He Took Me and Then He Left Me

I lost my virginity in the front seat of a small pick-up to man who was eight years older than me. It was chilled fall night, in a city three hours from my house. We struggled to contort our bodies to fit in the small cab, his large body seeming to tower over my small frame. But we didn't fit, we weren't a good match. He was a graduate student at a big college studying psychology, I was a strong-willed freshmen at a small campus studying biology. He preferred white wedding gowns and I had one too many tattoos. He was my first love and when he was finished, he pulled up his pants and drove away.

I remember driving home with wet cheeks. Thoughts of “Is that it? Is that sex?” raced through my mind as I drove the three hours home. I felt incredibly disappointed, vulnerable, and unattractive. I imagined him holding me afterwards, not starting his car and telling me it was time to get in mine. But I also felt guilty for being disappointed. I cared about him, I had wanted to be intimate with him. I berated myself for the rest of our short relationship for not being a real woman because I didn’t enjoy sex with him. Near the end of our time, when things between us were sordid and bitter, he would mention that he didn’t believe I had been a virgin because I “hadn’t felt like one.” His comment would warp my self-esteem for the rest of my life.

Life after him was filled with unemotional men and an intense hatred for removing my clothes. My relationships were half attempts at intimacy where maybe I told them truth about my life, and maybe I didn’t. No singular man lasted longer than a few weeks. Sometimes I would try to gather more than one at once, careful to keep my stories straight and their paths separate. Once, I told one about another. He shrugged his shoulders and nothing changed. In hindsight, I should have known that this sort of lifestyle would only continue to splinter my damaged relationship with sex. The more men I burnt through, the further I retreated from allowing myself to enjoy passion. I quit giving myself and instead gave a persona of the person I wished I was; beautiful, confident, and independent. The reality was that I was still that young woman in a pick-up truck, bashfully removing my clothes to please someone I admired. It was wrong and I wish it hadn’t happened.

I’ve been sexually active for six years and I still avoid giving myself to a man. I’ve been in love and out of love. Sometimes I knew the names of my lovers, sometimes I didn’t. I have been trying to undo the damage I did to myself that fall, when I opened myself up to someone who took me and then left me. This isn’t to say that I have not tasted joy or happiness after him. He taught me much more than he stole from me and I have been blissful after him. But the cracked mirror of my sexual psyche remains. Try as I might, I cannot climb over the mountain of fear he built for me when he snatched up my virginity and then told me it wasn’t good enough. I have tried to find solace in the warm arms of a stranger but a continual question haunts me after he falls asleep beside me, naked and unafraid.

How do I make myself whole again when the person I loved hollowed me out?