We held ourselves back when it was most natural, and we forced ourselves when it was unnatural.

The central struggle of purity culture is being a horny young adult with no acceptable sexual outlet. I longed to have sex, but I wouldn’t do that until I was married, because my religious conviction was stronger than biological urges.

If I’d been more self-aware, I might have realized I was seeking the fastest timeline for having sex. If we broke up, who knows when I would have fallen in love again and finally gotten married? My fiancée was less motivated by sex, but her relationship with her parents was traumatic. Marrying me was a way to become independent of them.

We got married in the summer, two weeks after I turned 20. Suddenly, after all the years I’d spent fearing, avoiding, and blaming sex; the light was green. God had flipped the magical marriage switch and now my “shameful” urges were A-OK.

Sex was supposed to change overnight from something evil into something wonderful, pleasurable, and easy. Something that would bond us together in Christ and inspire endless love between us.

The reality was nothing like that.

I bragged to the blushing, virgin groomsman who gave us a ride to the hotel room on our wedding night: “we get to have sex now!” My wife and I went up to the room to find the lights dimmed and the radio playing romantic music.

I didn’t waste any time. I’d been dreaming of “getting it in” for years. Why wait another minute? We got naked, I got on top of her, and I tried to push myself into her. No foreplay, no conversations about the day we’d had, just straight to penetration.

Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t wet, and we were both scared. We shyly dug through our bag of “sexual goodies”, found some kind of lube, and tried again. I got inside of her, but it didn’t feel like I expected, and emotionally there was nothing happening between us. She was in pain. I was confused; this was “the moment” I’d looked forward to for years, and I never thought it would hurt her. The plan was that sex would be miraculous and I would definitely have an orgasm. Hadn’t we done everything right up to this point?

I withdrew myself, but she was determined to make me come and I was determined to let her. She gave me a handjob, but I couldn’t orgasm, and she tried again in the shower; I ignored the chafing for as long as I could but then I got so raw that I had to tell her to stop. My penis stung sharply even from gentle running water, and I couldn’t use it for days after that. We went to bed frustrated and kind of in shock.

Two days later we flew to our honeymoon destination. Eventually, blocking out my knowledge of her pain, I managed to orgasm inside her, as though she were a masturbation toy. Everything about it felt wrong but at least we “did it”; we successfully “had sex”, so that seemed like an accomplishment. We felt so much pressure around it, and so much confusion, that we got into fights without even knowing what we were mad about. This was stressing both of us out so much that we developed painful MRSA boils, which we’d had before and recovered from. Hers were worse, and we had to go to urgent care.

So, our honeymoon was not exactly the sexual fantasy one might imagine.

Things didn’t get much better back at home. For the first two years or so, any penetration was painful for her. Her symptoms were consistent with vaginismus. I saw this as “her problem”, something she needed to sort out by herself.

Understandably, she didn’t feel much trust in me. Sex had always been a painful thing and I didn’t know how to create a safe, comfortable place in which we could learn and explore.

Yet she had a strong sense of duty and it almost seemed worse to her that she couldn’t satisfy me as a wife was expected to. We would try again.

There was no good way to have sex: if I was hard and inside of her, I was hurting her, which made me uncomfortable too. If I grew soft and stopped trying, it seemed to hurt her feelings even worse, and I felt blamed for “failing”, like I’d rejected her as undesirable. I developed a lot of anxiety about losing my erections, which only made it happen more often. It was a horrible, traumatizing feedback loop of stress and fear. We felt guilty, inadequate, and hopeless. Nothing good happened when we tried to have sex, so we avoided it as much as we could.

I wish we would have communicated better, set up appropriate boundaries, started where we were comfortable, and facilitated fun and safe experiences to break through our fear.

If we had still been in high school; if while kissing a hand could have slipped under a shirt, through a waistband, if the clothes could have come off and one thing could have led to another; I think we would have been ready. Instead, we held ourselves back when it was most natural, and we forced ourselves when it was unnatural.

Eventually, sex stopped being painful for her, and we even completely walked away from our religion and the harmful dogma associated with it, but we still didn’t have the right chemistry. I think the damage was already done; there wasn’t enough mutual attraction left to motivate the necessary healing process.

I initiated our divorce after 6 years of marriage. Part of it was the sexual attraction problem, and part of it was the realization that we wanted to go different directions in life.

If we had felt free to have sex while we were dating, there wouldn’t have been such a rush to get married. We would have had more chances to discover ourselves and what our goals were, and we might have realized we weren’t as compatible as we thought we were in high school. Rather than spending the first half of our twenties feeling trapped in a relationship that had lost its passion, we could have been exploring life for ourselves and discovering our place in the world.

I caught up with my ex-wife about a year after our divorce. We had both slept with our 2nd partners by that point and we both admitted that sex was instantly better with them than it ever was in our six years of marriage. Maybe it’s because the trauma we accumulated was specific to each other and didn’t come into play as much with the next person. Or, maybe we were inherently sexually incompatible, and if we’d had a few other reference points we would have known that right away.

My ex-wife is married again and fortunately, it sounds like she’s been able to heal from a great deal of her sexual trauma. Our relationship was unhealthy for both of us, but I think she suffered more than I did.

As for myself, I’ve had some good sexual experiences since the divorce too, enough to help me get over some of my fears and understand what I need in a healthy connection. But it’s hard for me to feel good about experiencing pleasure. I struggle to know what I want, and how to ask for it. I still have a ways to go to fully recover.