First Person: E "If I was forced to choose between having sex for the first time or going skydiving, I would pick skydiving every time.'

It's been a while since we've run a First Person, so we're glad we got this great submission from 27-year-old E, who talks about those bouncing hormones, her preference for skydiving and the dangers of 'ambush purity pledges.' Please send us an email if you'd like to tell your story. We'd love to run it in this blog!

Tell us about yourself:

I consider myself a painfully shy 27 year old female from Boston. I was brought up in a generally rigid Pentecostal environment with opinions on sex that pretty much matched up with my church. The turning point was when myself and the other unfortunate youths at my church were roped into what I can only describe as an “ambush purity pledge.” Hopping mad, I left the church at 19 and never looked back.

What is your definition of virginity?

A garbled one. The old me would have said “willie in hoo ha”, but the world is so big, full of so many different people living different lives and looking for different things out of their relationships and encounters with others that all these idiosyncrasies have me overwhelmed. So for now I will just say “untouched”, which is what I consider myself to be.

Why have you chosen to remain a virgin?

I can only speculate that I don’t want a sexual relationship with another person badly enough to pursue it. I mean if I was really eager I would have done it in my teens or at a “normal age” (as my peers often put it), when hormones were supposedly bouncing off their proverbial walls and horny teen-aged boys were hurling themselves at my feet. I dated a handful of people in college (albeit out of curiosity/intrigue), but the relationships never progressed to a level where I would feel comfortable enough to take that step. I actually didn’t become interested in sex until I was in my 20s and began experimenting with masturbation. I can’t express how great it felt to have learned about my body's' needs on my own, and expelling the “christian guilt” attached to that. I thought “wow, I really don’t need another person for this, do I?”

Now that I am not in an environment where I’m meeting people organically, fostering the kinds of relationships I would consider ideal for pursuing intercourse has become more difficult. And to be perfectly frank, I’m not really trying, which brings me back to my original sentiment: I don’t believe I want a sexual relationship with a partner at this point in my life. If there was a person I was interested in romantically the circumstances would probably be different, but even then I would invest more time in nurturing the human connection, which I value very much, than getting laid.

If I was forced to choose between having sex for the first time or going skydiving (something I have wanted to do since I was 12) I would pick skydiving every time. To me, that’s an exhilarating experience I would remember for the rest of my life. On that scale, sex is something I have no qualms with skipping. Would I like to experience it with a partner someday? Of course, but skydiving first :)