come to realize that in my heart I only wanted to wait for the moment to feel right. Like the heart of my ring I wanted to wait until someone set my heart on fire so that it sparkled like the gem held within the setting. Funny that a loss causes our eyes to become open because I know I had that and even though in the end it didn’t work out, at that time it was real. I always say live life without regrets. Do I regret not sleeping with him? No. Am I happy with my choice to uphold something I no longer personally supported? Well that answer to that is also no.

It’s hard to put in words where I stand today. I am proud of what I have done, I am happy with who I am and I am secure in the knowledge that my vow was valid and is now void. This does not mean I’m hopping in the sack tomorrow, but this also means that who I am today is not who I was 10 years ago. I can honestly say without a doubt in my mind that, at 23, I can make the informed decision to do something I am physically, mentally and emotionally ready for. I know the risks, I know the advantages and I know that it doesn’t change anything. I will still be me; the world will not view me differently. Most importantly I know I will be right.

Life is too short to hold off on your firsts because you never know what tomorrow brings. I recently got a new tattoo that reads my philosophy on life: ‘Doubt nothing Cherish everything Live without regret.’ I fully intend on upholding that for the rest of my life. I will always be Sarah no matter what physical changes or choices I make.'

On the face of things...

You can go whole weeks here at The Virginity Project and nothing really happens. No one loses their virginity and if they do, they don’t feel inclined to talk about it and generally speaking, everyone appears to be at one with the world. And then all hell breaks loose.  Which is an exaggeration but really, its not often that I get emailed a question that I’ve never been asked before:

‘Ms. Monro

Does a persons face change when they lose their virginity? 

Thanks

Karl’

Now, I don’t know if I have some weird kind of dyslexia but I completely misread this question the first time I looked at it. I thought that it had been written by a person with a looser grasp of English than myself who was asking if people, generally speaking, face change when they lose virginity…as in stare it in the face….

Duh. I am clearly a person who likes to make things more complicated than they are when actually this person was asking me a very simple question. Do people’s faces change when they lose virginity? i.e. do they look different?

What a ridiculous thing to ask, I thought. Of course they don’t. And then I began to cast my mind back to a more inchoate time in my life and it dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t such a crazy question after all. 

‘Can anyone tell that I have lost my virginity?’, I remember thinking that to myself as I sat on a Spanish beach aged 15. ‘Surely I must look different in some way?’

For reasons best known to myself at the time, I hadn’t told either of my best friends that I had ‘done the do’ the night before but I was utterly convinced that there was no need to because as far as I was concerned, it might just as well have been written all over my face in indelible ink.

Clearly it wasn’t because a couple of days later, they almost died of shock when Danielle the Slapper, a slightly older and more ‘experienced’ girl who spent her afternoons on the beach regaling us young’uns with explicit details of her nightly sexploits, popped this rather upfront question:

‘So which one out of you three is a virgin then?’ she asked as we were walking home one afternoon. ‘Not me’ chimed Claire and Tabitha. They both turned to me with expectant looks on their faces. Expectant as to how I was going to answer a question that we all knew the answer to. Or at least we thought we did. ‘No, I’m not either’, I answered as my two best friends did their best not to choke to death on their ice creams.

They had no idea. So clearly in my case, my face could be relied upon not to give the game away. But it did get me thinking about couple of incidences where people’s faces most definitely did give the game away.

A few years later, I went to college and completely wasted my time and everyone else’s doing an Art Foundation course. It wasn’t that it was a crap course; it was just that I was so obviously not cut out for the educational life. Anyway, there was a very nice and extremely spotty boy on my course called Ben. When I say that he was spotty, it wasn’t just the odd pimple, it was full on crater shaped, quite hard to look at without actually feeling a bit ill style acne. But he was a lovely man and he made some interesting ‘installations’ with chairs and string on the front lawn of our college campus.

But what was really amazing was this. A couple of months later, we went on a college ‘trip’ to Amsterdam and Ben, unbeknownst to us, got it on with Jane, another (female) person on our course. I have no idea whether Ben was a virgin before he met Jane but I suspect probably yes. What I do know for sure is this. When we returned from our trip and went straight into the Christmas holidays, by the time we all got back from the break, Ben’s face had completely changed. 

His spots had gone.

Was it the marathon sex sessions? I don’t know but I would like to think that losing his virginity had caused such a major hormonal shake up in Ben’s body that his acne had beat the hastiest retreat known to man. Either that or it was a Christmas miracle.

Fast-forward another decade and I was working in a restaurant with the two fabulous Baker sisters. Never let it be said that the Baker family were backward at coming forward. Pretty much everyone - from the postman to the restaurant regulars and most of the staff, knew that Danni and Gaby’s younger sister was still a virgin. Don’t ask me why, they were just one of those families for whom pretty much no subject at all was off limits. Mother and two daughters (who all worked together) discussed  the status of their younger sister’s virginity on a regular basis.

Eventually we all moved on and got other jobs so when I next saw the mother and asked the inevitable question, has Jennifer lost her virginity yet, I was amazed when her mother said yes, she has. But not only that, but that she had known with 110% certainty exactly when it had happened.

Despite the fact that Jennifer had a boyfriend whom she stayed with regularly and parents who were clearly itching for their daughter to lose her virginity, Jennifer had hung onto it. Until one morning when she walked into her house and her mother took one look at her and said ‘you’ve lost your virginity haven’t you’. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes, I have’, answered Jennifer.

How on earth did you know this? I asked. How could you tell?

‘She’s my baby’, she said. ‘She’s my youngest daughter and I knew that my baby was not my baby anymore. She looked different, she smelt different and I knew that something had changed.’

So there you go Karl. Apparently people’s faces can change when they lose virginity. There might be a physical reaction, as there was for Ben and Karl, the person who asked this question in the first place. He broke out into hives when he lost his virginity because he is a born again Christian so losing virginity was hardly on the top of his list of things to do before he got married. Stress can make your body do some funny stuff.

Or it may just be an almost imperceptible change. Its not a physical change, its not even an emotional change, its more to do with the umbilical chord like relationship that exists between a mother and her smallest baby, the one that deep down, we don’t really want to grow up…but invariably does.

But it probably wouldn’t happen in the way that I imagined it which was something akin to having a large neon sign attached to my head announcing to the world that I was now ‘A WOMAN’ – which, by the way, was far more exciting a concept to me than the fumbling excuse for sex that had accompanied this important change in my life.