Chapter 11: Sexual History
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Our wedding night was not what I thought it would be. Strangely, in this single area, I felt myself the least disillusioned. I wasn’t envisioning a passionate, all-night lovemaking session. I knew it would take time to learn one another’s bodies, to grow comfortable being witnessed naked and bare.
I also knew Martin was far less experienced than I. For better or worse, he truly held sex with the sacredness our shared religion ascribed to it. Sex was for man and wife; that was it. He managed to hold sex in this way without attaching additional shame to it. It was very cut and dry for him.
Once, during a relatively chaste make-out session, I innocently tried to french kiss Marty. (Yes, we got engaged before we had even french kissed.) In response to my advance, with a slow and calm gentleness that still pricks the back of my eyes with tears as I recall it, Marty pulled away from my hungry mouth, picked my hands up off of his body and returned them to my lap.
He looked me in the eyes and said,
“We can save that for marriage.”
His words wouldn't have made my face burn so red if not for the utter sincerity behind them. When I try to reach back in my red madness to understand how I let myself commit to marrying someone when the act of marriage itself ran so contrary to my wild nature, one of the only explanations I can find is that I fell in love with another’s goodness. I met the best and shiniest soul I had ever encountered up to that point in my life.
And as I was a young woman both curious and terrified of my undeniable, encroaching darkness, the aching part of me who still, misguidedly, wanted to prove her goodness believed this pure man would tether and tame me.
I am telling you I trusted him before I’d done the hard work of coming to know and trust myself. I did not know that was soul work that could not be skipped. I did not know that shadow is a natural part of all light. Years later, in different ways, both Martin’s and my own shadows would come looking for us in much more nuanced ways than the black-and-white moral code of sexuality.
At that time though, I had none of the same self-assured, albeit naive, black-and-white stance on sex.
Sex was far more complicated to me. And naturally, my experience with it up to that point was far more in depth than that of my soon-to-be husband.