It’s Okay To Enjoy Sex

The talk for us wasn’t in-depth in my house. Sandwiched between a random conversation as we were getting ready to eat dinner, I told my mom that I wasn’t going to have sex until I was married. Not because anyone expressed the sacredness of being a virgin on my wedding night and not even because I desired to get married. In fact, I had already convinced myself that being a wife wasn’t a role I wanted to be associated with. I thought my decision to be abstinent would be more appealing than confessing how repulsed the thought of having sex made me feel, but my words didn’t seem to sit well with my mom. Without asking any questions and without missing a beat she said, “Girl, ain’t nobody gonna wait that long for that.” She paused, shook her head to disagree with me, then repeated herself to reiterate that a man is not going to be willing to wait.

Several years had gone by since I had been molested and my mom’s words were the perfect frame to hold the picture of men that I’d painted in my head. By then I was a teen but still living from the stuck point of the scarred little girl that was sexually assaulted. My mom’s generation didn’t openly discuss traumas or emotions that were culturally accepted as weak. Our house was small in square feet and the dysfunction took up any extra space we had to spare. I guess she’s right, men won’t be willing to wait for what they want, I thought as her words took up residence in my brain. She was my mom and I didn’t ask any questions; I took her words to be gospel. That was it, that was our talk.

I was an 18-year-old high school senior when I lost my virginity. I wasn’t in love with the guy that I had sex with, he wasn’t even my boyfriend. I decided to give him this sacred piece of me partly because I wanted to see if sex could be something that I would enjoy if it was my own decision versus it being forced on me. It wasn’t and I didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t doing it right. I’ll meet someone in college and try it again, I reasoned as we put our clothes back on and went on with our lives. 

I tried again the first couple of years in college. Still, this is not fun. Maybe it’s me that has an issue because they seem to be enjoying themselves while my skin is crawling. I feel nauseous. Stare at the clock, it’ll be over soon. Is this what the molester wanted to do to me? These were the series of thoughts that would race through my mind during and after each escapade. 

Then I met the man that eventually became my husband and sex with him was a very different experience. I felt alive. He encouraged me to be in control and I finally understood the hype! Though I had the desire to be intimate with him all the time I also began to feel guilty and dirty for enjoying it. The tears I cried alone in the shower didn’t cleanse my mind of the thoughts that I was too embarrassed to share with my partner even after I’d just shared my body with him. 

For years I built a wall to hide behind but brick by brick that wall began to tumble down. My mom’s words about a man not waiting echoed in my head. Without reason I attached those words to the man that I’d fallen in love with. If I tell him the thoughts and feelings that I can barely explain, would he wait for me to sort them out and learn to detach them from him? Sharing my feelings wasn’t normal for me and neither was talking about sex. I continued to suppress while taking after-sex showers to cry. In my quest to not lose him, I lost me before I even knew who I was.

Recently, the tears started to fall before I could make it to the shower. I was crying uncontrollably and vomiting as a result of feeling disgusted with myself. My mind would not stop racing with the thoughts that wondered if my mom’s boyfriend wanted to do those things with 12-year-old me. I was mentally and physically tired of hiding. I had to confront what I’d been suppressing and running from. In what was likely the best conversation I’ve had with my husband I shared that enjoying sex made me feel guilty and dirty. 

For years I’d convinced myself that if I enjoyed it with him then I would have enjoyed with the man that sexually assaulted me because after all wasn’t this what he wanted to do with me? That made me sick. As we sat on the edge of the bed untangling and disconnecting the love and adoration my husband has for me versus the predatory nature of my mom’s boyfriend, I felt the safest I’d ever felt before in my marriage. For the first time I wasn’t reliant on my own logic to navigate feelings and thoughts that felt too heavy for me to carry alone.

A few days later I told my therapist about what happened. I told her that I felt like an anomaly for having these thoughts about sex, especially after all these years. She affirmed the normalcy of my experiences. She shared that research from sexual assault victims shows that the assault alone isn’t the only thing that is traumatizing, the lingering thoughts of embarrassment, guilt, shame, and even feeling dirty are normal responses. As she spoke, I was able to exhale. 

I’d held my breath on this subject and allowed the accumulated inner turmoil to suffocate my ability to be emotionally safe and communicative. I worked to hide my feelings and became emotionally homeless. Subsequently, I became an expert at projecting how I felt into how I assumed others would react or feel too. My projections disabled me from living authentically and made it easier to present a version of me that I thought was acceptable because I hadn’t yet accepted myself, residual trauma included. The responses from my husband and my therapist proved me wrong and I’m grateful for it. Their patience and reassurance was more than I could have hoped for and showed me how necessary my authenticity is. That’s when the last brick fell from the wall that guilt and shame built.