The Bachelor Fantasy Suite is the stuff of legend. It's the ultimate love den, where contestants check their dignity at the door and presumably do the nasty with a guy who has a 50/50 chance of dumping them the next day. However, with born again virgin Sean Lowe as the star of this season, don't expect to hear the bed squeaking after the doors of that suite close. When this guy tells you he wants to go some place quiet "to talk", boy does he mean it. They talk and talk and talk and talk. A letdown to millions of fans, to be sure. But Sean isn't alone in his purity promise — and I'm not talking about the Jonas Brothers. There are thousands of once sex-obsessed people who have revirginized themselves too.
You may not be able to erase the memory of losing "your flower" to that jerk you dated in high school, but you can become a virgin again. I have a very good friend who decided to "revirginize" herself. Really. Seriously.
Around the time we hit our late 20s, she had grown tired of having one dead-end relationship after another. Things always started out promising enough. She'd meet a great guy through mutual friends or a colleague and sparks would fly. And when it came to when to have sex, she had the perfect formula figured out: a nice guy, but not attractive — three dates before it was even considered. A hot guy — 12 hours. For her, sexual chemistry was key to figuring out if someone had long-term potential. Problem was, even the ones that rocked her world didn't turn out to be Mr. Right. After a lot of soul searching, she decided she needed to remove sex from the equation altogether.
At first I didn't buy it. She loved sex. She loved men. I doubted this would last. But she took her REVIRGINATION seriously. It wasn't a religious promise, like Sean's, but a promise to herself, for herself. Some people who opt for this actually have surgery to reseal their hymen with a hymenoplasty (YIKES!). She didn't take it that far, thank God. This was more of an emotional renewal for her. After a string of romances that went nowhere, she wanted to focus on other aspects of men and dating. As you can imagine, not all the guys she encountered were psyched about her decision, but if they didn't like it, she just shrugged her shoulders and moved on. If they didn't respect her choice, they weren't worthy anyway.
The problem was, she never really set an end-date for her self-imposed sexual drought. Was it when she got married? Or when she just found a guy she thought she could marry? It was unclear. Two years in, however, her resolve began to crumble. Then one day, another friend of hers set her up with a trainer from their gym. She wasn't particularly excited about the date since he wasn't really her type. But abstinence seemed to have a beer goggle effect on her because before she knew it, she had jumped on him like a cat in heat. She ended up losing her virginity (for the second time) in the back of his SUV.
As she gave me the play-by-play the next day, I thought she would have been more upset about essentially making the kind of mistake that led her to revirgination in the first place. But she wasn't. In fact, she seemed relieved. She said she'd learned a lot about herself, what she wanted, and what kind of man made her happy outside the bedroom. But her biggest lesson: a two-year sex diet is like denying yourself carbs. At some point you are going to snap and eat an entire box of donuts. I guess that trainer was her jelly roll.
Have you ever been revirginized?
Image via clarity/Flickr
