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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
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Imagine if you both, some months ago, had made a rational decision to have regular all-options sex together and had planned contraception, gotten tested for STDs, arranged a romantic getaway, etc. By now you would know if this man-worth-waiting-for is actually worth marrying.
....and now the joke is stale.
Are you going to go full-on SNL & keep repeating the joke unto self-parody?
@16 They are called sexually transmitted infections or sexually transmitted diseases because that is a common avenue of transmission, but you do not need to have sex of any form to get one. They are either transmissible through bodily fluids or through physical contact, depending on the infection in question. You can get genital herpes from your parents or a daycare provider changing your diaper in infancy without having washed his/her hands first. HPV is also touch-based and can be spread non-sexually. You can be born with HIV, hepatitis, etc. (Fortunately there is a hepatitis b vaccination these days, so the risks are lower, which is good, because you can get hepatitis from week old room temperature dried blood that has been on a random surface if you have a cut in your hand for it to enter... hepatitis is scarily contagious). HIV is harder to catch, as it is much more fragile, but can still be contracted in non-sexual ways through bodily fluid contact. Anyhow, either of them could have had blood or touch exposure to something nasty at some point in time without even being aware of it. The odds are lower, but it can happen.
After a month, if he's still harping on about this and unable to relax and have fun messing around with you, tell him that his obsession is an issue he needs to deal with, because you're not going to listen to this any more.
But also: take a lesson from this event that sometimes our bodies get carried away and demand things our rational brains didn't want. Alcohol increases the odds of that happening, but horniness can do it all by itself.
The guy is going to have to get over this himself. No amount of talking is going to get him over it, though I'm sure he appreciates the support. Just drop the subject, and show him through action you are still VERY interested in doing kinky stuff with him. He'll get over it eventually.
On a side note, why would any of them need to be tested for STDs if they are both virgins? That advice was dumb. And yes, Dan should leave instructions for his column not to be used to rehash stale political jokes over & over. It's just down right annoying and I'm considering not reading until Dan gets back. At least Dan makes funny political jokes. Chris's jokes are rather lame.
And I have to disagree with Chris on his definition of a virgin. Females only lose their virginity through penetration of a penis. She was technically a virgin until this, although yes she was "experienced" in other sexual acts. If you go off of Chris's definition, then a girl can lose her virginity solely by mutual masturbation, and how exactly do you expect to measure how many times you must be masturbated before you are no longer a virgin? Something that gray just does not cut it.
Or maybe he just had this idea of it being really special or something, like we usually train girls to think, and doin' it in the shower wasn't on the list.
Or maybe he feels like he raped her because it was non-consensual penetration (not really but in his mind?). Because he actually did do it on purpose then immediately regretted it, compounded by her probable "ouch" reaction? So now he's got the sads since he's thinks he's a bad guy instead of listening to the actual person he penetrated and relaxing about it?
I dunno. I think he meant to save penetration for his wife, which is why he wanted to wait a looong time, to make sure the gf was the one (they could then have sex before marriage in the sense that they could have sex once essentially engaged), and now he can't go untainted to the marriage bed (so also disqualifies himself from demanding a virgin bride)? I guess his solution would be to get married. That'll go well. How did we manage to sell the virgin 'till marriage thing, first time so so special thing to the guys? Hell of a PR job.
You could then get a harness, and have him fuck you with a strap on. Which according to his rules still seems like it would be fine. I admit I don't really get his rules. But you'd still both somehow be virgins, is my thinking. He would be anyway. Right?
Just wait until they ACTUALLY HAVE SEX and how much that's going to break his head.
Note that while the concept exists for men, it's really only ever enforced on women based on the broken hymen (a bullshit benchmark) or on pregnancy (itself a somewhat error-prone indicator).
Almost as many angles and pitfalls as the very useful notion of internalized homophobia.
I mean for a lot of (not all) women straight PIV sex is enjoyable and possibly meaningful but not the be-all-end-all. If she is anything like me and other women who can't orgasm from penetration alone then he's really only saving a mind-blowing experience for himself.
Plus with this new def I can totally say I saved my virginity for my husband (tho obvs not til marriage!!).
Expressing the sexual urge upon yourself clearly does not de-virginize you, but oral sex, anal sex, expressing the sexual urge by finger-fucking your girlfriend until she squirts hard enough to soak the ceiling, any expression of sexual urge with someone else should count.
Plus I think this means there are a number of teenage boys who lost their virginity to a circlejerk...
Meanwhile, "P.S. "Accidental" sex can lead to STDs and unwanted pregnancies, too. Get tested for both." Are you serious? Two near-virgins and a single moment of penetration are very, very, unlikely to get pregnant or infected. Panicking and getting tested would probably just add to the boy's hangups.
Assuming after a few days he calms down, the LW might want to ask her boyfriend to make plans. This couple clearly are in the running for another 'accident' soon, so they need to either stop seeing each other or decide when and how they'd like to do this thing that is special to them. The LW could point out that principles are usually informed and reshaped by experience. Where once it seemed that penetrative sex was only appropriate for marriage, now it's clear that pre-marriage relationships can be special enough to put penetrative sex on the table. If it's on the table, it might as well be planned for.
