Introvert and Virgin

"Celibacy is the most unusual of all the perversions."

-- Oscar Wilde

Wilde is provocative but he raised an interesting question and as a psychology major, I'm wondering if he's right. As I got ready for my last semester in college, I anxiously waited for the course schedule to be posted. For my major, I was required to take a capstone seminar and these varied each time. Different professors would teach the class, usually based on something they were researching. Since the class was required, how interesting it was going to be was a question of who was teaching it and what they decided to teach.

When the schedule was finally released, I saw that there would be two sections of the class and they were really different. Section 1 was being taught by Dr. Halliday and was called "Dogs, Cats, and People: Symbiosis in the Human-Animal Relationship." Even if I wanted another class with Halliday (I didn't like the only one I'd had with him), learning why people liked their pets and animals liked their humans didn't sound like a real fun way to spend a semester.

Dr. Browne was teaching Section 2 and she was one of my favorite teachers so I'd probably want her section regardless of the topic. The title though made me wonder about whether I might prefer to hear about dogs and cats instead. The class was called "Virginity and the Decision-Making Process" which didn't give a lot of information. Well, Browne instead of Halliday made my decision and I just hoped she'd make it an interesting way to finish up before I started in my master's program.

The first class meeting was the normal going over the syllabus, the readings, and the assignments but she also gave an overview lecture that cued us in on what we'd be doing. Dr. Browne was working on a book about the psychology of virginity--why different societies placed so much stress on the v-card, why losing it was such a big deal, and then, what was our thought process in making the decision. Psych of Sex was a pre-requisite but unlike the sexuality instructors, her research was focused more on the before and after, not the during. Things like what led people to the decision to give up their virginity and how they felt about it the next day.

We'd looked at decision-making and how our psychological make-up, among other things, led us to how comfortable we were taking risks in our decisions. Dr. Browne pointed out that giving up one's virginity could be seen as risky for a lot of practical reasons, such as pregnancy. But, unlike a lot of decisions, it was a bell that couldn't be unrung.

I could see how this might be interesting research and how she'd make it an interesting class, but I had a problem. I don't have the slightest idea how someone makes this decision or how someone might feel afterwards. Yup. I'm a twenty-two-year-old virgin and it doesn't look like that's likely to change soon.

The last time I had given any serious thought to what virginity meant was the week before high school graduation. Listening to the chatter around school--and it was impossible to ignore it--there was a lot of sex happening that week. People would be leaving to attend colleges elsewhere so couples were breaking up but wanted to have lots of sex first. Other people were breaking up just because it seemed like a good time to do it. Some people who had been teasing each other decided that it was now or never. A couple of people seemed to be in competition to run up their body count before the big day.

I admit that I felt left out and wondered if I should be doing something different (or just doing something) but, when I listened to all the buzz, I didn't do more than wonder. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I really wondered if there was as much sex happening as there was talk about sex.

I did neither--I didn't brag about having sex and I didn't have sex. Neither of those were different during graduation week than from previous weeks. I assume that to have sex, it's probably important to actually go out on dates and I hadn't done that a lot either. I hung out with friends, some of whom were guys, but I never got to the point of thinking of any particular guy as a boyfriend. Eighteen and only kissed a couple of times. Eighteen and never even been felt up.

It wasn't that I was ugly. At least objectively speaking, I don't think I was. It wasn't that I couldn't be a fun person to hang out with although that depended a lot on what you thought of as fun.

After four years of studying psychology, I now understand personality types and I know how much of an introvert I've always been. I see how this impacted my dating history and what dating might have led to. Even when I did go to parties, I tended to stay in the corner and observe other people interacting. I'd stay long enough to be polite and then look for a way to bail. The idea of just jumping into a random conversation with a guy I don't know is just not appealing to me and neither is jumping into bed with him. Instead, I have a few close friends and I prefer to hang out with them or to just stay home and read.

It's not like I didn't have fun--I had fun with my friends who generally had the same idea of fun as I did. We went to movies, played trivia and logic games, and a few times got dressed up to go to comic-cons.

I liked my classes. I liked taking extra, advanced classes. I liked to read. I liked to talk to teachers and learn more than what we got in classes. I had no complaints since my fun activities paid off for me. I graduated tied for valedictorian (but lost the drawing for who got to make the speech). I got into my first choice for college and received enough merit-based scholarships that most of my costs were covered.

So yes, I was (and am) the stereotypical nerd and so were my friends. And I'm okay with that. My idea of fun didn't include the type of active social life a lot of others described. I hung out with the school's other nerds. We understood each other and liked hanging out. We didn't party like others did, or at least it sounded like they did. We also didn't have sex or most of us didn't. We certainly didn't spend a lot of time bragging about it or even talking about it.

Carrying my v-card through the graduation ceremony didn't bother me. I knew that I had other priorities and that there would be plenty of time for things to happen. I didn't have a moral or religious objection to sex although I had the same pregnancy and STD fears that others had.

