The music started.
Everyone stood.
I was twenty-two and getting married.
As I walked down the aisle, my head swiveled from left to right. All I could think was everyone knows. At the end of the aisle stood this man that I was going to marry. He was dressed up in a tuxedo, grinning at me, slightly nervous. And all I could think was everyone knows we’re going to have sex tonight.
Earlier that day a not-so-tactful member of my family got a glimpse of me in my wedding gown and tried to crack a joke. “Yeah, like you deserve to wear white.” It came off as mean because I knew he was trying to make a dig about my faith, but the thing is, if you consider what the white gown used to signify, I really did deserve to wear it. My soon-to-be husband and I had been together for three and a half years, engaged for two and a half of them, and I was still, in every technical sense of the word, a virgin.
As a teenager, I feared sex. Not sex in itself, but the consequences of sex. I had big plans: going to college, becoming self-sufficient, rubbing my success in the face of every asshat in my family who thought I would never amount to anything.
I had seen my mom divorce my dad and try to put the pieces of her life back together. I wanted to make sure that I had a strong foundation to take care of myself and be an independent woman. A baby would have derailed all of that. Besides, getting pregnant as a teenager would have proved the asshats right, and I just didn’t have the stomach for that.
I had places to go, things to say, and a world to change.
Plus, somewhere along the way I had become a Christian. I had always been a romantic, a believer in soul mates and true love, so the Christian idea of the sacrament of marriage and fidelity fit right along with my belief system. My grandparents and the way they had grown old together were the perfect ideal, an example of true love to rival even the greatest of love stories. Forget Romeo and Juliet—they died. My inspiration came from these two old souls who had become my bedrock of stability in a world that held constant chaos and change. I wanted what they had for myself.
For all these reasons, I was a virgin on the day I walked down that aisle to my future husband. Vows were exchanged. Songs sung. Cake eaten. And then I threw the bouquet and we ran.
It was late when we arrived at the little lakeside cottage for our honeymoon. We had almost missed the last boat across the lake. We were tired. We were overwhelmed. We turned on the TV.
What can I say? Three and a half years with no sex and you kind of develop a pattern.
The weather turned bad. The sky grew dark and ominous. Rain pelted the roof. Before long, a storm raged outside. The wind whipped violently through the air, making the house shake and shudder and groan. The lights flickered. They flashed. And then they went out, plunging us into darkness. We sat in silent darkness for a few moments, uncertain. Hesitant.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
A lightbulb went on in my head. I knew. I knew that we could finally do what we had waited for all this time.
So I pounced.
In the unsexiest way possible, I pounced on my new husband.
I flung myself at him with a mixture of glee—Yes, finally I’m having sex!—and trepidation—Oh crap, I’m having sex. How do I do this? Kissing! You start with kissing, right? Like a jungle cat, I was suddenly there in the dark trying to kiss his lips. Except I don’t have jungle cat vision, so my first kiss landed on his nose. We banged heads. We fumbled in the dark, trying to make our way—still kissing, of course—into the bedroom.
That’s where the magic would happen. I knew this because I’d seen it time and time again in every romantic movie I’d ever seen. And then there was all this weird, awkward dancing. Trying to remove clothes. Trying to find each other in the dark. Trying to figure out exactly how you could insert Tab A into Slot B. I knew the mechanics of sex in the same way I technically knew how to change a flat tire. But I had never done either and knowing, it turns out, is not the same as actually doing.
It was the exact opposite of romantic.
There was, in fact, laughing. Limbs got tangled. Neither of us walked away from that first experience feeling like a red-hot sex machine. It was nothing like what I had grown up seeing in the movies. The movies, it turned out, had lied. But it was fun. It was fulfilling. It was, in fact, quite amazing. It felt like more than love, this trust and surrender that I had just given to the man with whom I had sworn to share my life.
When we were done, I stood up, dizzy with excitement and really needing to pee, but as soon as I did, all of this stuff came gushing out of me. I was appalled and a little grossed out. When I mentioned it, this newly crowned husband of mine asked, “Well, what did you think happened with it all?”
The truth is, I had never thought about it, but then no one had explained this moment to me. There is so much no one tells you about sex, including the fact that it can be slimy.
The Mr. and I have been married for a while now, and we have gotten better at the whole sex thing. Sometimes it is sexy, though more often it’s still funny. Sometimes we still bang heads. Sometimes I go in for the dramatic kiss in the dark and find that I am nowhere near my target and am, in fact, kissing his nose.
We have two kids so I’m pretty sure people realize that we have sex, but it turns out no one really thinks about it. And they weren’t that day I walked down the aisle either. Looking back, I’m pretty sure they were just thinking about how I was the most beautiful bride ever—right?