Excerpt from the book by Lindsey Isham
I am a thirty-year-old virgin on purpose, not by accident, and I am so horny. Yes, that’s right, I want sex! In fact, I am sure that I need it. Am I allowed to say that? Am I wrong for thinking that?
For some reason I love talking about sex (or should I say the lack thereof?). I heard rumors that the average American woman marries by age twenty-four, but when I researched it further, I found out that statistic was true in the 1970s. Today the average age is about twenty-six. How the heck did I get to be thirty and still unmarried? It sounds surreal when I actually say it out loud: “I am a thirty-year old virgin.” I don’t think I’m old, but for some reason I thought I would have had sex by now.
I was twenty, a sophomore in college, when I first heard a man teach a biblical view of sex. The Bible talks about sex? I had no idea. So, for the past ten years, I’ve been excited about sex. I’ll open books and turn straight to what I call the “good chapters.” Why not skim those chapters first? If you are anything like me, you probably looked at the table of contents in this book and skipped straight to chapter 10—the sex chapter. If you did, welcome back to the beginning. The way I see it, it never hurts to reread the sex chapter, right?
I don’t consider myself a violent individual, but sometimes I feel like shooting the person who said that women don’t reach their sexual peak until age thirty-five. Here’s the thing: If I am not in my sexual peak right now, then what the heck is happening to me? Some people have said, “It’s just stress.” Others have said, “It’s just because you are a virgin.” Hmm. Recently I confessed to my mentor, Judith, that I am constantly thinking about sex. She just smiled and said this was normal. Normal! I rarely hear other single, Christian women talking about how horny they are. Only guys are supposed to have this problem, right? If I have six more years of singleness with the constant onslaught of sexual thoughts and desires, I just might go postal.
I guess I am in what you could call a “pre-postal” stage in my life. I have been in this stage for at least eight years, and I don’t know how much longer I can take it. Because I have been deprived of sex for far too long, I sometimes feel that at any minute I could be the front-page story that reads, “Virgin Girl Goes Postal.” I suppose I could move to the mountains and live like a Lumber Jill—alone, with a dog, and far away from gorgeous men, sexualized media, and everything else that makes me think about sex. Maybe then my sexual desires would ease up a bit. In the meantime, I live in a city, have a regular job, and am trying to stop the progression of my “pre-postal” condition. So far I have seen very little progress.
I am surrounded by awkward men who think that virgins are fictional characters in Greek myths. This must explain why they are so shocked when they find out that I am still a virgin. If only I could come up with a way to give guys advanced notice about my virginity. You see, I figure that if men are forewarned, we can spend the majority of the conversation centered on something other than my sexual choices. Not that my sexual choices aren’t important, valuable, or interesting, because they are. It is just really difficult to get to know a guy when he is stuttering, “So you speak about abstinence for a living? You actually believe that people can get married without ever having sex? Oh, you are proof that it’s possible to be abstinent. So, uh . . . um, you’re a—so you have never, uh . . . How do I say this?” I reply with a smile and say, “It’s okay. You can say it. Yes, I am a virgin.”
“You’re a what?”
When a guy finds out that I am a virgin, in between stumbling over his words, he looks at me as if I were an alien. You know the look: blank stare, jaw wide open, crinkled forehead. It’s as if I have a third eye or eight arms. Then, once he processes the whole “virgin thing,” he hesitates because he is looking for a politically correct way to identify me. For some reason, the term virgin is not politically correct anymore. In fact, in a recent survey, 26 percent of teens said, “It’s embarrassing to admit being a virgin.” Maybe I should call myself a more socially acceptable term, something other than virgin. I just looked up “virgin” in the dictionary. How about unadulterated or immaculate?
To read Lindsey’s interview, please get the launch issue of Graceful Chic but emailing gracefulchic@gracefulchic.com
Lindsey Nicole Isham is a national speaker and author of the book No Sex in the City, the brutally honest and often hilarious story of Lindsey’s quest for sexual purity in the face of a sexually-saturated society. Lindsey is a 33-year-old relationship guru, the ultimate girly-girl, and a PR junky. Read more about her at lindseyisham.com, or follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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Jason Fields and Lynne M. Casper, America’s Families and Living Arrangements, issued June 2001, Current Population Reports, P20-537, U.S. Census Bureau, pp. 9–11, http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/ p20-537.pdf.
Table MS-2, “Estimated Median Age at First Marriage, by Sex: 1890 to Present,” U.S. Census Bureau. Internet release date: Sept. 15, 2004; http://www.2010census.biz/population/socdemo/hh-fam/tabMS-2.pdf.