I don't know why I thought I would do things differently but I did assume that when I got to college, I'd probably have more of a social life. But, if I didn't, I didn't care that much. It would happen, if it happened, when it happened.

Not caring was a good thing since not much changed in college. Living in the dorms my first year, I was invited to some parties and had my first drink. But I usually started looking for a way to escape a party as soon as I got there and I rarely stuck around for long. I had studying to do, prizes to win, and grad school to qualify for.

By the end of my first year, like in high school, I did find some friends whose priorities matched mine. We'd go out to get pizza or go to movies as a group, but we spent most of our time more productively. Four of us found an apartment together for our sophomore year and when someone referred to it as Nerd Hall, none of us took offense.

Late in my sophomore year, I finally got my first real boyfriend. Doug was one of the guys from the group I hung out with. He was an engineering student so we didn't have a lot of specific interests in common other than we both liked learning new things and we were both driven to succeed in our classes. One time, he and I were the only ones who wanted to go to some movie so we went by ourselves. We enjoyed talking to each other and after that, we kind of drifted to hanging out together.

One night, the week before we started our junior year classes, Doug and I were sitting on my sofa streaming a popular TV show and making snide comments about it when, without any warning, he leaned over and kissed me. After I got over my surprise, I kissed him back and, after several weeks of kissing, we finally agreed to tell our friends that we were a couple. If anything, Doug was more of an introvert than me and this was a new step for both of us.

It was several months later when we were back on the same sofa but now pretty comfortable sitting closer to each other and making out. As we kissed, I impulsively picked up Doug's hand and put it on my boob over my sweatshirt. We were both planners and neither one of us did important things spontaneously so I'm not sure which of us was more startled by this. He didn't run away and he kept his hand there for a while as we kissed so I'm assuming he liked it. It felt nice to me and I was glad that from now on, we could add this to our kissing. Unlike high school, when I graduated from college, I'd have been both kissed and felt up, at least over my clothes.

* * * * *

So, here I am in my final semester as an undergraduate and I'm going to spend the semester learning about psychological theories as they applied to virginity. Now that I think about it, I might be more of an expert than anyone else in the class.

There were twenty-five students in the class and about two-thirds were women. Since we were all seniors, most of us had been in classes together in the past but I knew some better than others. I wondered how many were interested in virginity and how many just weren't interested in dogs and cats.

Dr. Browne, like several other instructors, liked to use an app where members of the class can answer questions with the result projected on the screen in the front of the classroom. It encouraged participation even from the people who usually hid in the back of the room and--very important when a psych professor asked personal questions--it allowed people to answer them anonymously. Dr. Browne opened the first class discussion by showing the app on the screen and she asked us to answer her icebreaker question "How old were you when you lost your virginity?"

The app offered choices of different ages but the list ended with NOYB and NY. She explained that NOYB was "none of your business" for anyone who didn't feel comfortable answering even through the app. NY was for "not yet" in case there were any virgins left in the class. The way she said that made it sound like she didn't expect to find any and I looked around the room wondering how many of us would pick that answer.

We entered our answers and the numbers showed as a bar graph on the screen. There were a couple of early and late outliers but most of the answers clustered closely about the mean. Assuming that everyone answered honestly, and the anonymity of the app meant there wasn't any reason not to, then yeah, it was just me who was NY. Dr. Browne looked over the answers and then told us that our class average, calculated by the app, matched what research showed as the average age at loss of virginity.

She continued, "Statistically, if this class matched the norm, since I think that you're all right around twenty-one or twenty-two, there would be one or two virgins left and I see that we have one so this group is normal in that sense too." It looked like half of the class was looking around the room trying to figure out who it was. I tried to keep a straight face and hoped that I wasn't turning red or anything.

Someone asked about difference between genders and she told us that there was a difference in the population but in a class of this size the statistical difference wasn't going to be significant so she didn't bother to ask it.

Now that she had our attention, she delivered what turned out to be a real interesting lecture on how attitude toward virginity had changed over history and how it varied among cultures. As psychology majors, she concluded, we needed to identify these but our focus in the class would be on what impacted individual decision-making within those cultural and historical constraints.

Besides various small reflection papers, the class would have a major paper that would be a literature review related to some research question. She encouraged us to make appointments to visit her office to talk about potential subjects over the next couple of weeks.

That ended the first class.

* * * * *

No surprise but as an uber-nerd already accepted in grad school, I was one of the first to make an appointment for Dr. Browne's office hours. I had been thinking about various topics on the syllabus but I was also thinking about myself. I told her that I wanted to write about the factors that led someone to keep their virginity.

"Good topic. We'll be calling those constraining factors" she told me and immediately suggested some readings to get me started. "But remember that you'll need to put these psychological factors into their social-historical contexts." She gave a spontaneous mini-lecture, explaining how, in a society that placed a high value on virginity, being caught having sex before marriage could ruin all of your prospects and really ruin your life. Society thus supported being a virgin and made it easier for someone to keep her virginity. Of course, even then there were differences for men and women" she reminded me.