If he's waiting for her to qualify for penetration in some way, he needs to lay out exactly what conditions he expects her or the relationship to meet. She needs to decide if she can put up with whatever it is. If it's about waiting for some unspecified moment that he isn't able to describe, but he will be distraught if intercourse happens before it, that's just ridiculous and she needs to get away from such a silly person.
NOPE. If she was sorry about tainting his "honor", we'd be offering the same advice. Flipping the genders without changing the actual context does not give the same situation.
"Meanwhile, "P.S. "Accidental" sex can lead to STDs and unwanted pregnancies, too. Get tested for both." Are you serious? Two near-virgins and a single moment of penetration are very, very, unlikely to get pregnant or infected. Panicking and getting tested would probably just add to the boy's hangups."
Well, if he's going to have sex, he should do it responsibly. His hangups are irrelevant, if he ever ~wants~ to have sex. Which, considering the shower grindage, is going to happen sooner rather than later. (He's not a particularly smart boy.)
Thousands of years of tradition make it particularly sacrosanct. Anyone has the right to think these beliefs are wrong, but telling someone that they're wrong for feeling the way they feel and to just start ignoring them isn't going to work. Vaginal sex is obviously something different for the LW and her partner and by refusing to accept that they're using the traditional definition of "virgin," you risk giving them advice that they can't use.
1. They were virgins before the day in the shower. They weren't sexually inexperienced but they were virgins. This is what the term "technical virgin" is for. 2. They're virgins of any sort now. Yes, this act counts.
But that wasn't the girl's question. The girl's question was how they can get over this issue emotionally. I'd say that they should focus on their overall record: Think of waiting for marriage/other milestone like a marathon: Just because you don't win doesn't mean you can't be proud of running a decent time. Think of it like smoking: A person who only has two cigarettes a year is going to be way healthier than someone who smokes every day, even if their life goal was never to have one ever. Think of it like baseball: Yeah, it's great to pitch a perfect game, but pitching a game with only one hit is still pretty darn good.
So for this man for whom waiting until marriage/milestone for full sexual intercourse was a personal life goal in which he had invested his energy and his willpower, tell him that he's still done pretty well even though he didn't do a perfect job. Just because he slipped up once doesn't mean they need to feel like crud or give up.
@12: You win the internet.
20, 21 & 41 are kinda what I was thinking, too. They shouldn't beat themselves up over it. They can still have an amazing rest of their courtship, & have the wedding night of their dreams (though I myself am a believer in "practice makes perfect", I respect anyone else's timeline/schedule, as applies to themselves). This shower event can be a mountain, or a molehill.
Were I the LW, I'd take my SO out for breakfast somewhere - not home, where the slippery shower is - go out - & have some casual chitchat while ordering. Then just firmly, but kindly, I'd just come out with it: that I know that what happened in the shower wasn't planned, but instead of viewing it as a setback or a violation (brrr), it's an "oops". When trying to diet, we might have a chocolate cake night, an oops. But we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, & start over again the next day with healthier eating/working out. (Eating breakfast helps w/ the food metaphors, y'see.) & when we marry, we can have all the chocolate cake (sex) we want! This was an oops & just proof of how very into each other we are. Then, I'd project as much reassuring vibe as I could muster & change the subject. Movies, current events, anything but showers & soapy bubbles. ;) Frank discussion can make a mountain back into a molehill, but the advice of sexy violation notes - or trying to not have the discussion - can make a molehill - which is really all the Shower Incident should be, in the grand scheme of things - into the Rocky Mountains.
Of course, I wouldn't be in that situation. Not necessarily because I don't believe in waiting that long, but because the boyfriend does sound..scheduled. If they couldn't just talk about this on their own, if such a small happening is already a huge deal, I fear for the couple's long-term compatibility. Also, he sounds controlling. :/
Best of luck, LW/ASS.
& Mr. Savage - Chris, not Dan - this was a nice try, but this reader disagrees. Now is NOT the time for sexytimes notes of any sort.
That would put your goal in the not-going-to-happen category and you in the jerk category. If you want to help them, you have to engage with them.
Telling someone that the strict definition of virginity is silly is the same kind of thing as (but but less severe than) "Oh, you think God's mad at you? You know God doesn't exist, right?" People aren't going to become atheists over one mistake and they're not going to change their concept of virginity because of one mistake, especially if no one can prove that their concept of virginity is wrong.
Whoa, aggression. "Get this through their skulls" was a simple turn of phrase (qualified with "It MIGHT be a good idea to") from which you've extracted an awful lot of entirely imagined hostility and condescension. All those quotes are from you, not from me. My stated goal was to make the shower "incident" LESS traumatic for them. That would not include barking at them about being stupid and naive. That was the agenda and perspective YOU invented for me. And projecting your own bullshit onto another party puts you squarely in the jerk category.
If you want to make the shower incident less traumatic for them, then telling them that they're wrong to think of themselves as virgins before sex—wrong to feel traumatized in the first place—is going to be countereffective.