What I Have Against Virginity

Today's post is by a much loved old chum who wishes to remain anonymous.
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When I survey the twin wreckages called my career and my health, it's somewhat surprising that I can take consolation in my one area of great success: my love life. Yep, as I regularly tell people, I won the Wife Lottery, and have been happily married for over 20 years now. I even manage to get along with my in-laws. They're nice people, and even if in some ways they're even more conservative than my own family (and that's saying something), we usually get along. For example, they were tolerant of my not-yet-wife and me living together before marriage. Still, my mother-in-law was shocked when I suggested that a niece with a recalcitrant fiance follow the same course. First there was something about how her mother, my wife's sister, would never approve, and then an odd question: "What have you got against virginity, anyway?"

I hadn't really thought about it that way, nor did I answer at the time. But now, as I approach the third anniversary of my father's death, both my parents are long gone. Everyone has had a chance to mourn. It's time to answer.

To understand what I have against virginity, you need to understand my mother's story. She was raised to be a Good Christian, and taught that any decent man had the right to expect that his wife would be a virgin on their wedding night. She took these precepts to heart, lived by them, and tried to pass them on to her children.

Like many who believe similarly, my mother married young - right out of high school, in fact. The newlyweds had only a short time together before Pearl Harbor happened, and her husband went off to war. She stayed home and played the dutiful bride. When the war was won, her husband ran off with a woman he had met at a USO dance. My mother suffered an emotional collapse, and stayed in her bed for more than a year. Her family convinced her that it was OK to obtain what they called a "Bible divorce" from her unfaithful husband, and carried it out for her. Then they persuaded her to go away to a religious college for a change of setting. While studying there, she met my father, a Holocaust survivor from Europe, and they married. Soon after their marriage, he began beating her up. She endured beatings regularly for nearly 25 years, until she finally left at my insistence.

I asked her many times: why had she put up with the beatings for so long? She reviewed the usual Hit Parade of battered wives' excuses, but none made sense in her case. It wasn't for the children; when the beatings began, there were none. For the first ten years of my parents' marriage, they were convinced she couldn't have children at all. It wasn't economic dependency; at first, she was working to support my father through graduate school. There was certainly never any suggestion that she enjoyed being beaten up; when my father was out, she would complain and show me her bruises.

Why had she stayed in those early years, when she could have left fairly easily? I can find only one plausible reason: she was raised to be a Good Christian, and taught that any decent man had the right to expect that his wife would be a virgin on their wedding night. So, having been married before, she did not believe she had the right to expect a decent man.

That's what I have against virginity: it costs too much.

"Careful the things you say, children will listen." - Stephen Sondheim