"Okay but what about when it's the other way around?" I asked. "What about when sex is everywhere in a society and everyone else seems to be having sex? What about girls who stay as virgins in the middle of that?"

"Yeah, that does ask different question. You'll have to see how that's addressed in the literature but I suspect that you might even want to focus your paper on that question instead of the broader one."

She stared at me for a bit without saying anything. "Of course, like all social science research, it's important to minimize the impact of your own experiences and beliefs and to identify where you are impacting your research results." I blushed but nodded my understanding of what she was saying since this had been discussed in our research seminar. She smiled at me. "You don't have to answer, but can I assume that you're our class outlier?

I don't know if my face got redder but I finally nodded. "Yeah, that was me."

"Again, you don't have to answer but I think you should make sure that you can identify for yourself what factors led you to decide to not to be sexually active when everyone around you seems to be."

"Honestly, I'm not sure it was a decision."

"Maybe not a conscious one but to some point, almost everything comes down to some decision that we made. It may not be the end point that we decided on. Maybe it was some prior step. But that is a question to ask yourself."

"Yeah, I think I see that. When I made up my mind that studying was more important to me than going to parties, I wasn't thinking about dating and what that would lead to. I don't think I ever said I want to be a virgin. I just haven't gone out intentionally to change that."

"Good observation and worth exploring. In fact, our first paper is going to be a personal reflection on when you decided to lose your virginity or, in your case, decided to not lose it. You can use that to think about your motivations here--direct and indirect decision making. That will help you for the main paper"

Oh my God. She thought I'd stand up in class and announce this to everyone? No, she didn't. Just a paper, no presentation. Phew!

* * * * *

I wanted to talk more about what Dr. Browne and I had spoken about but I wasn't sure who I'd want to tell about it. I live with three of the smartest women I know and knowing each other since our freshman year and now in our third year of living together, we were pretty close. But I wasn't sure that I wanted to go home and talk to them.

The three of them generally matched me in nerdiness and we were all introverts although to different degrees. They certainly studied as hard as I did and we were all at or near the top of our majors. Three of us had already committed to graduate programs and the fourth one was still waiting to hear from her first choice school before deciding.

But unlike what I had heard about some groups of roommates who talked about everything, we were more restrained in what we discussed. We all knew who was dating, we celebrated someone getting a new boyfriend, and we commiserated about a breakup. I knew for certain that one of my roommates wasn't a virgin since, getting up early one more morning, I ran into her boyfriend leaving her room. Another one made no secret about spending the night with her boyfriend almost every weekend. The other one? And me? Well, it hadn't come up in conversation.

And given his shyness, trying to discuss it with Doug probably wouldn't help either. Was it just shyness or were there other constraining factors for him? If he wanted to do more at some point than touching my boobs, I'd need to know that too.

* * * * *

Dr. Browne had some great ways to get class discussions going. I appreciated how she used the app that let everyone participate but to stay anonymous. Today's question was "What single word describes your emotions the morning after you lost your virginity?" Answers were entered into the app and appeared on the screen in a word cloud where the more times an answer was given, the bigger it showed.

The two biggest words on the screen were "proud" and "ashamed" which were interesting since they were such a strong contrast. In-between were "stressed," "scared," "horny," "glad" and others showing a whole range of emotions. I pretended to type on my laptop but since "not applicable" was more than one word, I didn't hit send.

The lesson that came from the exercise and the rest of today's class was that it usually wasn't a black and white decision. Some people were really happy to not be virgins and others really regretted doing it. For most people, it was both and the emotions changed over time. I thought back to high school graduation week and wondered if I would have regretted it if I had rushed into it then or if I would have felt relieved to get it over with. I wonder that now too--if I had sex tonight (not that I thought that would happen), how would I feel tomorrow?

It wasn't like I never thought about having sex, generally and, as we kissed and touched, specifically with Doug. I'm a psych major with a biology minor so I think I've got a decent understanding of sexuality--at least the theory. I understand physiology so when my vagina lubricates as Doug and I kiss, I understand why that's happening. And yes, I masturbate and I imagine us having sex as I do that.

Why not just ask him what he's thinking? I admit it. I'm chicken. He's described himself as shy, not that I hadn't figured that out myself. Since he may never have touched me anywhere if I hadn't put his hand on me, I don't know if he's going to push for anything else or if that would be up to me too. I'm not pushing for anything that would rock the boat at this point so maybe we're happy the way we are. I think we're well matched as a college-aged couple, but would we be happier if we did more? Hmmm.

* * * * *

Finally, a class discussion prompt that I could participate in. "Before you lost your virginity, what factors made you say no?" This time, several choices were offered but it did an include an "other" category. I saw my classmates typing away and soon the answers showed on the screen in a bar chart. With the percentage of women in the class, it wasn't a surprise that "fear of pregnancy" was the top answer. Other answers included "religious teachings," "family expectations," "no partner available," "fear of slut shaming" and more. I think Dr. Browne had me in mind since she included "too busy with other things" in her choices. There were actually two of us who gave this answer and I glanced around the room wondering who the other one was.